Part 7: Dark Alliance...."They were Looking in The Other Direction"

Dark Alliance...The CIA,The Contra's and The Crack Cocaine Explosion
By Gary Webb  
11

"They were Looking in 

The Other Direction" 

Norwin Meneses was in a suspicious mood. He sat stiffly on a wooden bench and parried with two journalists who had come to question him about his relationship with the Contras some fifteen years earlier. 

It was January 1996. Meneses had been locked up in the primitive Tipitapa prison outside Managua for five years, but he had none of the fluorescent-tube pallor that men in American prisons have after such long periods of confinement. The drug lord was tanned, comfortably dressed; he had adapted well to his surroundings. 

Or, perhaps more accurately, the old Guardia prison— where FDN founder Ricardo Lau once held court as warden and chief torturer—had adapted itself to him. Meneses strolled freely through the grounds, and the guards looked respectfully at their shoes and murmured "Senor" when Meneses and his entourage passed by. His cell door was closed only when he wanted it that way. 

His sandals slapping loudly through the high-ceilinged halls, he had led the reporters to a breezy and secluded corridor that looked out on the prison's bright courtyard. A young dark-skinned inmate who seemed to take directions from Meneses stood by a tree outside, observing intently. 

Just getting this far had been a chore for Meneses visitors, a process as protocol-driven as arranging an audience with a potentate. They had been run through a screening process of Meneses own devising, one that had nothing to do with the Nicaraguan penal system or its security concerns. The prison warden admitted that he had no say. He simply signed the passes and opened the gates when Meneses told him to. 

First, Norwin's wives, Maritza and Blanca Margarita, had to approve. Then their attorneys needed to be personally satisfied. Then Norwin's attorneys—all three of them—had to sign off. And he wanted letters from them proving it. 

The DEA and the CIA also got involved. "I'll he right up front with you," said DEA public affairs chief James McGivney, after reviewing Meneses intelligence files in Washington, D.C. "I've already talked to the CIA people, because obviously there's some implications in some of the things I've seen that he may have been or at least he represented himself to be, and frankly, the CIA says, 'Hey, you know, that's fine. If he wants to talk to the reporter, he can tell them whatever he wants.' Their thinking on it was: 'We've been through this before' and they didn't think they had anything to hide on it." 

Nor did the DEA, McGivney assured the reporter, though no one had suggested otherwise about either agency. The DEA was even willing to set up the interview, McGivney said. "I think I could probably represent to you that we might be able to facilitate any meeting you have with Meneses, in arranging it," he said carefully. "I can represent that I can go out and try to facilitate an interview with Meneses. And what he ends up saying, who knows? I'm willing to let the chips fall where they may. That's the kind of confidence I've got that. . .that the DEA back in the 1980s had no problems in those areas." 

But the DEA's help came with a price, "a quid pro quo," as McGivney put it. In exchange, the DEA wanted the reporters to leave something out of their story: Danilo Blandón's relationship with the DEA. The reporters arranged the interview themselves.

Even after they jumped through all of his hoops, though, Meneses gave nothing away for free. Every suggestion of criminal conduct was protested as a calamitous slur by a foolish detective or Communist. But when he was confronted by hard evidence—such as a photograph or his own words—he would shrug, smile, and admit it. 

As the minutes stretched into hours, Meneses became relaxed and expansive but never let his guard down. Every so often, he would tell an obvious lie, just to see if his audience was paying attention. He denied having any connection to the Contras, a falsehood he immediately retracted when confronted with a photograph of himself standing with FDN commander Adolfo Calero. Or he would casually drop a bomb-shell—like mentioning Ronald Lister's name unbidden—to see how it resonated, doing his own soundings to test which paths the journalists had taken before arriving in his presence. 

He laughed heartily only once during the afternoon, when he was reading an interview U.S. authorities had done with his old associates, Jacinto and Edgar Torres, who later became informants for a variety of police agencies. In May of 1992 the FBI, the DEA, the IRS, and the LAPD sat the Trees down in the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles and grilled them about Meneses and Danilo Blandón. Meneses was asked to read the Torres's statement and point out areas where he disagreed. He rested a forefinger on his lips, and his eyes darted across the four-page FBI report. He nodded occasionally, pursed his lips angrily once, and then let out what could best be described as a guffaw. 

Holding the document open to the second page, he pointed to the second paragraph: "Torres estimated that between 1980 and 1991 Blandón moved over 5,000 kilograms of cocaine." 

"It would be more accurate if you multiplied that by ten," Blandón's longtime supplier smiled. 

Fifty thousand kilos? Fifty-five tons of cocaine? 

"Easily," he said. And not without a little pride. 

Meneses figures are impossible to verify, but as he was Blandón's supplier for many years, no one is in a better position to know. The DEA estimated Blandón imported between 18,000 and 27,000 kilos between 1982 and 1990, amassing millions of dollars, and the Torres brothers later boosted their own estimates dramatically. According to a 1996 L.A. County Sheriff's Office report, the brothers told police "they heard that Blandón sold 10,000 kilos of cocaine, mostly in South Central Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area" during a two-year span in the mid1980s. At Ricky Ross's conversion rate, that's enough cocaine to make 30 million doses of crack. "Danilo Blandón was the biggest dealer in the Los Angeles area for about two years," the Torres brothers concluded. 

U.S. government officials were even more generous in their appraisals. "Mr. Blandón was considered to be probably the largest Nicaraguan cocaine dealer in the United States, is that correct?" Assistant U.S. Attorney L. J. O'Neale asked Blandón's DEA case agent, Charles Jones, during a 1995 federal grand jury hearing in San Diego. 

"I believe so, sir," Jones testified. 

Both men had reason to know. O'Neale had been monitoring the activities of Blandón and his associates since the 1980s. Jones had been watching him since at least the early 1990s, and would describe Blandón in a sworn statement in 1992 as a "multi-ton dealer." 

Becoming the biggest dealer in the biggest cocaine market in the United States in less than four years is no small testament to Blandón's sales and marketing skills. But what makes his rise to the top even more remarkable is the fact that his friend, mentor, and cocaine supplier, Norwin Meneses, was working for the DEA toward the end of Blandón's ascendancy. 

☹     ☹     ☹

After the arrests of his nephew Jairo and Renato Pena in late 1984, the drug lord quickly wound up his affairs in San Francisco, selling his gray Jag, his used car lot, and his Mission District office building, and moving his base of operations to his beachfront ranch in Costa Rica. "I went to Costa Rica to see him right after he moved and I spent about six months on his ranch down there," said John Lacome, a Bay Area friend of Meneses and his nephews. "He would take us into town, take us to the clubs, get us some girls. I got a great picture of him while I was there. He's standing next to one of his cows and he's wearing this black baseball hat with a picture of a clock on it that says, 'It's Party Time!'" 

Meneses was no stranger to Costa Rica, a picturesque and normally placid little democracy on Nicaragua's southern border. Like Somoza, Blandón, and other wealthy Nicaraguans, Meneses had had a home there since before the Sandinista takeover. Meneses owned not one house but several, and large ranches in northern Costa Rica, near the war zone. The LA. Times, citing an unnamed source, reported that "beginning in November 1982 Meneses was spending much of his time in Costa Rica and commuting back to San Francisco." 

He also had important friends in Costa Rica. 

"Norwin receives political protection from Jose Marti Figueres, the son of former Costa Rican President Jose 'Pepe' Figueres," an informant told DEA agents in 1984. Jose Marti Figueres, the older brother of Costa Rica's current president, was accused in 1995 of swindling the Costa Rican State Lottery of six million dollars. He was also implicated in the 1970s with fugitive financier Robert Vesco in a scheme to profit from the nationalization of Costa Rica's gasoline distributors. 

Who Norwin Meneses was and what he did for a living was no mystery to Costa Rican police officials, or the American DEA agents assigned there. The DEA was first informed of Meneses Costa Rican drug operations in February 1984, when a confidential informant was debriefed at the U.S. embassy in San Jose and reported that Meneses was in charge of a major cocaine trafficking ring. Six months later the DEA learned that a small cocaine shipment destined for Meneses had been seized at the international airport in San Jose by the Costa Rican police. 

Costa Rican authorities knew him as "one of the most important traffickers of drugs, as much in the Nicaragua of Somoza, as at the moment in Costa Rica." That 1985 report from an OIJ investigation stated, "He was one of the first economic supports of the FDN in Costa Rica. There are rumors that he works as an informant for the DEA." It was more than rumor; it was true. And the DEA may not have been the only U.S. government agency in Costa Rica to have availed itself of the drug kingpin's services. 

To hear the DEA tell it, Meneses simply walked into the U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica one day in July 1986, unsolicited, and announced to the assembled agents that he had come to enlist in the Reagan Administration's war on drugs. 

DEA agent Sandalio Gonzalez was on hand to faithfully record the official reasons behind the kingpin's life-altering decision: "(a) his desire to clear up a minor problem he has with the IRS (b) his decision to totally terminate his involvement in drug trafficking activities and (c) his desire to help the present U.S. Administration's fight against drugs, in view of President Reagan's total commitment to free his native land, Nicaragua."

If Meneses wanted to help the Reagan Administration, he'd come to the right place. The U.S. Embassy in San Jose, Costa Rica, was the nerve center for all of the Administration's covert operations on the so-called Southern Front of the Contra war, and these included a number of illegal CIA ventures that would later be exposed during the Iran-Contra scandal. The American Ambassador, Lewis Tambs, was taking orders directly from Oliver North and the CIA's Costa Rican station chief, Joseph Fernandez, was so heavily involved with illegal Contra operations that he would be fired and indicted for his participation. 

But there are several reasons to doubt agent Gonzalez's stirring account of Meneses' redemption. First, it is likely that the drug lord was already working for the DEA before that report was written, snooping around in a murder case tinged with CIA overtones. In an interview, Meneses said he had helped the DEA gather intelligence on the February 1985 torture-murder of DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena in Mexico, whose demise at the hands of Mexican traffickers made him a hero to many narcotics agents. Meneses claims he provided information that helped U.S. authorities capture one of the Mexican drug lords involved, Rafael Caro Quintero, at a mansion outside San Jose, Costa Rica, in April 1985. That claim could not be corroborated, but Gonzalez's report does note that Meneses had "helped the DEA in the past." 

Meneses said he also met with the DEA's Costa Rican attache, Robert J. Nieves, in late 1985, again concerning the Camarena case. Meneses described Nieves as "desperate" for information Norwin supposedly had on the crime. Nieves refused to discuss Meneses, or anything else. 

Not coincidentally, the issue of the Contras and drugs flared up during some of the 1991–92 criminal trials of Camarena's alleged killers. A longtime CIA operative in Mexico, Lawrence Victor Harrison, testified that the CIA was then collaborating with the Mexican intelligence service and cartel bosses who were providing money, arms, and training facilities for the Contras in exchange for the CIA's protection of their drug enterprises. 

Both Harrison and his DEA overseer, Hector Berrellez, who headed an investigation into Camarena's murder, believe the agent was killed because his investigations into some "protected" marijuana plantations threatened to disrupt or expose this marriage of convenience. Based on his investigation—which discovered the audiotapes his killers made during their torture sessions—Berrellez recommended that a federal grand jury be convened to examine the CIA's knowledge of Camarena's murder. Soon afterwards, Berrellez, one of the DEA's most decorated agents, was transferred to Washington and given a do nothing desk job until his retirement. 

Exactly what services Norwin Meneses was performing for the DEA during those years in Costa Rica is hard to know because few records were kept of his activities. When the Justice Department's Inspector General checked the files in 1997, he found vague and sometimes wildly misleading accusations Meneses had made against other traffickers, such as the ridiculous claim that Danilo Blandón, who'd helped Norwin start the FDN offices in California, "was a Sandinista sympathizer." 

Even more suspicious is the fact that the DEA made no official record for at least a year that Meneses was one of its informants. The drug kingpin's name didn't show up in the DEA's database of informers until 1987. Costa Rican DEA agent Gonzalez explained this oddity to Justice Department investigators by saying that the trafficker "initially refused to sign DEA's informant registration." Gonzalez admitted this was unusual but said he "allowed it because of Meneses' background and potential to make cases." In truth, it was because Meneses was wanted by the FBI in San Francisco for trafficking and, as we shall see, the DEA was protecting him. Another result of this "unusual" arrangement, the Inspector General observed, was that "other DEA offices could not get information on Mcncscs' use by the DEA through this database." 

In other words, one of the biggest and richest cocaine traffickers in all of Latin America became an exclusive, off the-books, protected informant for a tiny DEA office in Costa Rica—a country with few known drug problems then —during the time the Reagan Administration was desperately seeking to replace the CIA money the Costa Rican Contras had lost. "Within the administration there was no doubt that the resistance would continue to be supported," Oliver North wrote of those times in his memoirs. "The only question was how." 

One idea North had in 1984, records show, was to use drug money. At a top-level meeting with DEA officials in Washington, North shocked the room into silence by suggesting that $1.5 million in cocaine cash the DEA planned to seize from the Medellin cartel should be turned over to the Contras. The DEA says it declined North's suggestion. Subsequently, a White House leak blew the operation, and several DEA officials believed North was responsible, something he has denied. [His headstone should read,Big Time American Drug Dealer and liar DC]

With the assistance of former securities lawyer and then CIA director William Casey, Oliver North created an elaborate network of offshore bank accounts to conceal the source of the money that was to sustain the Contras through the Congressional funding cutoff. North wrote that Casey didn't want the Contras' "unofficial funds" coming into U.S. banks because of fears that Treasury agents on the lookout for drug money would grow suspicious of the large sums of cash that would soon be arriving in those accounts. 

Roger Mayorga, the former chief of criminal investigations for the Nicaraguan National Police, believes Meneses was actually working for the CIA in Costa Rica, using his role as a DEA informant as a cover for his real tasks. 

"They used Meneses in Costa Rica basically for money laundering operations," said Mayorga, a former Sandinista intelligence officer who monitored Meneses for years. "He was really in the background." 

There is some circumstantial evidence to buttress this claim. At the time, Norwin's brother, Jaime Sr., owned a large money-changing business in San Jose. Norwin also had a couple of legitimate business fronts that were also useful for laundering cash, including a restaurant across the street from the U.S. Embassy, a gambling club, and a bean processing factory. His partner in the latter concern was FDN director Aristides Sanchez's playboy brother, Troilo, a former CIA pilot fingered in 1982 as a supplier to Meneses' operations in San Francisco. 

The idea of the DEA and CIA swapping agents and providing cover for each other is not hard to believe. The agencies had adjoining offices in the U.S Embassy in San Jose. DEA agents assigned to Costa Rica in the 1980s told the Justice Department of "having an amicable relationship with the CIA Costa Rica Station personnel" and DEA agent Gonzalez, in fact, kept the CIA supplied with intelligence on arms smuggling by leftist guerrillas in El Salvador. Despite the amicability of their "working relationship" with the CIA, the DEA agents told of taking great pains to hide-it from the Costa Rican police, but didn't say why that was necessary. 

Whatever it was the DEA and CIA were collaborating so happily upon, one thing is crystal clear: it couldn't have had a thing to do with preventing Contra drug trafficking. 

"The information the CIA gave the DEA was often too vague or general to be of use," DEA agents complained to the Justice Department's Inspector General. "Indeed, neither [of the two DEA Country Attaches] in Costa Rica from 1980 to 1985 could recall any specific information about drug trafficking that the CIA station ever gave them." [yeah,no corruption there,squeaky clean DC]

Not a single DEA agent "could recall the CIA providing any information about Contras who might have been involved in narcotics trafficking," the report continued. There's no mystery to that. "CIA personnel from the Costa Rica Station. . .do not recall giving any information about narcotics trafficking by Contras to the DEA." 

Despite all the official rhetoric from the Reagan Administration about just saying no and cracking down on crack, CIA officers who served in Central America in the 1980s said they never felt a need to actually do anything about the drug trafficking that was swirling all around them. 

"Narcotics was just not on the radar screen at the time," one CIA officer told the Inspector General's office. A former Central American CIA station chief agreed, saying that drugs were "not something my agents]were looking for in the 1980s." [You know how a CIA officer is lying? His or her lips are moving DC]

Unless, of course, the wrong people were selling them. 

"One CIA officer and several other Agency analysts note that, with respect to Nicaragua, the U.S. policy focus was on the Sandinista government's involvement in narcotics trafficking, not on that of the Contras," CIA Inspector General Fred Hitz wrote in 1998. "The policymakers, one analyst asserts, really wanted to 'stick it to' the Sandinistas on this subject." 

"All of the Central American Stations were seeking information that would link the Sandinistas to drug trafficking," a top CIA official told the Inspector General. "The goal was to diminish the image of the Sandinistas."[See people, nothing has changed with these people with regard to the truth.All one has to observe here in 2019 is the handling of Venezuela and Iran, all that matters to the pond scum is their narrative,the truth be damned DC]

One Central American Station Chief remembered watching Langley's odd non-reaction to the first wave of Contra drug trafficking reports, which he said came "fairly early" into his assignment. He quickly realized which side of the drug war the CIA was on in Central America. 

What the CIA did or didn't do about drugs "has to be considered in the context of DCI William Casey's overriding political objective," the station chief insisted. The CIA contingent running the Contra project "had one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government." 

Consequently, the CIA "assigned a low priority to collecting intelligence concerning the Contras' alleged involvement in narcotics trafficking. . .Agency analysts had only a small number of reports on which to base their analysis." Even then, Hitz found, only a privileged few inside the Agency were allowed to see them, because they were classified as "Sensitive Memorandums" and few had a clearance mighty enough to know such secrets. 

CIA's unspoken policy about Contra drug dealers, the station chief concluded, was that "we were going to play with these guys. That was made clear by Casey and [Dewey] Clarridge." 

A good example of this policy in action was the arrangement Norwin Meneses reached with the DEA to help the Reagan Administration win the war against drugs and communism. Menses' partner, Troilo Sanchez, told CIA inspectors that while Meneses was living in Costa Rica he was dealing cocaine for the Contras, an activity that seems starkly at odds with the usual functions of a DEA informant. Even Meneses' handler, DEA agent Sandy Gonzalez, suspected he was moving cocaine while turning in other dealers. 

According to Rafael Cornejo, one of Menses' Bay Area distributors, Gonzalez's hunch was correct. Norwin's business expanded terrifically while he was spying for the DEA. "Those were very big years in terms of. . .well, the contraband," Cornejo said hesitantly. "That's why I have a hard time believing Norwin was working with the feds." 

The FBI, however, had no problems believing it and their thinking tracked with Roger Mayorga's, the former Sandinista intelligence officer: Meneses was being protected because he working for the CIA. In a remarkable 1988 cable to FBI headquarters in Washington, San Francisco FBI agent Donald Hale wrote: "It became apparent to the FBI that Norwin Meneses was, and may still be, an informant of the DEA. It is also believed by the FBI, SF, that Norwin Meneses was, and may still be, an informant for the Central Intelligence Agency." 

The CIA, of course, denies it and Hale, who pursued Meneses for years, is now dead. The Justice Department says the agent based his belief on the fact that Meneses told friends his CIA work made him immune from prosecution. 

Whatever its source, Meneses obviously had some kind of protection while operating in Costa Rica. By 1984 his drug dealing there was well known to the CIA, the DEA, and the Costa Rican OIJ. Yet in all the years he lived there, he was neither arrested nor expelled. "There were some stories in the Costa Rican papers about me, planted by the Communists, which said I was involved in drug trafficking, but nothing ever came of it," Meneses said dismissively. 

Perhaps the strongest indicator of Meneses true function is the fact that soon after he waltzed into the DEA's office in San Jose, he was paired up with a veteran CIA operative who had freshly arrived from Europe. Like Norwin, the CIA man was in Costa Rica posing as an informant for the DEA. Agent Gonzalez told Justice Department inspectors in 1997 that Meneses' CIA sidekick—whom the drug lord introduced to others as "Roberto"—" claimed to have worked for the CIA for many years before in Europe and the Soviet Union, and the CIA had then turned him over to the DEA." 

Why a CIA agent with a long background in Soviet affairs would suddenly surface in Costa Rica and be teamed up with a Latin American drug smuggler is not addressed in the declassified versions of the Justice Department Inspector General's report. The declassified CIA Inspector General's report never even mentions the mysterious agent, even though he would play a significant role in helping to keep Meneses out of the FBI's clutches. 

Later events would suggest that Meneses and Roberto weren't "investigating" drug trafficking at all—they were monitoring it. And the best evidence of that is the fact that the first drug ring Meneses and his spooky associate were assigned to "investigate" was Danilo Blandón's roaring crack enterprise in South Central Los Angeles. 

DEA agent Gonzalez told Justice Department inspectors that he "planned to use Meneses only to introduce other informants into the Blandón organization," reportedly because he thought Mcneses would be "difficult to control." But how reuniting Norwin Meneses with Danilo Blandón, his old friend and former employee, and inserting a CIA agent into the mix, would help keep the drug kingpin under control is a question that, so far, has eluded explanation. 

☹       ☹       ☹

Much of the information the DEA and CIA picked up about Meneses and Contra drug dealing in Costa Rica centered around Guanacaste Province, an isolated northern area infested with Contra camps, rural landing strips, and easily bribed government and police officials. According to a special Costa Rican legislative commission, during 1984 and 1985 the area served as the headquarters for "an organization made up of Panamanians, Colombians, Costa Ricans and citizens of other nationalities who dedicated themselves to international cocaine trafficking, using Costa Rica as a bridge for the refueling of planes that came from Colombia." That drug ring, which was being run with the help of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, worked closely with the Contras, the legislative commission found. "Specifically, use was made of the same landing strips and the collaboration of the same Costa Rican authorities that had aided the Contras," the commission's report stated, adding that Contra pilots provided "the gasoline that was used for refueling the planes of the organization."

Evidence produced during the DEA investigation of Manuel Noriega revealed that his drug trafficking ring loaded up planes with cocaine in Colombia; the planes refueled at Contra airstrips in northern Costa Rica before continuing to the United States and dumping their loads in Louisiana and Texas. Former Costa Rican government pilot Werner Lotz Octavio confirmed to a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1988 that Noriega's pilots would fly up weapons for the Contras along with the drugs, leaving the guns behind in Costa Rica, before hitting two routes north: one through Mexico for the West Coast market, and the other through the Bahamas for the East Coast's coke buyers. 

"The people who were flying in the weapons used and made contacts with certain people in Costa Rica to be able to use their airfields as a jump point to carry drugs for them, for refueling stops," Lotz testified. "There was a charge, you know, the allowing of the aircrafts to land, to drop the weapons, and to proceed with the drugs. Or to better explain, the landing fees, to put it this way, were paid with weapons." 

"How was it possible for these drug planes to go in and out of the airstrips without being detected and without creating problems in Costa Rica?" a Senate investigator asked Lotz. 

"Very simple, sir. Costa Rica has got a very poor radar." 

"So there was no radar to detect them? Wasn't there danger that they would be arrested on the ground?" 

"None, because it was previously arranged. All the landings were arranged. They were supported by the revolutionaries themselves," answered Lotz, who admitted to flying weapons and drugs for several years. 

"Were there many police or Rural Guard people in that region?" the investigator pressed. 

"To be very clear with you, sir, our Guard down there is barefooted, and you're talking 50 men to cover 400 kilometers maybe," Lotz explained. (The head of the Costa Rican Rural Guard in Guanacaste Province, Colonel Edwin Viales Rodriguez, was convicted in 1988 of providing security for those drug and weapons flights. He allegedly told a friend that he was doing it for the CIA and was paid between $20,000 and $30,000 a flight.) 

While the barefoot Costa Rican Rural Guard may not have been able to keep up with such a well-oiled drug operation, the CIA and DEA couldn't use the same excuse. The number of American agents stationed in Costa Rica exploded during the Contra war years, and U.S. reconnaissance aircraft and spy satellites made routine overflights, photographing miles of northern Costa Rica for the Contra war effort and monitoring Sandinista troop movements and the rural airfields the Contra used for their supply flights. 

Yet in spite of all this cutting-edge technology, plus firsthand human intelligence from Norwin Meneses, the Americans proved surprisingly inept at catching drug dealers. "Despite obvious and widespread trafficking through the war zones of northern Costa Rica, the Subcommittee was unable to find a single case against a drug trafficker operating in those zones which was made on the basis of a tip or report by an official of a U.S. intelligence agency," a U.S. Senate subcommittee reported in 1988. "This is despite an executive order requiring intelligence agencies to report trafficking to law enforcement officials and despite direct testimony that trafficking on the Southern Front was reported to CIA officials." 

Costa Rican law enforcement officials said in interviews that the contingent of DEA agents working from the U.S. Embassy in San Jose showed little interest in helping them probe reports of Contra drug trafficking. Jorge Chavarria, a former prosecutor who investigated several such cases in the 1980s for the Costa Rican OIJ, said he was convinced the DEA "knew about the Contras and drugs. All these flights and pilots that were flying in and out with drugs could not have been ignored by the DEA. They were looking in the other direction." 

There is some evidence to substantiate that accusation. During a 1987 Senate subcommittee hearing, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts told DEA director Jack Lawn that "the head of the DEA office in Costa Rica was interviewed by this committee and he told us that the infrastructure that was used to supply the Contras was used to smuggle drugs. This is your DEA officer in Costa Rica. Are you familiar with that report?" 

"No, sir, I am not," Lawn said. The DEA's position, said Lawn and aide David Westrate, was that there was "no credible evidence" to support such allegations. The DEA officer in Costa Rica who was questioned by Kerry's committee, Robert J. Nieves, was in a perfect position to know, however. According to Norwin Meneses, Nieves was his control agent, and would be throughout the remainder of the 1980s. 

Meneses appearance in Costa Rica also coincides with a time when his drug network there had been suddenly rendered leaderless, accidentally disrupted by a Costa Rican police investigation. 

In May 1984 the OIJ raided the San Jose home of Meneses business partners Troilo and Isanaqui Sanchez, whom they suspected of moving thousands of dollars worth of cocaine every month. According to newspaper reports, Sanchez's wife ran to the bedroom and tossed a package out the window containing nearly a pound of cocaine. 

One former Costa Rican Contra official, Leonardo Zeledon Rodriguez, told UPI in 1986 that Sanchez "was caught in Costa Rica with pillows full of cocaine. Troilo is a brother-in-law of Adolfo Calero." Both Sanchez and his wife were arrested on trafficking charges, but the charges against his wife were dismissed. Troilo was acquitted after convincing the jury that he was an addict and the cocaine was for his own use. Nonetheless, the raid provided the Costa Rican authorities with the break they needed to land an even bigger fish in the Meneses organization. 

While searching Sanchez's house, the agents were interrupted by a banging on the front door. Opening it, they came face-to-face with a very surprised Horacio Pereira Lanuza—"La Burra"—the Meneses lieutenant who had been supplying cocaine to Carlos Cabezas and Julio Zavala in San Francisco and funneling the profits to the UDN-FARN Contra army of Fernando "El Negro" Chamorro. 

In August or September 1984, a recently declassified CIA cable-shows, Meneses had approached "Negro" Chamorro and asked the Contra leader "to help move drugs to the U.S." Neither Chamorro's nor the CIA's response to Meneses overture was disclosed. 

Though Horacio Pereira's drug trafficking activities had been known to both the FBI and the U.S. Customs Service since 1982, those agencies apparently never bothered to inform the Costa Ricans that they had a major dealer in their midst. According to the Costa Rican paper La Nacion, the OIJ agents had no idea who Pereira was the day he put in his unexpected guest appearance at Troilo Sanchez's house. Once they made his acquaintance, however, they were loath to let it end. In November 1984 they placed wiretaps on his phones and those of two associates. They quickly learned that Pereira "was one of the biggest narco traffickers to have operated from this country," La Nacion reported—the man behind nearly every major drug trafficking case in Costa Rica since 1981, with "connections in Honduras, Colombia, San Andres and the United States." 

As the OIJ agents listened in on Pereira's phone calls, they were stunned to find themselves eavesdropping on Costa Rican Contra commanders, who were discussing cocaine shipments, drug labs, weapons deliveries, and international politics with the cocaine dealer. Among those captured on the wiretaps were UDN-FARN subcommander Edmundo Chamorro; Ernest Hidalgo Abuanza, UDN FARN's logistics chief and the personal assistant to UDN FARN commander "El Negro" Chamorro; Guillermo Bolt, a CIA-trained Contra pilot who flew for Eden Pastora ARDE Contra group; and Sebastian "Guachan" Gonzalez, the man in charge of the Panamanian logistics for ARDE and UDN FARN. During one conversation, a caller mentioned that Gonzalez was building a cocaine processing lab in Panama, and hinted that he was kicking back $20 million a month to Panamanian authorities for the privilege of doing business there. 

The Pereira wiretaps were an intelligence bonanza for the Costa Rican police. "Guachan" Gonzalez was a wanted man at the time of his calls, having recently fled Costa Rica after he and UDN-FARN's logistics chief were caught with 600 grams of cocaine in a house in Guanacaste Province. Gonzalez was overheard calling Pereira from his hideout in Panama, where he was living under the protection of Manuel Noriega, then head of the Panamanian military. 

A charismatic and intelligent smuggler, Gonzalez had worked for the CIA since 1983 as the Panamanian quartermaster for all the Costa Rican Contra armies, arranging supplies and deliveries from Noriega's armed forces. He was "a personal friend of Manuel Noriega since high school years. His job was to manage the arms flights from Panama to the ARDE forces in Costa Rica," ARDE commander Eden Pastora said. 

According to a 1998 CIA report, Norwin Meneses "was known to be involved in the drug trafficking activities of Sebastian Gonzalez." A 1984 cable from the Costa Rican CIA station to CIA headquarters in Langley said Meneses and "another trafficker, Tuto Munkel, were involved in drug trafficking with Sebastian Gonzalez Mendieta in Costa Rica. . .. It was reported that Meneses owned a restaurant in which Gonzalez might have had a financial interest." According to the cable, "Meneses, Gonzalez and Munkel were well-known as the 'Nicaraguan Mafia,' dealing in drugs, weapons smuggling and laundering of counterfeit money." (The "Tuto Munkel" mentioned in the CIA cable may be Augusto Mönkel, a Contra supporter who was detained in Miami with Horacio Pereira for currency violations during the FBI's investigation of the Frogman case in 1982.) 

In a 1990 interview with journalist Douglas Vaughan, Gonzales said Horacio Pereira had offered him money to help finance a new Contra movement he started when he broke with Pastora in 1983: the M-3. "Horacio Pereira earlier had loaned money to Eden Pastora and he offered to help M-3 but we rejected this because Norwin Meneses and Troilo Sanchez were involved in drugs," Gonzalez said. "They were close to [FDN founder] Aristides Sanchez." 

Largely on the strength of the wiretaps, Horacio Pereira was convicted of drug trafficking in 1986 and sentenced to twelve years in jail, one of the harshest sentences a Costa Rican court had ever handed down for a drug crime. The verdict was significant enough to attract the attention of the CBS Evening News, which aired a brief report in June 1986 on Pereira's trial and the undercover tapes. "The wire-tapped phone calls show the drug dealers have ties to the highest level of Contra leadership in Costa Rica," CBS correspondent Mike O'Connor reported. "Costa Rican narcotics officers say much more dope has been flowing through their country to the United States since the Contras began operating from here and they don't believe it's a coincidence." 

Pereira never served a day of his sentence. He was released on bail and immediately disappeared. Meneses said his friend was "chopped into tiny bits" in Guatemala a few years later, when he became embroiled in a dispute over a drug debt. 

The Costa Rican government's indictments of Pereira, "Guachan" Gonzalez, and Troilo Sanchez might have been expected to put a crimp in cocaine trafficking in that small nation. After all, Costa Rica's biggest dealer, Pereira, was out of business, Gonzalez was on the run, and their supplier, Norwin Meneses, was now working as an undercover informant for the DEA. 

But that wasn't the case. "It was precisely in that period when the transshipment of weapons and drugs in our country grew," a Costa Rican legislative commission reported. Again, this growth can traced to a drug ring involving the Contras and the CIA. 

CIA records and the declassified testimony of former CIA officials who oversaw the Contra program in Costa Rica confirm that the intelligence agency began receiving reports of drug trafficking by Eden Pastora's ARDE faction in late 1984. In a secret congressional hearing in April 1987, former CIA Costa Rican station chief Joseph Fernandez testified that "there were certainly substantiated cases—and we can name names if you wish—of people in [Pastora's] coterie, of supporters and his lieutenants that did have connections with drug traffickers and, in fact, he himself received funds from a person who was known to be affiliated with drug traffickers." 

Pastora admits all that, but says it was due entirely to the CIA. In an interview, the former Contra commander claimed he was the target of an elaborate CIA scheme to force him out of the war, a plot that involved the use of drug dealers working for the intelligence agency. This occurred, he said, after he refused CIA orders to unite his forces with the former National Guardsmen in the CIA's northern Contra army, the FDN, which was being run by Norwin Meneses friends. 

The problem for the agency, Pastora said, was that many of his fighters refused U.S. government entreaties to desert him for the new Costa Rican Contra army the CIA was putting together, and they decided to fight on without the agency's assistance. The CIA had to get Pastora out of the way because it needed his veteran commanders and his men to run its new army. 

While it is tempting to dismiss Pastora's theory as the paranoid grumblings of an embittered and abandoned asset, a considerable amount of documentary evidence suggests he may be right. At one time, the CIA admits, "the Agency's relationship with Pastora was one of its most significant with a Contra leader." But after enduring years of anti-FDN rhetoric and unpredictable behavior, Langley began distancing itself from him in 1984 and ordered its agents to have no "contact with him under any circumstances unless it is clone for the purpose of manipulating him towards some objective clearly consistent with the policy in the region." 

One CIA policy objective became to replace the uncontrollable Pastora with someone the CIA could more readily rely on: the crowd of drug dealers and Bay of Pigs veterans working with Fernando "El Negro" Chamorro and UDN-FARN. 

To get rid of him, Pastora claimed, Nicaraguan CIA assets approached him with offers of financial assistance, which he desperately needed after his CIA funding was cut off in May 1984. Pastora said he accepted their money and their supplies, not knowing that the men were drug traffickers. 

When it came time to dispose of him, Pastora said, the CIA leaked the information that he was getting help from drug dealers, both to drain his support in the United States and to make him the fall guy for the cocaine trafficking being done by the CIA's "approved" Contra armies—the FDN and UDN-FARN—which was about to be exposed by the American press. 

Former CIA station chief Fernandez disputed Pastora's claims. "We attempted to diminish his influence by showing other political leaders that he was an irresponsible person and so forth, but never did we ever use narcotics or even the rumor of narcotics trafficking or anything like that as a means of bringing about this diminishment,"[See,lips moving DC] Fernandez testified. But recently released CIA files show his testimony was at best misleading: the CIA told everyone and his brother about it. "The reporting tying Pastora and senior members of his group to drug smuggling operations in the United States was disseminated by CIA to a broad range of senior U.S. government intelligence and law enforcement officials," the CIA's Inspector General wrote. That move stands in vibrant contrast to the Agency's modesty about the Legion of September 15's and UDN-FARN's drug dealing; predictably, the information dealt a death blow to Pastora's already shaky relationship with Washington. 

Further evidence of the CIA's role can be found in the backgrounds of the men who set up the drug deals that eventually ruined Pastora. They had long-standing ties to the CIA or Norwin Meneses, sometimes both. Two of them have since publicly admitted the CIA was aware of their drug dealing on behalf of Pastora's army and had, in fact, okayed it. 

Pastora's first offer of assistance came from Octaviano Cesar, the former social director of Meneses VIP nightclub in Managua. The CIA now admits that he was one of its snoops. "Agency officers met occasionally with Cesar —usually in the United States—to gather information and to promote unity among the Southern Front groups," the CIA Inspector General found. 

In March 1984 Cesar and two other Contra officials close to the CIA—ARDE logistics chief Adolfo "Popo" Chamorro and ARDE air force commander Marcos Aguado—met with a major Colombian drug trafficker named George Morales at his offices in Fort Lauderdale and asked him to contribute to Pastora's army. "During our conversation they told me they were CIA agents. Two of them said they were, Octaviano Cesar and Marcos Aguado," Morales said in 1986 congressional testimony. "I knew that they belonged to the Central Intelligence Agency and I also knew this through several pilots, who at the time worked for me and who had also been directly involved in operations with the Contras flying airplanes." Like Octaviano Cesar, Marcos Aguado was another old friend of Norwin Meneses. He was also a close associate of the CIA's man in northern Costa Rica, John Hull, who served as the agency's unofficial liaison to the Contras. 

Morales, the Colombian trafficker, had supplied a few shipments of guns to the rebels in 1983, and he was surprised that the Contras still wanted his help in early 1984, since he had just been indicted by a federal grand jury on conspiracy and cocaine trafficking charges. But Morales said Cesar and Aguado made it clear that if he assisted them again, they could make his legal problems disappear. Cesar "told me he had plenty of friends, being him, the CIA, can advise the superiors about my financial support and airplane and training and therefore they will finally, eventually, will take care of my problem, which they did," Morales testified. During the entire time he was working with the two Contras on drug deals, no action was taken on his pending cocaine indictment. It was one postponement after another, Morales said. When he started talking to U.S. Senate investigators about his Contra dealings two years later, however, the case moved quickly to trial and conviction. 

Morales later passed a DEA-administered lie detector test about his drug dealings with the Contras. In addition, two of the pilots who flew the Contra drug missions for him confirmed Morales's story—under oath as U.S. government witnesses. 

Morales and the pilots, Fabio Ernesto Carrasco and Gary Wayne Betzner, said planeloads of weapons were flown to a ranch in northern Costa Rica owned by CIA operative John Hull, whose cover was that of an aw-shucks midwestern farmer managing some plantations for rich gringos. In reality, Hull's ranch was a training area and hiding place for Contra soldiers; it was where the Legion of September 15 gathered before its bumbling raid on the Argentine radio station in 1980. 

After they dropped off arms, Morales and the pilots said, large green duffel bags full of cocaine belonging to the Contras were loaded aboard and flown back into the United States, usually to the public airport at Opa Locka, Florida. "Every one of the flights I make to Costa Rica, the cocaine was the Contras', not mine," Morales testified. "I have my suppliers in Colombia. I don't need to go to Costa Rica." 

While Hull has vehemently denied accusations that drug trafficking was occurring at his ranch, a once-secret FBI report shows that the CIA official who was overseeing the Contras from Washington during that time, Alan Fiers Jr., was convinced that Hull's ranch was being used for Contra drug flights. "There is no doubt in Fiers mind that Pastora's men trans-shipped drugs out of the airstrip on Hull's ranch," investigators for Iran-Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh reported in 1991. "Fiers realized this around 1986 when he heard all the evidence from Senator John Kerry's hearings and from the newspapers. Fiers is adamant that he has no knowledge of CIA complicity with drug activity in Central America." 

Hull, when told of Fiers's statement, was astonished. "Hell, here I thought that all this time the people spreading rumors like that were the Sandinistas and the Communists. Now I find out it's my own government." 

One of the Morales pilots who flew in and out of Hull's ranch, "Tito" Carrasco, testified that one of Pastora's commanders assured him he had nothing to worry about because the CIA was protecting the flights from Costa Rica all the way into Florida. "Octaviano and Popo tell George [Morales], 'Listen, these people supposed to work for the CIA, those people are supposed to have, you know, everything under control, so the people tell George, 'Do it at Opa Locka. Nothing will happen if the plane arrives at Opa Locka,'" Carrasco testified. 

"And you flew into Opa Locka?" he was asked. 

"Yes." 

"Did anyone stop you?" 

"Nobody," Carrasco said. 

Carrasco's opinion was that the entire operation was being protected from police interference all the way from Panama, where his drug flights originated. "Every week I flew to Panama, between Panama and Costa Rica, with different passports and different names and they never asked me why," Carrasco testified. "So if that is not protection, I don't know what is protection." 

The Contra officials gave Carrasco and Morales "good passports" from Nicaragua during a party at Morales's house in Miami. The passports were complete with entry and exit stamps from a variety of countries, Carrasco said; they lacked only a name and a photograph. 

Carrasco's copilot, Gary "Hippie" Betzner, also testified that their flights were protected by the CIA. "And did these CIA people permit you to fly airplanes into foreign countries carrying weapons?" a defense lawyer asked him during a federal trial in Oklahoma. 

"Why, sure," Betzner said.

"And bring drugs back?" 

"Yes." 

"And did these CIA people know what you were doing with the drugs?" 

"Certainly," Betzner insisted. (Like Carrasco, when Betzner gave that testimony, he was on the stand as witness for the Justice Department, not as a defendant.) 

Asked if he was surprised that his boss Morales was helping the Contras, Betzner, who'd pleaded guilty to federal drug charges, said, "No, actually, I wasn't surprised by it because I knew that George was anti-Communist, as are most Colombians. So the Cartel and people like that are definitely anti-Communist to the—I don't suppose their world would function too well in a Communist world. It's strictly a capitalist movement, this drug business." 

When money from the drug sales was collected, Carrasco said, he would deliver it to CIA operatives Chamorro and Cesar, "sometimes in the United States, sometimes in Costa Rica." He said he delivered bags of money "sometimes two, three times a day. . .. I paid a lot of money, maybe millions."

In 1996 interviews with the Washington Post, Cesar and Chamorro both said the CIA was fully aware of their involvement with the Colombian drug trafficker and had approved of it beforehand. Cesar informed a CIA officer stationed at Ilopango air base in El Salvador. Chamorro went higher than that—to Langley. "I called our contact at the CIA, of course I did," Chamorro told the Post. "The truth is we were still getting some CIA money under the table. They said [Morales] was fine." While the Post thoughtfully omitted the name of the CIA official who okayed the arrangement, in an interview Chamorro identified him as the head of the CIA's Central American Task Force, Alan Fiers. [Of course they did,because the Post has always been a CIA mouthpiece,hell they made it official when the POS pond scum from amazon bought the propaganda rag sheet DC]

In congressional testimony, former Costa Rican CIA station chief Joe Fernandez said Fiers once ordered him to use two suspected drug traffickers in a still-secret CIA operation involving the Contras. "For political considerations, there were two individuals who were associated with Pastora who had allegations against them for drug involvement and [the chief of the Central American Task Force] wanted [censored]," the declassified hearing transcript states. "I objected to it in cable traffic, in person, and it was deemed necessary censored, at least since these were only allegations and not proof, and so I was overruled and we proceeded to do it and we did it." 

"But in your mind it went beyond allegation, didn't it?" Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii asked. 

"Yes, sir," Fernandez replied. "[Censored] there were indications that our suspicions might be more well founded than. . ." 

The rest of Fernandez's exchange with Inouye was censored for national security reasons. [Which for all you slow learners means,that IF the TRUTH be told,the government agents would be found out as liars DC]

After his first meeting with the Contras, Morales testified, he agreed to give the men an aged C-47 cargo plane that he had stored in Haiti, and $10,000 with which to fly the lumbering transport to Ilopango. Pastora's planes had been hangared there since 1983 under an arrangement worked out between CIA pilot Aguado and the Salvadoran Air Force. The C-47 was the first of many aircraft the Colombian trafficker would give to the Contras. According to a Senate subcommittee investigation, the airplane was officially transferred from Morales to Marcos Aguado for $1 on October 1, 1984, and saw considerable service on the Southern Front. 

In 1987 investigative reporter Jonathan Kwitny obtained the refueling receipts for the C-47 and reported that the plane "was repeatedly piloted into and out of Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador by Marcos Aguado." Another one of the C-47's pilots, Kwitny found, was Gerardo Duran, a Costa Rican drug pilot who also served as chief pilot instructor for the Southern Front Contras. Duran was convicted of narcotics trafficking in Costa Rica in 1987 and jailed. 

"Morales contends that his C-47 would continue on from Ilopango to Colombia, where it was reloaded with drugs before flying back to Florida," Kwitny reported. "This assertion is entirely plausible, and is even somewhat corroborated by Justice Department charges that Morales was importing cocaine at the time for the largest Colombian cartel." 

Morales told Congress that his old C-47 remained part of the Contras' air force for years, which both Aguado and congressional investigators confirmed. "Chamorro gave the Subcommittee a list of flights made by that C-47 to ferry arms from Ilopango to Costa Rica," a Senate subcommittee report stated. "Between October 18, 1984 and February 12, 1986, some 156,000 pounds of material were moved from Ilopango to air fields in Costa Rica." 

When he quit the war in May 1986, Aguado said he sold the airplane for $30,000. The buyer? Norwin Meneses. In 1997, Aguado said, the C-47 was still being used by Meneses in Venezuela. 

Soon after Morales began supplying him with money, Pastora said, Danilo Blandón popped up waving cash. Pastora knew Blandón from before the Sandinista revolution, when Blandón headed a pro-Somoza student group in college. "We knew of him as a man who always had money," Pastora said. "In fact, he was regarded in Nicaragua as a millionaire. He was a member of the Blandón family, a family that had always been well-to-do." 

Pastora said he met with Blandón during a trip to Los Angeles in late 1984. Marcos Aguado confirmed that and said he accompanied Pastora to the meeting. Both men agreed that Blandón provided cash—according to Pastora, $6,000; according to Aguado, $20,000—two pickup trucks, and the keys to Blandón's vacation home in San Jose, Costa Rica, where Pastora lived rent-free for several years. Blandón told the CIA he could have charged Pastora $1,000 a month for rent if he'd wanted. 

"The only time Danilo came down to Costa Rica was for the parties," shrugged Meneses partner, Troilo Sanchez. 

It was around this time, according to former CIA official Fliers, that the CIA learned Pastora was getting drug money. "We knew that everybody around Pastora was involved in cocaine," he testified in 1987. "We knew it from November of 1984 forward. We reported it." [Again,his lips are moving DC]

Pastora assumed Blandón was a successful car dealer, not a dope peddler, and he said he thought nothing of the donations at the time. "It seemed to me totally natural that a friend of mine who was in very comfortable financial straits, as are the Blandón family in Nicaragua, it just seemed very natural to me that a person like that would give to me two pickup trucks." [Yep,because that is what successful car dealers do,and how they became successful, they give away vehicles, and sell awesome desert plots of land on the side D.C]

Another Blandón associate who came to Pastora's aid after the CIA cutoff was a Nicaraguan pediatrician named Dr. Felix Saborio who, Pastora said, volunteered to become his representative to the anti-Communist Cuban community in southern Florida, his liaison with the U.S. news media, and an ARDE fund-raiser. Saborio was frequently quoted in the Miami Herald and other papers as Pastora's spokesman during 1984 and 1985. "Felix Saborio was a close friend of Blandón from childhood," said Pastora's former aide, Carol Prado. "I also knew them from childhood. They were very rich people. I went to a party in Miami at Felix's house with Eden and that's where I saw Blandón." 

Saborio was also acquainted with Blandón's spooky associate Ronald Lister. Lister told the CIA that he had "travelled to Hialeah, Florida sometime in 1982 or 1983 and met with a Contra member named 'Dr. Sabario' in an effort to sell 'military supplies' to the Contras." The CIA report stated that "the military supplies were commercially available equipment such as non-reflective paint for equipment and surveillance detection gear of the type that can be purchased at electronic shops and 'spy' stores." 

In 1992, court records show, Saborio posted part of Chepita Blandón's bond after she was arrested on drug trafficking charges in San Diego. The doctor did not return phone calls inquiring about his relationship with the trafficker or his wife. No evidence has surfaced implicating Saborio in drug dealing. 

"Blandón and Saborio. . .both vanished from my ranks when it became clear that I was not willing to march to the tune of the CIA," Pastora said. Blandón's interest in helping ARDE always mystified him, "because I knew he had been with the FDN from the very first. I thought he gave me a little bit of money just so he could tell people that he had helped Comandante Zero." 

Pastora's involvement with the Colombian trafficker Morales remained a secret until late 1985, when two Associated Press reporters looking into allegations of Contra drug dealing discovered some of the donations. The source of their information was a leaked CIA analysis of the narcotics trade that alleged that "one of ARDE's top commanders, loyal to ARDE leader Eden Pastora, used cocaine profits this year to buy a $250,000 arms shipment and a helicopter." The AP story also mentioned that "Guachan" Gonzales's M-3 group and the FDN were suspected of being involved in drugs as well, but offered no details. 

Robert Parry, one of the AP reporters who wrote the groundbreaking story, said his editors sat on the piece for weeks and edited it heavily, only to spike it at the last minute. When it was accidentally transmitted over the AP's Spanish-language wire, his editors rewrote the story once again, and all references to the alleged involvement of CIA operatives were deleted before it was released to the American public. Parry later discovered that the AP's Washington Bureau chief was having regular meetings with Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who was running the Contra program at the time. 

Though emasculated by its editors and ignored by most of the American media, the AP story kicked up a heated controversy in Washington and prompted Senator John Kerry's staff to begin an investigation. As the evidence of Contra drug trafficking piled up and suspicions mounted, CIA and State Department spokesmen immediately pointed to Pastora as the only drug-dealing Contra they knew, citing him as an example of how ridiculous were accusations that the CIA would condone drug dealing. Pastora's CIA funding was cut off, they said, at the first whiff of impropriety. 

To this day, Eden Pastora remains the only Contra commander the U.S. government has ever officially admitted was involved with drug money. A few months after the AP story appeared, Pastora quit the Contra war and became a fisherman. The CIA-linked ARDE commanders who got him involved with the Colombian trafficker Morales —Octaviano Cesar and "Popo" Chamorro—quickly joined forces with the CIA's new Contra army. 

Pastora's claim of a CIA plot becomes even more believable when one considers who the Agency selected to replace him as the Southern Front's military commander: none other than Fernando "El Negro" Chamorro, the drunken leader of UDN-FARN, which had been getting cocaine money from the Meneses organization since the early 1980s. Former Costa Rican station chief Fernandez confirmed to Congress in 1987 that the CIA decided "to diminish Pastora's influence" and "raise up the stature of the Negro Chamorro people. . .what we needed to do was put [Pastora] aside and at the same time enhance the organization that we were supporting." 

Why the CIA was so eager to promote such a drug tainted organization as UDN-FARN is one of the enduring mysteries of the Contra war. Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, in his memoirs of the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote that Chamorro was picked because he "had been acceptable to Contra leader Adolfo Calero and responsive to the CIA." The agency's choice demonstrates just how contrived the official shock was over Pastora's involvement with drug dealers. Chamorro's Contras had far more links to drug traffickers than Pastora's organization ever did, and those ties could be traced all the way back to the beginnings of the Contra war. The leadership of UDN FARN had been directly implicated in the Frogman case in 1983, a fact the CIA had strived mighty to conceal from the American public. Moreover, "El Negro" was just as erratic and unstable a military commander as Eden Pastora had been—perhaps more so—and far less effective in recruiting volunteer fighters. Most of Chamorro's band were Cuban mercenaries and terrorists he and the CIA had scoured from the Miami underworld. 

But even when reports of UDN-FARN drug dealing reached the highest levels in Washington, the U.S. government's financial and material support for the organization never wavered. The money and the CIA assistance kept right on coming. 

"The concern about Chamorro is that he drinks a fair amount and may surround himself with people who are in the war not only to fight but to make money," Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North's Costa Rican emissary, Robert Owen, nervously wrote North in April 1985. Owen, one of the CIA's top informants in Costa Rica, listed eight of Chamorro's associates as having "past indiscretions." The list included UDN-FARN's air force chief, Jose "Chepon" Robelo, whom Owen described as having "potential involvement with drug running," and Meneses partner, Sebastian "Guachan" Gonzalez, whom Owen said was "now involved in drug running out of Panama." That Meneses and Gonzalez were dealing cocaine together had been known to the CIA since late 1984, records show. [And to think the Feds hung a felony rap on me,30 years ago,[Reagan-Bush] because I refused to stop smoking marijuana.We are talking smoke,not distribute the stuff,so yeah I have an axe to grind with the hypocrites who allowed all you are reading to happen!I know I could get 'my rights' back if I petitioned the court,but I want nothing to do with the criminals in charge in Washington as NOTHING has changed the downward plunge since the B grade actor was placed in office in 1980. I mean how could it when you replace a senile actor,with a nightmare,followed by a sexual pervert,only to be replaced with a recurring nightmare that got so stupid,even Homey the Clown was considered an improvement for a time,until he was found out,but not before he too was given another time, which brings us to the latest Criminally Insane Association asset....The Apprentice and the made for tell a vision production, with which they continue to stupify my fellow Americans,who actually still think Washington can be fixed, no matter how much evidence they are shown contrary to this.DC]   

One of the men closely involved in the Contra operation around that time, retired air force general Richard Secord, told writer Leslie Cockburn in 1987 that he heard the same allegations about the UDN-FARN commanders, and that "most of them were true. I didn't pick them. The Agency picked them." [out of all the PROVEN CONSPIRACIES, I do not recall any in which there was so much deflection and finger pointing as the Contra affair.All of them ball less cowards.I would also point out at this time,that there is another element to this whole affair,that this work[and I am not sure if it will as we go forward] has not touched on is Iran.Any sharp human being knows why that angle is played down,and the heat deflected all to the drug aspect, with the weapons touched upon as an afterthought.DC] 

As a fighting force, UDN-FARN was an unmitigated disaster, probably the most inept Contra group there was. Never numbering more than a couple hundred fighters, UDN-FARN caused more grief for the U.S. government than it ever caused the Sandinistas. Chamorro's boys were creating "such a difficult situation" that CIA station chief Joe Fernandez, who'd been instrumental in throwing the CIA's support behind UDN-FARN, was catching flak from both the Costa Rican government and the U.S. ambassador to "get those people under control. 'They just do this and that' and I mean it was just one headache after another," Fernandez testified. (If he elaborated on the "this and that," it was deleted from the heavily censored transcript of his testimony.) 

According to Fernandez, Chamorro and his men couldn't be driven into battle with a cattle prod. "They certainly had to get their act together and their guts in place and say, 'No more [Costa Rican] sanctuary, let's go in and fight the Sandinistas,'" Fernandez told Congress in April 1987. "They were extremely—and that is not an overstatement— they were extremely reluctant to do so. Negro Chamorro to this day that I know of has yet to get inside Nicaragua." 

CIA informant Rob Owen confirmed that. "The Costa Ricans wanted the people—they were up near the Costa Rican/Nicaraguan border, they were in several camps— they wanted them moved out. They wanted them moved at least 40 kilometers inside Nicaragua," Owen testified. "There was a hesitancy on the part of Negro Chamorro and his people. . .. Their hesitancy was based on going deep inside Nicaragua. They would not have Costa Rica to be able to run back into should something happen." 

Blandón's drug-dealing friends, the Torres brothers, told L.A. County Sheriff's Office investigators that "during the height of the Contra war, they would continually run into supposed Contra commandantes in swank casinos throughout Costa Rica. These 'commandantes' would laugh and say they were just spending the CIA's payroll money of about $7,000 a month," a 1996 report stated. (Why two L.A. cocaine traffickers were cavorting through Costa Rica at the height of the Contra war was not a question the Torreses were asked.) 

CIA officer Fernandez testified that "the last time I remember Negro Chamorro being inside Nicaragua was in 1983 when he crossed the border [censored] and attacked, if you can imagine, a guard post, a guard house 30 meters or 30 yards inside Nicaragua. And then when he started to get his—when the Sandinistas counterattacked he ran to a telephone on the [censored] side and dialed me in Washington D.C., at Langley headquarters, asking for mortars! So help me God! And I asked him, 'Where in the hell are you calling from?' and he said, 'From the guard post at [censored].' He said, 'We are under attack, you need to send me arms!' and I said, 'You've got to be out of your mind.'

"This is no joke," Fernandez assured the laughing congressmen. "He called our outside line." The lawmakers were apparently so amused by Fernandez's stories that none of them thought to ask why the CIA continued to train and finance such a clownish crew. 

But El Negro and company weren't the CIA's headache for long. 

Shortly after UDN-FARN became the agency's anointed force in Costa Rica, the CIA was forced to give up its active role in the Contra project, and it left the mess it had created for someone else to clean up. When the Boland Amendment went into effect in October 1984, day-to-day control of the Contra project passed to the Reagan White House and Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North at the National Security Council. "As the summer of 1984 came to an end, I felt like I was straddling a canyon," North wrote. "On one side was the resistance, always expanding, always needing more. On the other side was the CIA, which was steadily withdrawing its support." 

If the CIA's blindness to Contra drug trafficking was bad, it was nothing compared to what happened after North and his network of spooks and mercenaries took the wheel. Perhaps for the first time in history, the U.S. government became business partners with cocaine traffickers. And Norwin Meneses cocaine began arriving in the United States aboard military transport planes.

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