Part 8 : Dark Alliance..."This Guy Talks to God"...&...The Wrong Kind of Friends

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

12 

"This guy talks to God" 

When they found Dr. Hugo Spadafora in September 1985, they found everything but his head. The rest of him had been tied up in a U.S. mail sack and dumped under a bridge on the border of Costa Rica and Panama. 

His body bore evidence of unimaginable tortures. The thigh muscles had been neatly sliced so he could not close his legs, and then something had been jammed up his rectum, tearing it apart. His testicles were swollen horribly, the result of prolonged garroting, his ribs were broken, and then, while he was still alive, his head had been sawed off with a butcher's knife. 

The horrors of Hugo Spadafora's death brought thousands of people into the streets of Panama City, where they formed a miles-long human chain of outrage and lament. The dashing young doctor had been a hero to many Panamanians— an unusual mix of revolutionary warrior and middle-class professional. 

When he was murdered, Spadafora had been fighting for the Contras in Costa Rica, at the side of his old friend Eden Pastora. They had fought together in the 1970s against the Somoza dictatorship, with Spadafora leading an international brigade of jungle fighters—the Brigada Internacional Simón Bolívar—in support of Pastora's southern forces. After the Sandinistas became too oppressive for Pastora's liking, he joined the CIA and took over command of a Contra army in Costa Rica. Hugo Spadafora gave up his medical practice in Panama and, with his wife Winy, moved to Costa Rica to take up arms with Pastora once again— this time against their old Marxist comrades. 

The Reagan administration's Contra PR machine couldn't have dreamed up a better freedom fighter than Hugo Spadafora. The DEA called him "reportedly the best known guerrilla fighter in Central America." He was so popular in Panama that the country's civilian president, Nicolas Barletta, announced an immediate investigation into his shocking murder. It was to be one of Barletta's last official acts. A few weeks later he was forced to resign by Manuel Noriega, the commander of the country's military, and the promised investigation never occurred. Charged with masterminding Spadafora's murder, Noriega was convicted in absentia by a Panamanian court in 1993. 

The New York Times, in a June 1986 story that first exposed Noriega as a drug dealer and money launderer, cited Spadafora's murder as an example of why U.S. government officials were growing tired of the tyrant. "Officials in the Reagan Administration and past Administrations said in interviews that they had overlooked General Noriega's illegal activities because of his cooperation with American intelligence," the story said. "They said, for example, that General Noriega had been a valuable asset to Washington in countering insurgencies in Central America and was now cooperating with the Central Intelligence Agency in providing sensitive information from Nicaragua." 

But the Times story left unaddressed a rather obvious question: why would a cunning political strategist like Noriega take the risky step of having the popular Spadafora, Panama's former vice minister of public health, kidnapped by government security men in full view of dozens of witnesses, and decapitated? 

The answer, which may be the reason the Times sidestepped the issue, involved drugs and the CIA. When Noriega's goons hauled Spadafora off a bus at the Panamanian border, he was on his way to Panama City, where he intended to publicly release evidence of Noriega's cocaine-smuggling activities— activities that also involved the Contras in Costa Rica. Before leaving for Panama, Spadafora had excitedly told friends that he now had the proof he needed to document the dictator's participation in cocaine trafficking, and he was convinced that the revelations would sink the tyrant. 

In the months before his murder, the doctor had befriended a drug and arms smuggler who once ran Noriega's drug operation, Floyd Carlton Caceres. Carlton, who also served as Noriega's personal pilot, began confiding in Spadafora, sharing intimate details of Noriega's drug trade. "Dr. Spadafora was a very honest man," Carlton said. "He was an idealist and he tried to get the best for anyone needing justice." 

If anyone needed justice right then, it was Floyd Carlton. The smuggler was lying low, trying to avoid a hit man Colombian dealers had sent after him. Carlton had lost $1.8 million in cash the Colombians had entrusted to him to fly from Los Angeles to their banks in Panama City. Since he was too busy to do it himself, he'd delegated the task to an underling, who later turned up in Miami, sans cash. 

"I had to pay that money," Carlton said, which he agreed to do by flying a drug load north for free. But again, he'd sent someone else to fly the mission, one of his partners, Teofilo Watson. Watson had never returned, disappearing with 530 kilos of cocaine. Now the Colombians were really angry. 

"They thought I had agreed or made a plan with Mr. Watson to steal the drug," Carlton said. Carlton suspected that Costa Rican Contra leader Sebastian "Guachan" Gonzalez and his strange M-3 Contra group had done Watson in, leading him into an ambush at an airstrip owned by the local CIA man, John Hull. "They killed him and then took the airplane and the drugs to Mr. Hull's ranch," Carlton testified. The plane was cut up and thrown into a river that ran through Hull's property, and the cocaine was spirited to the United States, where it may have been traded for weapons. 

The Colombians sent a hired killer named Alberto Aldimar out to find Carlton and the cocaine. Aldimar started by kidnapping Carlton's friends and employees and slapping them around. One of his relatives, Carlton said, "was brutally beaten." Then the power shovels arrived and began digging up Carlton's ranch. "They spent weeks there looking for some type of metal and found nothing," he said. Next the Colombians kidnapped the daughter of the Contras' CIA liaison, John Hull, on whose ranch the theft supposedly had taken place. Hull ransomed the girl back unharmed and blamed it on the Communists. 

After that, Carlton bolted Central America altogether and took refuge in Miami, the U.S. headquarters of his cocaine transportation network. That's where Spadafora found him, in hiding. "He was trying to unmask Noriega and he was successful in obtaining truth that could imperil Noriega," Carlton later testified. 

That in large part was due to Carlton, who would later astonish DEA officials with his photographic recall of Noriega's drug deals. Carlton eventually became the U.S. government's star witness against the Panamanian dictator at his trial on drug charges. The pilot gave Spadafora the names of other pilots involved and the dates of specific-drug flights through Costa Rica. He also implicated Noriega's high school buddy, "Guachan" Gonzalez, who was then hiding out in Panama from a Costa Rican cocaine indictment. 

When he was finished, Carlton said, Spadafora announced, "I am going to have a bomb explode in Panama. I am going to set it off with all this information which I have." Hurrying back to Costa Rica, Spadafora began sharing his discoveries with law enforcement and intelligence officials, which may have been his worst mistake. 

News of Spadafora's visit to the DEA's offices in San Jose was quickly relayed back to CIA headquarters in Langley, which was informed that "Hugo Spadafora had made vague allegations to DEA. . .that [Guachan] Gonzalez, Manuel Noriega and [another Contra leader] were engaged in drug trafficking. The chief of the local DEA office [Robert Nieves] met Spadafora twice and. . .Spadafora had promised that he would provide evidence of drug trafficking by Gonzalez." 

If Nieves needed a way to confirm the doctor's explosive claims, he had just the man for the job—his deep-cover informant Norwin Meneses. In addition to Meneses connections within the Contras, the trafficker was a close friend and trafficking partner of the Contra official Spadafora was trying to unmask, "Guachan" Gonzalez. 

Somehow Meneses lieutenants got wind of what Spadafora was planning, and they began devising a counterattack. During their investigation of Meneses aide Horacio Pereira, the Costa Rican police taped Gonzalez and Pereira discussing Spadafora's probe and plotting ways to silence him. The Costa Rican newspaper La Nacion obtained copies of the tapes and printed partial transcripts. One ploy Gonzalez and Pereira batted around was paying a witness in Guanacaste Province between $200,000 and $300,000 falsely accuse Spadafora of drug trafficking and exonerate Gonzalez of his pending Costa Rican drug charges. 

"Now he's surrounded because if he comes over here, he's finished," Gonzalez confidently told Pereira in a phone call from Panama. 

"Yes," Pereira replied. "If he shows up over there, you'll get him." 

The district attorney in the Panamanian province where Spadafora was murdered ordered Gonzalez arrested in 1990 for allegedly offering to pay someone to kill the doctor, but no charges were filed, and Gonzalez was quickly released. He has strenuously denied any involvement in Spadafora's death, but Spadafora's family remains convinced Gonzalez played a major role. 

Though Noriega apparently felt the information Spadafora possessed was important enough to kill him over, DEA official Robert Nieves had a very different reaction. He told La Nacion that his discussions with Spadafora were "not important" and said he did nothing with the information the doctor had risked his life to bring him. Since Noriega's drug dealing was the official reason the United States invaded Panama four years later, Nieves's professed inaction is astounding. But it would not be out of character for the DEA at that time. 

Floyd Carlton testified that he got the same cold shoulder from the DEA office in Panama City when he tried telling them about Noriega's drug dealing in January 1986. "I did actually make contact with intelligence agents in the United States Embassy in Panama," Carlton related. "And I asked, 'Have you not heard my name?' And they said, 'Yes, we have.' And so I said, 'On different occasions I have sent people to speak to you so that you interview me. But you have always told them that you have nothing to talk to me about. And the fact is that I believe that I can go before the American judicial system and speak of a lot of things that are happening in this country, and I can even prove them.' 

"So they asked, 'Such as what?' So, I said, 'Money laundering, drugs, weapons, corruption, assassinations.' When I mentioned the name of General Noriega, they immediately became upset." Carlton said the DEA agents "did not try to contact me again. And the only thing that I asked for was protection for myself and my family. And at that time I had no problems with the American justice system." 

Judging from the DEA's response to a Freedom of Information Act request, Nieves took a similarly incurious stance when his informant turned up with his head missing. Apparently, none of the DEA's Costa Rican agents ever looked into the doctor's gruesome death. All the agency had on Spadafora, it claimed, was a couple of paragraphs culled from Panamanian newspaper stories written a year after the murder. 

The CIA's reaction was even more bizarre. Its Costa Rican station chief, Joe Fernandez, helped Noriega plant false media reports about who really killed Hugo Spadafora. 

Jose Blandón, then Noriega's consul general in New York, told Congress that he and Noriega discussed Spadafora's murder a few weeks after the body was found, during a long flight home from New York aboard the dictator's private Lear Jet. Noriega, who'd been in France when Spadafora was killed, wanted an update on how the public was reacting to the killing, the diplomat said. "Especially, he was interested in the developments regarding a witness whose name is Hoffman, a witness of German origin who appeared on Panamanian television saying that he knew who had killed Spadafora and publicly said that Spadafora had been killed by the FMLN [leftist guerrillas] of El Salvador," Blandón testified. 

The German, Manfred Hoffman, "was a witness who was created by Noriega, and he was obtained through the CIA operating in Costa Rica," Blandón testified. "He is a specialist in electronics and he worked for the CIA in some cases." Blandón, describing the episode as "an absurd farce," said he told Noriega "nobody believed that story." 

A month after Spadafora's killing, Noriega's men contacted the CIA and asked for help in "defusing an effort by family members of slain rebel Hugo Spadafora to implicate Manuel Antonio Noriega in drug trafficking." The CIA cable discussed putting Gonzalez on a popular morning radio talk show to discredit Spadafora's brother, who was trying to obtain Costa Rican documents implicating the Contra commander as a drug dealer. According to a handwritten note on the CIA cable, brother Winston was barking up the right tree: "If the truth be told," someone had written, "we had reason to believe that Gonzalez has been involved in drugs about a yr, 1 ½ yrs ago." 

Actually, it was longer than that. A CIA contract agent had first reported on Gonzalez's drug dealings in October 1983, after Spadafora had informed him that "Noriega was smuggling drugs with the Contras and that Gonzalez was involved." The agent said his CIA supervisor simply "replied that CIA had heard some rumors of drug trafficking involving the Contras." 

Unfortunately for Spadafora's wife and family, the good doctor had the bad luck of being murdered at a politically inconvenient time. It was in no one's interests right then—Noriega's or the U.S. government's—to delve too deeply into the crime for fear of what would be exposed: the apparent complicity of two CIA assets—Noriega and Gonzalez—in the murder of someone trying to expose government drug trafficking.

At that point the Reagan administration was nuzzling up to Noriega as it had never done before, frantically searching for ways around the 1984 congressional ban on CIA support to the Contras. For months, a steady stream of high-ranking visitors from Washington had been paying courtesy calls to the despot, reminding him of how much Uncle Sam liked and needed him. 

In June 1985, aboard a luxurious yacht anchored in the Pacific port of Balboa, North and Noriega struck a very important bargain, said Jose Blandón, who attended the meeting. "Colonel North was interested in gaining Panama's support for the Contras and he particularly requested training assistance in bases located in Panama," Blandón told Congress in 1988. "General Noriega promised to provide training in specific locations to members of the Contras, training to be provided at bases located in Panama." He was also willing to allow Contra leaders free access to the country, and made it clear to North that he was willing to do much, much more. 

According to government documents filed during North's trial, Noriega offered to have the entire Sandinista leadership assassinated in exchange for "a promise from the U.S. government to help clean up Noriega's image." North raised the proposal at a top level meeting in Washington and made it clear that "Noriega had the capabilities that he had proffered." North was instructed to tell Noriega that the administration wasn't keen on murdering Nicaraguan government officials, but that Panamanian assistance with sabotage would be another story. 

A month after Spadafora's body was found under the bridge, North went back to Panama for another visit, this time to assure the dictator that the U.S. government would be boosting Noriega's foreign aid payments. Within a year an additional $200 million in U.S. taxpayer funds and bank loans was sent his way. 

Meanwhile, a former staffer on the National Security Council, Dr. Norman A. Bailey, was frantically trying to alert various high-ranking government officials to the fact that Noriega was in bed with drug traffickers and other criminals. Bailey, the NSC's former director of planning, had discovered that Panamanian banks were taking in billions of dollars in $50 and $100 bills, money that Bailey concluded could only have come from criminal activities. 

Bailey set off on a quixotic quest to persuade the Reagan administration to distance itself from Noriega, pressing his reports into the hands of Reagan's top advisers, including national security adviser Admiral John Poindexter. "I took the initiative myself after the murder of Dr. Spadafora," Bailey testified. "As far as I know, the only thing that actually took place was that Admiral Poindexter added Panama to a trip he was making to Central America in December of 1985." 

But Poindexter's meeting with Noriega was hardly what Norman Bailey had envisioned. According to Jose Blandón, who was in attendance, Poindexter did bring up the Spadafora murder, but only to give Noriega some friendly advice on how to handle it; Poindexter "spoke of the need to have a group of officers be sent abroad, outside of Panama, while the situation changed and the attitudes changed regarding Spadafora's assassination." 

Noriega met CIA director William Casey after that, again to discuss his help for the Contras. According to a Senate subcommittee report, Casey decided not to raise the allegations of Noriega's cocaine trafficking with him "on the ground that Noriega was providing valuable support for our policies in Central America." 

While all of this official ring-kissing was going on, Oliver North and the CIA were quietly knitting parts of Noriega's drug transportation system into the Contras' lines of supply—and hiring drug smugglers to make Contra supply flights for them. 

At the time of his visits with Noriega, North was firmly in control of the Contra project, having been handed the ball personally by CIA director Casey. Far from being the dopey, gap-toothed zealot portrayed by the Reagan administration and the press, North was one of the most powerful men in Washington. "The spring of 1985, he was the top gun," testified Alan Fiers, the CIA's Central American Task Force chief and North's liaison at Langley. "He was the top player in the NSC as well. And there was no doubt that he was—he was driving the process, driving the policy." 

Former Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, who indicted and convicted North on a variety of felonies, suspects the Marine officer was a cutout for the CIA, a human lightning rod to keep the agency from becoming directly involved in illegal activities. "The CIA had continued as the agency overseeing U.S. undercover activities in support of the Contras after the Boland amendments were enacted," Walsh wrote in his memoirs. "The CIA's strategy determined what North would do." 

In a city where information is power, North had access to the nation's deepest secrets, subjects so highly classified even top CIA officials didn't know about them. "He told me in 1985 that there was [sic] two squadrons of Stealth bombers operational in Arizona and I just thought he was crazy," Fiers testified. "It was the, one of the greatest secrets the government had and then all of a sudden we, in fact, ended up with two squadrons of Stealth bombers operational. And there were many, many other instances when he told me things, and I thought they were totally fanciful and, in fact, turned out to be absolute truth." 

One of the many surprises North had for Fiers was the fact that he had received specialized training usually reserved for CIA officers. During one latenight conversation about the Contra supply operation in Costa Rica, Fiers testified, North blurted out that he had "put together a whole cascade of cover companies, 'just like they taught us at the CIA clandestine training site.' And I thought that was pretty interesting because I went there and I didn't learn how to put together a whole cascade of companies. And I also didn't know that Ollie North had gone down to the training site." 

Savvy bureaucrats in Washington knew North was not someone to be taken lightly. Fiers called him "a power figure in the government. . .a force to be reckoned with." When he asked for something, people jumped. When he gave orders, they were followed. "Ollie North had the ability to work down in my chain of command and to cause [it] to override me if and when I didn't do something," Fiers testified. "And, I would like to add, subsequently I saw that happen in other ways, other places and other agencies." 

Fiers's boss at the CIA, Clair E. George, echoed that. "I suffer from the bureaucrat's disease, that when people call me and say, 'I am calling from the White House for the National Security Council on behalf of the national security advisor,' I am inclined to snap to." 

CIA Costa Rican station chief Joe Fernandez was more blunt. "To a GS-15, this guy talks to God, right?" Fernandez said of North during a secret congressional hearing in 1987. "Obviously, I knew where he worked in the Executive Office Building. He has got tremendous access. . .. I mean, North is not some ordinary American citizen that is suddenly in this position. This is a man who had dealings with, obviously, the Director of the CIA. . .. You know, he deals with my division chief." 

North was even telling U.S. ambassadors what to do. 

In July 1985, before taking his new job as ambassador to Costa Rica, Lewis Tambs said North sat him down and gave him his marching orders. "Colonel North asked me to go down and open up the Southern Front," Tambs told the Iran-Contra committees. "We would encourage the freedom fighters to fight. And the war was in Nicaragua. The war was not in Costa Rica, and so that is what I understood my instructions were." 

But with the CIA's billions officially banned from the scene, North had a big problem if he was going to get the Contras out of their Costa Rican border sanctuaries and into Nicaragua to do some actual fighting. 

He had no way to supply them; the CIA had been doing all that. 

It takes tons of material to sustain an army in the field, particularly one that is going to be warring deep inside enemy territory, separated by days from its supply depots. The CIA had plenty of experience handling such complicated logistical problems, but North didn't. It was a problem he took up with his friends at Langley, who, according to CIA official Fiers, "spent major time, major effort" trying to come up with a solution. 

"Air resupply of the Contras was the key," Fiers testified. "We had a 15,000- man army of guerrillas operating in Nicaragua and had to supply them. All of the supply went by air. They carried in what—their boots and their clothes, and then their new ammunition and such had to be dropped in by air. So the success or failure turned on air resupply operations." 

One of the vehicles North selected to handle that chore was a new unit set up inside the U.S. State Department called the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office (NHAO). The office was officially created in mid-1985 to oversee the delivery of $27 million in "humanitarian" aid Congress agreed to give the Contras, under considerable pressure from the White House. 

North and the CIA first tried to get the operation placed inside the National Security Council, where it would be free from public scrutiny and North could control it directly, but that move failed. Instead, Fiers said, North simply "hijacked" it from the State Department. In November 1985 he pressured the NHAO to hire one of his aides as a consultant, a tall, blond former L.A. prep school counselor named Robert W Owen. A Stanford University grad and onetime advertising executive, Owen idolized North. Since 1984 he had been, in his own words, North's "trusted courier" in Central America, zigzagging through the war zones for Ollie, listening to the concerns of Contra officials, setting up arms deals, and solving problems. 

Owen's work had drawn rave reviews from his CIA contacts. "That man has all of the attributes that we want in our officers," Costa Riean station chief Fernandez told Congress during a 1987 hearing. "I met with him on a number of occasions. . .introduced him to one of my officers who regularly met with him when he was in town." Fernandez said his superiors were "so impressed with Mr. Owen that he was being considered as a possible applicant for the clandestine service." 

Owen, in 1989 court testimony, admitted that "there was a possibility that I might have gone with the CIA on contract." 

But because Owen was a private citizen, Fernandez said, he couldn't legally send him out on intelligence-gathering missions. He could listen when Owen reported back but couldn't, in CIA jargon, "task" him. But that all changed once Owen began working for the NHAO, which probably explains North's insistence that Owen be hired. "When he did that, then we did have a much more operational relationship," Fernandez confirmed. "Because then he was a government employee, I did ask him to find out things." 

NHAO director Robert Duemling and his aides couldn't figure out why they needed to have Rob Owen around, and initially they rebuffed North's suggestions. "I certainly didn't see the necessity for a middleman," Duemling testified in a once-secret deposition to the Iran-Contra committees. But North kept pushing. Duemling said North had Contra leaders write letters demanding Owen's hiring, and he lobbied Duemling's superior at the State Department, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, a fervent Contra supporter. After one stormy meeting with North and Abrams, Duemling said, "Elliott Abrams turned to me and said, 'Well, Bob, I suppose you probably ought to hire Owen.' Well, in bureaucratic terms the jig was up, since I was the only person who was speaking out against this." 

Owen was given a $50,000 contract as a "facilitator," a job that mystified Duemling's aide, Chris Arcos. Arcos testified that no one was "sure what, in fact, Rob Owen could do or bring or offer to the office that we couldn't do. He didn't have much Spanish, he didn't have an expertise in medical or anything like that." 

The minutes of that November 1985 meeting show that for some reason, Abrams and North were extremely concerned about the fallout if someone discovered Owen's involvement with the NIIAO, and they began working on a cover story to explain his presence there in case it leaked. "Abrams and North agreed that Owen will be expendable if he becomes a political or diplomatic liability," the minutes state. If that happened, Congress would be told that he was "an experiment that hadn't worked out." 

It was an experiment right out of Dr. Frankenstcin's lab. 

Rob Owen's mission was to serve as the CIA's unofficial liaison to the drug traffickers and other undesirables who were helping the Contras in Costa Rica, people who were too dirty for the CIA to deal with directly. Like North, he was another "cutout." "He probably had the most extensive network of contacts among the resistance leaders," CIA station chief Fernandez testified in 1987, "including people with whom we did not want to have contact with and who, however, were involved with the Nicaraguan resistance." 

The untouchables Fernandez was referring to were the Cuban anti-Communists in Costa Rica—the rough mix of mercenaries, bombers, assassins, and drug dealers recruited in Miami by UDN-FARN commander Fernando "El Negro" Chamorro and CIA agent Ernesto Cruche. The agency, Fernandez testified, was "very leery of these people. However, Rob Owen had an entree to them." 

And now, thanks to his NHAO job, he had an official entree—as an operational CIA asset. Owen's specific assignment, in fact, put him directly over the drug traffickers Fernandez and the CIA didn't want to be seen with. 

He was assigned to "monitor" an NHAO contract with a Costa Rican shrimp company called Frigorificos de Puntarenas, S.A. This consisted of a small fleet of fishing boats based in the humid Pacific Coast village of Puntarenas, and an import company in Miami called Ocean Hunter, which brought Frigorificos' catch into the United States. In reality, however, it was "a firm owned and operated by Cuban-American drug traffickers," according to a 1988 Senate subcommittee report.

That conclusion was based partly on the congressional testimony of former Medellín cartel accountant Ramon Milian Rodriguez, a suave Cuban-American who was the cartel's money-laundering wizard until his arrest in Miami in 1983, when he and $5 million in cash were taken off a Lear jet bound for Panama. Frigorificos, he testified, was one of an interlocking chain of companies he'd created to launder the torrents of cash that were pouring into the cartel's coffers from its worldwide cocaine sales. Drug money would go into one company and come out of another through a series of intercompany transactions, clean and ready to be banked or invested. In 1982, Frigorificos was taken over by a group of major Miami-based drug traffickers, who began using it to help the Contras. 

"Were payments or arrangements made by which the Contras could receive money through Frigorificos?" Senator John Kerry asked Milian during a Senate subcommittee hearing in 1987. 

"Yes sir," the accountant answered. 

"You arranged that?" 

"I, through my intermediaries, made it possible." 

"Was any of the money that you provided Frigorificos traceable to drugs or to drug-related transactions?" Kerry asked. 

"No, sir." 

"Why was that?" 

"Because," said Milian, "we were experts at what we do."

Milian, a graduate of Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley, told Kerry's committee that he used the firm to launder a $10 million donation from the Medellín cartel to the Contras, a donation he said was arranged by and paid to a former CIA agent, Cuban Felix Rodriguez. Kerry's committee didn't believe that tale, especially after Milian flunked a lie detector test on the question. 

But during the drug trafficking trial of Manuel Noriega several years later, one of the government's star witnesses, former Medellí;n cartel transportation boss Carlos Lehder, confirmed under oath that the cartel had given the Contras $10 million, just as Milian had testified. Lehder said he arranged for the donation himself. 

Contra leader Adolfo Calero has always denied the Contras received such a sum, but Calero is hardly a credible source when it comes to Contra fundraising. He denied for many years that the Contras ever got money from the CIA, or assistance from Oliver North. 

The FBI first picked up word of Frigorificos' involvement with drugs in September 1984, while the CIA was still running the Contra program. An investigation of a 1983 bombing of a Miami bank had led police and FBI agents into the murky underworld of Miami's Cuban anti-Communist groups, who were suspected of blowing up the bank. 

Miami police questioned the president of the Cuban Legion, Jose Coutin, who told them what he knew of the bombing and then unloaded some unexpected information about the Contras and drugs, naming a host of Cuban CIA operatives and Bay of Pigs veterans he said were working for the Contras in Costa Rica. One drug dealer Coutin named was Francisco Chanes, whom Coutin said "was giving financial support to anti-Castro groups and the Nicaraguan Contra guerrillas. The monies come from narcotic transactions." lie identified Chanes as one of the owners of Ocean Hunter, the sister company of Frigorificos. The Miami cops quickly turned the information over to the FBI, records show. 

Coutin's statements were corroborated years later by former drug pilot Fabio Ernesto Carrasco, who admitted flying cocaine and weapons loads for the Contras in 1984 and 1985. As a U.S. government witness, Carraseo testified that Frigorificos was being used by the Contras during the war as a front to bring cocaine into the United States to finance the war effort. 

"To make sure I understand, is this company Frigorificos de Puntarenas in any way involved in drug trafficking?" defense attorney Richard "Racehorse" Haynes asked Carrasco during a 1990 drug trial in Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

"That's correct." 

"In what way was it involved?" 

"As I have said, they would load cocaine inside the containers which were being shipped loaded with vegetables and fruit to the United States," Carraseo said. 

"Did this company have a role in your drug operations dealing with the Contras and the weapons that you believed to be involved with the CIA?" 

"It did in my opinion," the pilot testified. 

So how could a company started by the Medellín cartel and used as a front to run drugs into America ever wind up with a contract from the U.S. State Department's Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office? 

Through Rob Owen and the CIA, court records show. 

"The people that were involved in Ocean Hunter in Costa Rica were ones that had been helpful to the cause," Owen testified in a 1988 civil deposition. He identified those helpful souls as Frank Chanes, the Miami Cuban who was reported to the FBI as a drug trafficker in 1984, and Moises Nunez, another Bay of Pigs veteran who was suspected by Interpol of being a drug trafficker as well as an intelligence operative. 

Another man involved with Frigorificos was the exiled Nicaraguan lawyer Francisco Aviles Saenz, the CIA asset who claimed the $36,000 police had seized during the investigation of the Frogman case in San Francisco in 1983 belonged to the Contras. On several occasions Aviles, the brother-in-law of Meneses lieutenant Horacio Percira, notarized affidavits submitted by the shrimp company to obtain payment from the State Department, records show. 

Owen claimed the shrimp company was used mainly for its international bank accounts, serving as one of several Central American "brokers" for the humanitarian aid money going to the Contras on the Southern Front. In all, more than $260,000 in U.S. taxpayer funds flowed through Frigorificos's bank accounts during 1986. 

"We needed an account in Miami that the [State Department] money could be deposited to. [There were] constant financial transactions between Miami and Costa Rica, between Frank Chanes and Moises Nunez. They had been helpful and supportive of the cause. They were willing to do it," Owen testified. "I felt that they were honest and that the money would go where it was supposed to go." 

Where it ended up is anybody's guess. Some of the money paid Frigorificos, bank records show, was wired out in never-explained transfers to banks in Israel and South Korea. When the U.S. General Accounting Office audited the NHAO's "broker" accounts, it was unable to trace most of the money. Of $4.4 million that went into the accounts, less than $1 million could be accounted for, and much of that was in payoffs to Honduran military officials. The rest was traced to offshore banks and then disappeared. 

Owen insisted that the traffickers at Frigorificos had been cleared by the CIA and presumably the FBI. "U.S. intelligence sources were involved in Costa Rica to provide a check and a balance on this. They would be knowledgeable, they knew the lay of the ground. I thought it important and appropriate to talk with them," Owen testified. "To the best of my knowledge, I talked to U.S. intelligence officials regarding Moises Nunez. I believe I would have asked about Frank Chanes as well." 

In addition, Owen said, "their names were given to NHAO and it was my understanding that any account that NHAO provided funds to was checked through the FBI. The FBI was informed who was being used as a banker. Now, whether they did any check on it or not, I'm not sure. I guess I assume that they did." 

The director of the NHAO testified that the FBI never answered his letters of inquiry. "

So, is it fair to say, then, that you were the one that suggested these gentlemen be utilized?" Owen was asked during a deposition. 

"It is fair to say. . .in consultation with U.S. intelligence officials," Owen replied. Owen refused to identify them further, other than to say that it was "someone who works for the CIA." 

One reason the CIA gave Frigorificos a clean bill of health may have been because its Costa Rican manager, Moises Nunez, was a CIA agent. John Hull, the CIA's Costa Rican liaison with the Contras, confirmed in an interview that Nunez was working with the agency as an intelligence source, and a 1988 UPI story said Nunez was "identified as an Agency officer by two senior Costa Rican government officials, a U.S. intelligence source, and American law enforcement authorities." 

In addition to distributing State Department money to the Costa Rican Contras, Nunez was also permitting Frigorificos to be used by North and CIA station chief Fernandez as a cover for a secret maritime operation they were running against the Sandinistas, records show. 

In February 1986, one of the Cubans working with North in Costa Rica, a longtime CIA contract agent named Felipe Vidal, devised a plan for a "small, professionally managed rebel naval force" that would serve as a supply line for the Contras, an intelligence-gathering operation, and a transportation unit "to infiltrate into the [Nicaraguan] mainland rebel cadres for specific missions." 

Vidal recommended using a Costa Rican shrimp company as "a front" and getting two shrimp boats to act as motherships and to gather intelligence. "These boats could be acquired from U.S. government auctions," Vidal wrote, noting that "existing connections with a high-ranking official in the DEA would facilitate the purchase of said boats. The cost of these boats, with cooperation from the DEA, could come to as low as $10,000 per boat." CIA records show that Vidal was employed by Frigorificos at the time he proposed this scheme. 

Vidal's "existing connections" with a top DEA official are fascinating, considering the Cuban's shady background. Vidal's criminal history "reflects an assortment of assault, robbery, narcotics, and firearms violations," the CIA Inspector General wrote, and included a 1971 drug conviction and a 1977 arrest for conspiracy to sell marijuana. Former CIA official Alan Fiers admits being aware of Vidal's "record of misbehavior and general thuggery" but claims he didn't know the Cuban was a convicted drug trafficker. The following month, Owen informed North that "the first hard intelligence mission inside by boat has taken place and the people arc now out." He said five small boats were being constructed and "a safe house [in Costa Rica] has been rented on a river, which flows into the ocean." 

"Moises Nunez, a Cuban who has a shrimping business in Puntarenas [sic] is fronting the operation," Owen wrote North. "He is willing to have an American come work for him under cover to advise the operation. . .. If we can get two shrimp boats, Nunez is willing to front a shrimping operation on the Atlantic coast. These boats can be used as motherships. I brought this up awhile ago and you agreed and gave me the name of a DEA person who might help with the boats." 

In other words, in early 1986 the DEA was being asked to provide cheap oceangoing vessels to a company started by the Medellín cartel, run by drug traffickers, for espionage missions planned and fronted by drug traffickers. 

The identity of Vidal's high-ranking DEA contact was not divulged, nor is it known whether the agency ever provided the boats, but records show the maritime operation was going strong in April 1986 and would soon be running "several trips a week," according to a memo Owen sent to North. Curiously, the Iran-Contra investigations barely looked at this clandestine operation, which was a clear violation of the Boland Amendment since, according to Owen, it directly involved CIA station chief Joe Fernandez. 

Despite his background, Moises Nunez also maintained a chummy relationship with anti drug agencies, both American and Costa Rican. "Nunez got to be known by our authorities as a collaborator of the DEA and of other police bodies," said a 1989 Costa Rican prosecutor's report, adding that the Cuban carried credentials from the Costa Rican Ministry of Public Safety's Department of Narcotics, provided funds and vehicles for an anti drug unit, and went out on raids with them, though his effectiveness was somewhat questionable. The report said he blew a four-month investigation of a Colombian drug ring by making a "premature" arrest.

Most of this strange activity was occurring with the knowledge and apparent approval of CIA station chief Fernandez and other CIA agents in Costa Rica, records indicate. Fernandez admitted to the Iran-Contra committees that he knew Nunez and knew he was meeting with Owen to discuss Contra operations. Fernandez was asked if he knew that Nunez claimed to have met North, but his answer was classified for reasons of national security. 

Nunez, however, shed light on that question when the CIA interrogated him in March 1987 about allegations that he'd been dealing drugs in Costa Rica through his shrimp company, Frigorificos. Thanks to a DEA seizure, the CIA already knew that Nunez's partners in that firm were behind a 414-pound cocaine load shipped to Miami in January 1986 amidst crates of yucca. 

"Nunez revealed that since 1985, he had engaged in a clandestine relationship with the National Security Council [NSC]," the CIA Inspector General reported. "Nunez refused to elaborate on the nature of these actions but indicated it was difficult to answer questions relating to his involvement in narcotics trafficking because of the specific tasks he had performed at the direction of the NSC." 

Instead of following up on this eyebrow-raising answer, CIA headquarters ordered an immediate halt to Nunez's questioning. "The Agency position was not to get involved in this matter and to turn it over to others because it had nothing to do with the Agency, but with the National Security Council," former CIA officer Louis Dupart reasoned in an interview with the CIA Inspector General. "That's all we had to do. It was someone else's problem." That "someone" was harried Iran-Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, upon whom every potential allegation of drug trafficking by the Contras was dumped by the CIA and the Reagan Administration. Of course, Walsh had neither the time nor the authority to look into most of those leads and the CIA refused to cooperate on the few occasions when he did ask some questions. Therefore he made an excellent scapegoat in case anyone wondered why tips about drug dealing by the NSC and the Contras were never investigated. "We turned it over to Lawrence Walsh," became the Agency's standard reply. 

Former CIA official Alan Fiers, who ran the Contra project at the time, confirmed that Nunez's questioning was stopped "because of the NSC connection and the possibility that this could be somehow connected to [North's] Private Benefactor program, otherwise known as the Iran-Contra affair." 

The CIA made the same decision when a security check on the CIA's logistics advisor to the Costa Rican Contras, Cuban mercenary Felipe Vidal, discovered evidence of drug running. 

"Narcotics trafficking relative to Contra-related activities is exactly the sort of thing that the U.S. Attorney's Office will be investigating," CIA attorney Gary Chase worried in an August 1987 memo. Chase "expressed concern over the possibility that the security process. . .could be exposed during any future litigation." Vidal's security check was shut down. 

But the Agency's conduct was far worse than simply burying its head in the sand. For years afterward, it shielded both Dago Nunez and Felipe Vidal from criminal investigations into drug trafficking and money laundering. At various times, the CIA told U.S. Customs and the DEA that it had no information about Nunez's trafficking activities. The CIA's Directorate of Operations—which runs covert operations—lied even to the Agency's own lawyers, denying knowledge of Nunez's shrimp company though there was plenty of information in its files. 

Fiers also confirmed that the CIA played a critical role in the "humanitarian" aid operation involving Frigorificos; without the agency, Fiers said, the NHAO was simply "a shell entity. . .. We were to be the eyes and ears of the NHAO office. The only way that they could monitor alignments, verify shipments and receipts was by having CIA capabilities in the region perform that function for them. And so that's what we did." But since at least three other drug-dealing companies ended up working for the NHAO during its brief lifespan, either the CIA's oversight was woefully incompetent or it was seeking a special kind of contractor. 

One such company was DIACSA, the Miami aircraft company that Floyd Carlton had used for years as the U.S. headquarters for his Panamanian drug smuggling venture with Noriega. It was in DIACSA's offices, Carlton admitted, that he and his partners plotted their drug flights and arranged the laundering of their cocaine profits. DEA records confirm that. 

Just like Frigorificos, DIACSA was run by a Cuban drug dealer who had been part of the CIA's Bay of Pigs operation, Alfredo Caballero. Carlton testified that Caballero was "involved with drug trafficking and to a certain extent he helped the Contras. But to be more specific he was helpful to Mr. Pastora's organization [ARDE]." 

According to a Senate subcommittee report, the Contras were dealing with DIACSA even before it was hired by the State Department. "During 1984 and 1985, the principal Contra organization, the FDN, chose DIACSA for 'infra account transfers.' The laundering of the money through DIACSA concealed the fact that some funds of the Contras were deposits arranged by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North," the report stated. 

The State Department's selection of DIACSA as a "humanitarian" aid contractor is perhaps even more egregious than its choice of Frigorificos. At the time DIACSA got its government contract, the company had been penetrated by an undercover DEA agent, Danny Moritz, who was churning out eyewitness reports of Caballero's drug dealing and money-laundering rackets. Moreover, both Caballero and Carlton were under indictment in the United States for conspiring to import 900 pounds of cocaine and laundering $2.6 million in drug profits. Both were convicted, and both became U.S. government informants. 

How the CIA missed those clues has never been explained. It is highly likely the agency knew exactly what DIACSA was, since its owner was said to be working for the CIA. "Alfredo Caballero was CIA and still is," insisted Carol Prado, Eden Pastora's top aide in ARDE. "I say that because I knew him very well. A lot of times I went to DIACSA in Miami." Prado has reason to know. A 1985 CIA cable described DIACSA as the "cover company" used by the Costa Rican Contras to secretly buy aircraft. 

During Noriega's trial in 1991, Floyd Carlton testified that his smuggling operation was flying weapons to the Contras at the same time he was flying dope to the United States and he said some of the arms flights were organized by Caballero. When Noriega's lawyers asked Carlton about Oliver North's knowledge of those flights, federal prosecutors vehemently objected, and U.S. judge William Hoeveler became angry. "Just stay away from it," the judge snapped, refusing to allow any more questions on the topic. 

Another Miami company the NHAO hired to ferry supplies was Vortex Aviation, which was being operated by a Detroit drug dealer named Michael Palmer. Palmer, a former airline pilot, had worked since 1977 for "the largest marijuana business cartel in the history of the country," according to a federal prosecutor in Detroit. Yet in 1985 Palmer became a freedom fighter and volunteered for the Contra war effort, transporting humanitarian aid for the State Department. 

In a recently declassified interview with FBI agents in 1991, CIA official Fiers admitted that the CIA had information that Palmer was dealing drugs during that time. "Fiers heard that sonic of Palmer's people got caught taking a plane of drugs into the U.S. and this is what caused a lot of problems for Palmer," the FBI reported. "CIA thought the northern Contras were clean but Palmer was an exception." 

One DC-4 Palmer was using to deliver Contra aid was shot up in February 1986 as it attempted an airdrop over Nicaragua, and it made an emergency landing on San Andres Island off the coast of Nicaragua, a notorious haven for cocaine traffickers. Four days later Owen wrote to North, saying, "No doubt you know that the DC-4 Foley got was used at one time to run drugs and part of the crew had criminal records. Nice group the Boys chose." Pat Foley was the owner of a Delaware-based company, Summit Aviation, a longtime CIA and U.S. military contractor, often for clandestine air operations. Foley was reportedly overseeing Palmer's operations at Vortex. 

Francis McNeil, at the time one of the State Department's top narcotics intelligence officers, confirmed to Congress that the DC-4's appearance at San Andres caused red flags to go up in Washington. "A stop at San Andres Island for a Contra resupply plane is a bit suspicious since San Andres is known to be a transshipment point for drugs," McNeil testified. 

The pilot of that unlucky DC-4, former CIA contract pilot Ronald Lippert, said in an interview that neither his trip nor his crew were involved with drugs, though the plane had been involved with drug flights "long before I acquired it." He said the landing at San Andres was for repairs only. But he acknowledged that his plane was probably used for drug flights while Vortex was hauling humanitarian aid for the Contras. Those flights were piloted by Vortex's own crews, Lippert said. He knew one of the flights wound up in Colombia, because he got a call from the FAA in Miami "asking what my plane was doing, taking off from a dirt strip on the northeast coast of Colombia during its two-day mysterious absence on the Nicaraguan Contra flight." 

Lippert, a Canadian who flew for the CIA in the early 1960s until his imprisonment by Cuban intelligence agents in 1963 for espionage, said that "the most I was able to find out from a friend in the intelligence community was the name 'Operation Stolen Mercedes' and that aside from Costa Rica, its itinerary may have included a stop in Panama and Mexico after it left Colombia." 

On another Contra flight, Lippert's plane came back with an unexplained twelve and a half hours of excess flying time on it; Palmer told him the pilots had to make an emergency detour to Costa Rica. In his testimony to the Iran/Contra committees, Rob Owen confirmed that the airplane was involved in an unexplained "embarrassing situation" in Costa Rica. "That's when 1 decided some real strange shit was happening," Lippert said. "It came back all messed up with bullet holes in the tail and the engine burned out and, after that, I told them that was it. Unless I'm flying the plane, it was no dice. So Palmer says, 'Fine, I'll buy the damned thing from you.'" 

Palmer, whom the CIA admits was working as an Agency subcontractor at this point, arranged to buy Lippert's DC-4 through some associates of his: a Cuban lawyer from Miami named Jose Insua and an aircraft company executive, Richard Kelley, both of whom intimated to Lippert that they were working with the CIA. After the sale, Lippert said, the DC-4 was used to airdrop explosives off the coast of Cuba. Then, a month after he signed the installment sale papers, it was seized in Mexico with 2,500 pounds of marijuana on board. 

A story in the Mexican newspaper La Opinion quoted the attorney general of Mexico as saying that the plane was being used by a "powerful gang of drug smugglers. . .known to have been operating for a long time using large aircraft to transport arms southbound and bring back marijuana through here." 

Lippert never got the plane back, nor was he ever paid for it. The company that issued the letters of credit that "guaranteed" the purchase of his plane was later shut down by the state of Florida, which announced that its owners were drug traffickers and fugitive stock swindlers. "Can't we close a bank or even a supposed bank anymore without finding some sort of tie to the Contras?" bank examiner Barry Cladden wondered to a Miami Herald reporter in 1987. "What's the world coming to?" 

One of the DC-4's buyers, Jose Insua, was later exposed as a drug trafficker and DMA informant himself, and was used by the agency in an unsuccessful attempt to snare the former chairman of the Florida Democratic party in a bribery sting. During the trial, the government admitted that Insua was "involved in the brokering of aircraft for narcotics smugglers on approximately 12 occasions." 

As Lippert aptly observed in 1997, "Jose Insua is a drug dealer and he's hanging around a company [Vortex] with a State Department contract. Michael Zapdos is a drug dealer and he issues two letters of credit for planes that are used by the CIA. Mike Palmer is a drug dealer and he's running an airline for the CIA. You tell me what's going on." 

Actually, the litany of drug dealers working for Vortex was even longer than that, according to the CIA's Inspector General. "Michael Palmer, Joseph Haas, Alberto Prado Herreros, Mauricio Letona, Martin Gómez, Donaldo Frixone, and two pilots for the prime contractor—all of whom were affiliated with the CIA Contra support program—may have been involved in narcotics trafficking prior to their relationship with the Agency," the Inspector General found. 

Records show top CIA officials were fully aware that Vortex was dabbling in drugs even before they recommended the company for the NHAO's "humanitarian aid" project and, later, for a CIA subcontract. 

"At least two Agency officers [Alan Fiers and an unnamed CIA contractor] knew about Palmer's drug dealing before the Agency agreed to buy an aircraft from Vortex and approved the subcontracting to Vortex of the servicing of aircraft flying resupply flights for the Contras," a May 1988 CIA memo states.

The NHAO also hired a Honduran air freight company, SETCO, which happened to be owned by the I londuran drug kingpin Juan Matta Ballesteros, a fact that the U.S. Customs Service had known since 1983. "SETCO was the principal company used by the Contras in Honduras to transport supplies and personnel for the FDN," the CIA's Inspector General reported. "Oliver North also used SETCO for airdrops of military supplies to Contra forces inside Nicaragua." In fact, that appears to have been the reason behind all of the State Department contracts that were awarded to cocaine smugglers: they were the same people the CIA had hired to do that work when the agency was running the show. 

"I believe we guided them toward the carriers they ultimately used," former CIA official Alan Fiers confirmed in 1998. Fiers told CIA interviewers in 1987 that he and NHAO director Robert Duemling "had frequent meetings regarding possible contract cargo carriers. . .[Fiers] said he had checked out some of these carriers for Duemling." 

Duemling told Iran-Contra investigators that he was given very specific instructions regarding the cargo carriers when he took over the humanitarian aid program. "One of the policy guidelines was do not disrupt the existing arrangements of the resistance movement unless there is a terribly good reason," Duemling testified. 

"Who told you that, by the way, going back to the beginning of this?" 

"Ollie North," Duemling said. He said North instructed him not to "dislodge or replace their existing arrangements, which seemed to be working perfectly well." 

They certainly were, in one sense. According to Danilo Blandón's lawyer, Brad Brunon, the Centra's cocaine was arriving in the United States literally by the planeload. "The transportation channel got established and got filled up with cocaine rather quickly," Brunon said in an interview. "As I understood it, these large transports were coming back from delivering food and guns and humanitarian aid and things like that and they were just loading them up with cocaine and bringing them back. I think 1,000-kilo shipments were not unheard of. That scale. Because all of a sudden they seemed to have unlimited sources of supply." 

According to former Meneses aide Enrique Miranda, Meneses drug-laden planes were flying out of a military air base in El Salvador called Ilopango. Like the CIA before him, North had selected that base as the hub for his Contra air force; his operatives worked there "practically unfettered," according to the report of Iran-Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. 

And it was at Ilopango where the whole sordid mess first started to unravel.

13 

"The wrong kind of friends" 

It didn't take DEA agent Celerino Castillo III very long to discover that something very strange was going on at Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador. Two days into his new job at the DEA's regional office in Guatemala City in October 1985, Castillo said the agent-in-charge, Robert Stia, took him aside and told him that the U.S. government was running a covert operation at the air base. Castillo should be careful not to interfere with it. 

It struck the former Texas policeman as odd advice. Why would a DEA field agent need to be warned about interfering with a legitimate government operation? Castillo was there to fight drug dealers. Whatever they were doing at the military airfield outside San Salvador couldn't possibly concern him. At any rate, it wasn't as if he was going to be spending a lot of time in El Salvador. Though he was the country's only DEA agent, Castillo lived and worked in neighboring Guatemala and had duties there also. 

Besides, El Salvador in late 1985 had all the makings of a very sorry posting. The war-torn country produced no drugs, and as far as anyone knew there were no major drug rings operating there. It was of such little concern to the American government that the DEA never opened an office in the country. If El Salvador was anything, it was a resting place for cocaine mules on their way north. 

Flipping through the reports of his predecessors, Castillo could see that the DEA's role in the country had been limited to intelligence gathering, collecting information about drug shipments passing through and filing them away, making few seizures. "We were playing traffic cop, taking down the license numbers of speeders but never writing any tickets," Castillo would later observe. 

Castillo put his boss's warning about Ilopango down to bureaucratic caution and got on with his job, which was to train and recruit Guatemalan and Salvadoran policemen to become soldiers in America's worldwide war on drugs. Since the DEA couldn't legally make any arrests in Central America, his assignment was to put together local anti-narcotics squads the DEA could trust enough to work with, and develop informants who could provide real-time intelligence. 

But no matter where he went, it seemed, Ilopango kept coming up. 

Castillo was out one day with a DEA informant in Guatemala, a Cuban named Socrates Sofi-Perez, who proudly informed Castillo that he was a Bay of Pigs veteran and a Contra supporter. After learning that his new control agent had been decorated for fighting Communists in Vietnam, Sofi-Perez confided that he was helping the Contras fight Marxism in Nicaragua and laid out a scheme that was remarkably similar to the operation Frigorificos was then conducting in Costa Rica: a shrimp company he owned was being used as a front to launder money for the Contras. The Contras were also dealing in cocaine, he told Castillo, using a small air force based at Ilopango that was ferrying war materials for the cause. He justified the trafficking by blaming the U.S. Congress for ill-advisedly cutting off Contra aid. 

Castillo wasn't sure if his informant was trying to impress him, pull his leg, or waste his time. The idea of a U.S. government-sponsored operation dabbling in drugs struck the six-year DEA veteran as absurd.[Imagine that DC] But there was one way to find out. The next time he was in El Salvador, Castillo said, he bounced the Cuban's story off one of the few informants the DEA had there, Ramiro Guerra, who owned a coffee shop in San Salvador. Guerra was working for the DEA as the result of a pending cocaine trafficking indictment in San Francisco, where he had lived for many years. While hiding out in El Salvador, Guerra picked up pocket money by acting as an informant for the very agency that wanted him in jail back in the United States. He had also insinuated himself into Roberto D'Aubuisson right-wing ARENA party, and had risen to a high level inside the party structure. 

To Castillo's surprise, Guerra told him that the information about drugs at Ilopango was probably true. He'd heard the same rumors himself. And he confirmed that there was indeed a small air force based there that was illegally flying supplies to the Contras, but it really wasn't very secretive. While headquartered on the restricted military side of the Ilopango airport, the Contra air supply operation was being run quite openly, and a lot of his friends in the Salvadoran Air Force knew about it, Guerra told Castillo. 

"The woman selling tortillas at the gate of Ilopango could tell you what was going on," the assistant regional security officer for the U.S. embassy in San Salvador told Iran-Contra investigators in 1991. "Anyone who ever flew into or over Ilopango air base could see something like that was going on. When looking down at Ilopango from the air, one could see one side of the airfield having a ragtag operation of inferior planes, dilapidated buildings and the like. On the other side of the airport were nice facilities, lift trucks unloading supplies from more sophisticated and bigger aircraft, and gringos running around." 

The modern facilities "all belonged to the American operation," the officer said, adding that he didn't know "if it was a CIA operation or what, but he knew there was Contra resupply activity at Ilopango." 

While CIA officials denied they were running the show, they admitted they were keeping a very close eye on it. "We had a capability and indeed a responsibility for reporting what had been happening at Ilopango," said Alan Fiers Jr., the former CIA official who headed the Contra program from 1984 to 1988. 

Guerra told Castillo that a Cuban named Max Gómez was doing the actual day-to-day management of the operation for the U.S. government. "Gómez," was the name then being used by CIA agent Felix Rodriguez, a Bay of Pigs veteran who'd had a remarkable career with the agency as a paramilitary specialist. Among other operations, he'd been in on the capture and execution of Che Guevara. In early 1985 Rodriguez appeared in El Salvador as an adviser to the Salvadoran Air Force, working on a helicopter-based counterinsurgency operation against the FMLN guerrillas. 

While Rodriguez has always claimed—sometimes under oath—that he was retired from the CIA and in El Salvador merely as a volunteer and private citizen, former CIA officer Fiers suggested otherwise. He testified that Rodriguez was sent there in early 1985 as part of a CIA reorganization that began after Fiers took over the Central American Task Force. "As a result of the change in management of the task force. . .we undertook a complete review of our efforts in San Salvador. . .and made adjustments in that undertaking that left certain operations, certain activities that we had—left a void," Fiers testified in 1992. "Felix Rodriguez was put into—sent to El Salvador to work in the areas where we had left a void and was going to take over those responsibilities, or at least in part take over those responsibilities." 

Rodriguez's journey from "retirement" to Ilopango began with a very strange step. Shortly before he left for Washington, D.C., to get final approval for his mission to El Salvador, he received a call from a friendly private eye in Miami who wanted him to meet "a client who could compromise the Nicaraguan Sandinista government for drug-money laundering," Rodriguez wrote in his memoirs. 

The client turned out to be former Medellín cartel accountant Ramon Milian Rodriguez—the man who had set up the Costa Rican shrimp company Oliver North would later use to funnel money to the Contras. Rodriguez said Milian was trying to broker information to obtain help in the money laundering case pending against him. Not only did he tell Rodriguez of Manuel Noriega's drug activities, but he claimed he could provide proof of Sandinista drug dealing. Rodriguez said he passed the info along to the CIA and FBI and heard nothing back. 

Milian tells a very different story. He met with Rodriguez to offer $10 million to the Contras in exchange for the U.S. government dropping the money laundering charges against him, he says; Rodriguez accepted the offer, and money was delivered to him on five separate occasions. Milian later failed a lie detector test when asked about making payments to Rodriguez, but the examiner reached no conclusions about his claim that he'd given money to the Contras. In congressional testimony, Noriega's former political adviser described Felix Rodriguez as "a very close friend of Milian." Both were Cubans who had been active in Miami's anti-Castro movement. 

Most accounts date the Contras' use of Ilopango to September 1985, when North wrote to Rodriguez, asking him to use his influence with Salvadoran Air Force commander Juan Rafael Bustillo to secure hangar space for Contra supply flights. Rodriguez claimed he "greased the skids" with Bustillo and eventually became the overseer of North's Contra resupply operation at the air base. 

In actuality, the Contras had been using Ilopango with General Bustillo's blessings since 1983, when Norwin Meneses friend, CIA pilot Marcos Aguado, made arrangements to base Eden Pastora ARDE air force there. 

Since he could not devote all of his time to North's secret air force, Rodriguez wrote, "I found someone to manage the Salvadoran-based resupply operation on a day-to-day basis. [At Ilopango] they knew that person as Ramon Medina. I knew him by his real name: Luis Posada Carriles." 

With men like Luis Posada and Marcos Aguado running things at Ilopango, it's little wonder DEA agent Castillo was hearing rumors about Contra drug trafficking. Luis Posada was a veteran CIA agent with a history of involvement with drug traffickers, mobsters, and terrorists. He was recruited by the CIA in the 1960s after years of working with anti-Castro Cubans in Miami and was implicated in a number of terrorist incidents conducted by various Cuban extremist groups. In 1967, CIA records show, Posada was investigated by the Justice Department for supplying explosives, silencers, and hand grenades to Miami mobsters "Lefty" Rosenthal and Norman "Roughhouse" Rothman. Rothman was a close associate of South Florida's Mafia chieftain, Santos Trafficante. A memo in Posada's CIA file said, "Posada may have been moonlighting for Rosenthal," but in late 1968 he was transferred by the agency for "unreported association with gangster elements, thefts from CIA, plus other items".

Posada was sent to Venezuela and began working as an official of the Venezuelan intelligence service. In 1973 the DEA received a report that Posada "was in contact with two Cubans in Miami who were reportedly smuggling narcotics into the United States for Luis Posada." According to the informant, Posada was to be "the main contact" in a major cocaine smuggling operation involving members of the Venezuelan government. The DEA placed Posada under surveillance and he "was observed by agents in Miami to meet with numerous identified upper echelon traffickers in Miami during March 1973." 

Records show the CIA was fully aware of its agent's reported involvement with drug traffickers. It received word in February 1973 that "Posada may be involved in smuggling cocaine from Colombia through Venezuela to Miami, also counterfeit U.S. money in Venezuela." But the agency decided "not to directly confront Posada with allegation so as not to compromise ongoing investigation." 

According to the notes of a congressional investigator who reviewed Posada's voluminous CIA files in the late 1970s, cables in the file "indicate concern that Posada was a serious potential liability. Anxious to terminate association promptly if allegations prove true. By April 1973, it seems sure that Posada involved in narcotics, drug trafficking—seen with known big time drug trafficker." But after questioning the Cuban about his contacts, the agency found him "guilty only of having the wrong kind of friends" and continued his employment. 

His choice of friends continued to plague Posada, however. In January 1974 he asked the CIA to provide a Venezuelan passport for a Dominican military official, which the agency refused to do on the grounds that it "cannot permit controlled agents to become directly involved with illicit drug trafficking." A few months later the DEA received a report that Posada was trading weapons for cocaine with a man the DEA believed "is involved in political assassinations." 

According to records at the National Archives, the CIA formally terminated Posada in February 1976. Eight months later he was arrested in Venezuela and accused of participating in the midair bombing of a Cuban DC-8 airliner, which killed seventy-eight people. Though never convicted of the crime, he spent nearly ten years in Venezuelan prisons before escaping in the summer of 1985 and going underground. He resurfaced at Ilopango in early 1986 as Felix Rodriguez's right-hand man, telling investigators that "Rodriguez and other Cuban friends" helped him "get out of Venezuela and relocate in El Salvador. Upon arriving in El Salvador, Posada stayed with Rodriguez for two or three days. Rodriguez then helped Posada get a house in San Salvador, where Posada lived for the next year or so." 

Though allegations of Contra drug trafficking were swirling around Ilopango, DEA agent Castillo was having difficulty getting firsthand evidence of it. For one thing, the air base was in a very protected position, high atop a plateau, surrounded by imposing cliffs. The area where the trafficking was supposedly going on was off limits to the public, tightly guarded by the Salvadoran military. If he was ever going to find out the truth, Castillo figured, he needed to get onto that side of the base. 

He went to Salvadoran Air Force commander Bustillo, lord and master of Ilopango, for permission, but got the cold shoulder. "An agent from the DEA's branch office in Guatemala City came to San Salvador seeking access to Ilopango," the New Republic reported in 1990, adding that Bustillo "stalled" the requests. "There was never a good reason why [the DEA] couldn't get on Ilopango," the magazine quoted an unnamed U.S. official as saying. "They just kept putting off meetings, stuff like that." 

So Castillo improvised. He recruited a Salvadoran named Murga, who wrote the flight plans for the private planes on the civilian portion of the base. Murga had excellent contacts on the military side and could come and go at will. He became Castillo's eyes and ears inside Ilopango. 

Murga knew all about the Contras' drug running, Castillo said, because he was filling out their flight plans and inspecting their aircraft; the pilots were so brazen that they told him they were flying dope to the United States and money to Panama. Sometimes they left with the kilos in plain view, or arrived with box loads of money, Castillo said. 

In a once-secret 1992 interview with the FBI, ex-CIA agent Posada recounted that "the resupply project was always looking for people to carry cash from the United States into El Salvador for Posada to dispense. They were always worried about the restriction on only taking $ 10,000 out of the United States at one time. Any time any of the resupply people went up to the United States for any reason, whether it was a personal visit or whatever, they would be asked to bring money back." Posada was told "the money came from Washington," but never got a better explanation than that. 

The drugs often arrived in private planes flown by Contra pilots from Costa Rica, Murga told Castillo; on other occasions they came in military aircraft from Panama. 

When Castillo typed the names of the Contra pilots Murga had given him into the DEA's computers, nearly all of them came back as documented narcotics traffickers. Among the busiest of the pilots was Francisco Guirola Beeche, the scion of one of El Salvador's most influential families. How Chico Guirola wound up at Ilopango flying for the Contras is an illuminating tale; he should have been sitting in a federal prison cell in the United States. 

On the morning of February 6, 1985, a white T-39 Sabreliner jet took off from John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, with Guirola and three other men—Cuban-Americans—aboard. It stopped briefly at the Kleberg County Airport in Kingsville, Texas, to refuel, and was met by a posse of U.S. Customs Service agents wielding search warrants. The agents had been tracking the men since the month before, when they were spotted in the same plane leaving Orange County for Florida. In mid-flight, they had suspiciously diverted to Panama, where they landed with $1.2 million in cash. 

Guirola and his crew were all listed in Customs databases as suspected drug traffickers, and their airplane was on a watch list as a suspected smuggling craft —for good reason, it turned out. In the Sabreliner cargo hold were fourteen suitcases, which Guirola claimed as his. He pulled out a Costa Rican diplomatic passport and advised the agents not to search the suitcases, or it would "cause trouble." 

He was right. They were bulging with cash, a total of $5.9 million in small bills, the largest cash seizure in Texas history. When the agents announced they were arresting the men for trying to smuggle the cash out of the country, Guirola claimed diplomatic immunity because his mother was the Costa Rican vice consul in New Mexico. 

In court records, federal agents charged that the cash was drug money destined for El Salvador. They cited DEA records that said Guirola had been "reportedly involved in cocaine and arms smuggling in El Salvador and Guatemala" and noted that he was a top aide to Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson. 

The latter claim was confirmed by the Los Angeles Times, which reported that Guirola had accompanied D'Aubuisson to a "very sensitive" meeting with former CIA deputy director Vernon Walters in May 1984. According to the story, Walters had been dispatched in a frantic attempt to talk D'Aubuisson out of assassinating Thomas Pickering, the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador. 

Guirola, who attended college in California with one of Anastasio Somoza's nephews, had allowed D'Aubuisson to use his house as a campaign headquarters when he ran for Salvadoran president in 1984. Guirola passport, which was signed by D'Aubuisson, identified him as a "special adviser" to the Salvadoran Assembly. He was also carrying credentials from the Salvadoran attorney general's office. 

Since Guirola was using an Orange County airport as his departure point, it is possible that the millions he was hauling out of the country came from Los Angeles—area drug sales. But the source of the funds was never made public. "The investigation came to a sudden, abrupt halt with a lot of questions unanswered," U.S. Customs agent Krnest Allison complained. 

That was because the justice Department had made a quick deal with Guirola: If he let the U.S. government keep the money, he'd be let off with probation. Guirola and one of his companions pleaded guilty to a minor currency violation charge and walked. Charges against another passenger and the pilot were dropped, and the plane was given back. 

"I have a hard time swallowing it," federal judge  Hayden Head Jr. told Guirola after the Justice Department announced its plea bargain with the smuggler. "The punishment doesn't fit the crime. . .. I don't know what you were up to, but this conduct cannot be tolerated." 

Less than a year later, DEA agent Castillo and his informants were watching Guirola zoom in and out of Ilopango, hauling drugs in, carrying cash to the Bahamas, and flashing credentials from the Salvadoran Air Force and the Salvadoran president's office. "When I ran Guirolas name in the computer, it popped up in 11 DEA files, detailing his South America-to-United States cocaine, arms and money laundering," Castillo wrote in his memoirs. 

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed in 1997, the Customs Service claimed it could not locate any records relating to the Guirola case. 

Castillo said that in January 1986 he began firing off a string of reports to DEA headquarters in Washington about the suspicious activities of the Contra pilots, listing their names, destinations, tail numbers, and criminal records. He got no replies, and no offers of assistance. It was, he wrote later, as if his reports were "falling into some faceless, bureaucratic black hole." 

But in late March 1986 Castillo got his first official confirmation that he was on the right track. A cable arrived from the Costa Rican DEA office reporting that a pilot named Carlos Amador was intending to fly into Ilopango, pick up cocaine at Hangar No. 4, and take it to Miami. Amador would be carrying Salvadoran government identification, which got him through Customs and any inspections. Castillo was asked to "investigate Amador and any persons or companies associated with Hangar No. 4." 

As Castillo would soon realize, that was easier said than done; he was about to plunge headlong into the darkness of one of the Reagan Administration's most secret operations, a clandestine activity that Reagan privately predicted would result in him and his Cabinet being strung up by their thumbs on the White House lawn if word ever leaked out to the public. CIA records show that Hangar No. 4 had been used by the Agency for covert Contra operations until it was turned over in 1985 to the National Security Council and Oliver North's illegal arms network, "The Enterprise." CIA agent Felix Rodriguez also used the hangar for his helicopter-based counterinsurgency program. The adjoining hangar, No. 5, was still being used by the CIA in support of the Contra project. 

Moreover, the suspected drug pilot, Carlos Amador, had been working with the CIA for years, flying missions for the Costa Rican Contras. The CIA had been collecting information for at least a year indicating Amador was also flying drug planes between Costa Rica, Panama, Belize, and Miami for a pair of major cocaine traffickers, the Sarcevic brothers, at the same time he was flying for the White House. 

Excited that his investigation was finally starting to bear fruit, Castillo drove to El Salvador to tell his informants and the Salvadoran narcotics police the good news—he now had independent confirmation that their stories of Contra drug flights at Ilopango were true. Someone would finally start listening to them, Castillo exulted. 

But the CIA had other ideas. Within weeks, cables were shooting off in a dozen directions as the Agency quickly tried to get a handle on the DEA agent's investigation. 

In April 1986 the CIA station in El Salvador sent a desperate message to the Costa Rican CIA office, asking if the DEA office there could be persuaded to back off. 

"Hangar No. 4 at Ilopango was the location of Contra operations and. . .the El Salvador Station could assure that the only thing Amador and the other pilot had transported during their flights there was military supplies," the cable stated. "Based on that information, El Salvador Station would appreciate Costa Rica Station advising DEA not to make any inquiries into anyone re: Hangar No. 4 at Ilopango since only legitimate CIA supported operations were conducted from this facility. FYI, Station air operations moved from Hangar No. 4 into Hangar No. 5, which Station still occupies." 

The CIA official who wrote that cable told the agency's Inspector General that "his statement was not intended to thwart an investigation of activities in Hangar No. 4. He concedes, however, that the language in the cable could be read to suggest a meaning he did not intend." Plus, that was the effect it had. 

The official alarm was easily understood. Not only was someone like-Carlos Amador strolling freely in and out of CIA-run hangars, but there was a host of other Contra traffickers milling about Ilopango, including Norwin Meneses and friends. 

Enrique Miranda Jaime, who became Meneses emissary to the cartels of Colombia in the late 1980s, testified in a 1992 trial in Nicaragua that "Norwin was selling drugs and tunneled the benefits to the Contras with help of high ranking military officials of the Salvadoran Army, especially with the help of the head of the Salvadoran Air Force and a Nicaraguan pilot named Marcos Aguado." 

Aguado, the chief pilot for the ARDE Contra forces in Costa Rica, was identified in 1987 congressional testimony as a CIA agent. Soon after North set up his resupply operation at the air base, Aguado moved to Ilopango permanently, working as an aide to a high-ranking Salvadoran air force commander. The pilot, who had been instrumental in arranging the Contras' 1984 arms-and-drugs deals with Colombian trafficker George Morales, was no longer welcome in Costa Rica, having been formally accused of cocaine trafficking. "Aguado became a colonel in the Salvadoran Air Force, sharing all the privileges of a high-ranking military officer in El Salvador and was accepted by subordinate ranks as Deputy Commander of the Salvadoran Air Force," Miranda testified. "The flights he directed went as far as Colombia, where they were loaded with cocaine and then redirected to the United States, to a U.S. Air Force base located in the state of Texas." 

In interviews, Miranda and former Nicaraguan anti-drug czar Roger Mayorga, who arrested Miranda, said the U.S. air base was near Fort Worth, but neither knew the name of it. The only air force base near Fort Worth at the time of the alleged drug flights from Ilopango was the now-closed Carswell Air Force Base, the home of a Strategic Air Command bomber squadron. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed in 1997, the U.S. Air Force said all flight records that may have shown arrivals and departures of Salvadoran military aircraft during the mid-1980s were destroyed years ago. 

Miranda, a former Sandinista intelligence officer who became a double agent for the CIA during the Contra war and has worked as a DEA informant in recent years, said the cocaine brought from Colombia by Medellín cartel pilots arrived in Costa Rica in square twenty-five-kilo packages. It was unloaded at various airstrips there, including one located on CIA operative John Hull's farm in northern Costa Rica, where it was placed aboard Contra planes and flown into Ilopango. 

Once it had arrived at the Salvadoran base, Miranda said, Aguado and Meneses supervised the loading of the cocaine onto U.S.-bound aircraft owned by the Salvadoran Air Force and, on occasion, a Miami-based CIA contractor, Southern Air Transport. Though Southern Air officials have vehemently denied involvement with drug smuggling, once suing a Florida TV station for daring to suggest such a thing, CIA and DEA records show that the airline was under investigation for drug trafficking by U.S. Customs in 1987. Further, Southern Air was "of record" in the DEA's databases from 1985 through 1990 "for alleged involvement in cocaine trafficking. . .several of the firm's pilots and executives were suspected of smuggling narcotics currency," the DEA reported. Southern Air was once owned by the CIA.

Miranda testified that he met CIA pilot Aguado for dinner at Meneses's mansion in Managua in 1991, where Aguado regaled them with tales of flying for the Colombian cartels. Aguado told him that he once took a Salvadoran Air Force bomber and leveled a warehouse full of Medellín cartel cocaine on behalf of the rival Cali cartel. Another time, he made plans to bomb the prison where Medellín cartel chief Pablo Escobar was briefly imprisoned. Aguado also boasted of flying weapons from the Salvadoran military to the Colombian cartels, a story Miranda said he doubted until a Salvadoran Air Force colonel and his associates were arrested in 1992 for selling bombs and high explosives to Colombian drug dealers. 

Miranda said Meneses told him that U.S. military hardware stockpiled at Ilopango was loaded onto Salvadoran transport planes and flown south, where the guns were traded for cocaine and flown back to Ilopango. As wild as that scheme sounds, records show Enrique Miranda is not the first drug trafficker to have reported such a fantastic operation. During the 1980s the U.S. Justice Department received at least three other reports from reliable informants detailing arms-for-drugs swaps involving the Medellín cartel, the Contras, and elements of the U.S. government. 

One of those informants, records show, was a member of Meneses' drug ring, a boyhood friend who "had a long track record of providing information and was considered extremely reliable," according to the Justice Department's Inspector General. The friend was questioned in April 1986 by a DEA intelligence analyst as part of a secret DEA assessment of allegations that the Contras were involved in drug smuggling; he not only confirmed that Meneses was selling cocaine to raise money for the Contras, but said "some of these proceeds were used to buy weapons for the Contras in Colombia." The DEA informant related that "Meneses had recruited him to coordinate drug and weapons shipments from Colombia. . .the drugs were shipped to the United States, sometimes through Nicaragua. Meneses boasted that he traveled in and out of Nicaragua freely and that U.S. agents would assist him." 

Another report of Colombian cocaine being traded for U.S. weapons surfaced less than two years later, during the 1988 debriefings of a Colombian trafficker turned government informant, Allen Raul Rudd, who was questioned by Justice Department officials and the U.S. Attorney's office in Tampa, Florida. 

In a February 1988 memo marked "Sensitive," Assistant U.S. Attorney Walter E. Furr told his boss that Rudd "is a very articulate individual and there has been no indication to date that he has not been totally candid. In a real sense his life is on the line for the cooperation he has given so far." Furr probably thought it necessary to add his testament to Rudd's credibility in light of what he was about to report next: the Medellín cartel reportedly had made a deal with Vice President George Bush to supply American weapons to the Contras in exchange for free passage for their cocaine deliveries to the U.S. 

Rudd told the officials that in the spring of 1987 he'd met in Medellín, Colombia, with cartel boss Pablo Escobar to arrange a drug deal. In the course of their conversation at Escobar's palatial home, Rudd said, the cocaine lord began ranting about Bush and his South Florida Drug Task Force, which was making the cartel's deliveries to the Miami area more difficult. 

"Escobar then stated that Bush is a traitor who used to deal with us, but now he is tough," Rudd told the federal officials. Escobar described "an agreement or relationship between Bush and the American government and members of the Medellín cartel which resulted in planes similar to C-130s (but smaller) flying guns to the cartel in Colombia. According to Rudd, Escobar stated that the cartel then off-loaded the guns, put cocaine aboard the planes and the cocaine was taken to United States military base(s). The guns were delivered and sold to the Contras in Nicaragua by the Cartel." 

Escobar, Rudd said, explained that "it was a swap of cocaine for guns. . .Rudd has stated that while Escobar did not say the CIA was involved in the exchange of guns for cocaine, that was the tenor of the conversation. Rudd has stated that Escobar and the rest of the cartel members are very supportive of the Contras and dislike the Sandinistas as they dislike the guerrillas which operate within Colombia." 

Rudd claimed that Escobar had photographic proof to back up his story. Not only were there "photographs of the planes containing the guns being unloaded in Columbia," but he claimed to have a picture of Bush posing with Medellín cartel leader Jorge Ochoa, in front of suitcases full of money. "After Escobar talked about the photograph, Rudd said that if the photograph was not genuine (and was merely two individual photographs spliced together somehow) it would be easily discredited," Furr wrote. "In response, Escobar stated that the photograph was genuine, it would stand up to any test. . .Escobar stated that the photo would be made public at the 'appropriate time.' Rudd indicated that the photo is being held back as blackmail if the cartel ever needs to bring pressure on Bush." 

By 1993 Escobar was dead, killed in a shoot-out with Colombian police, and Jorge Ochoa was in jail. The photos, if they ever existed, were never heard of again. 

Rudd's story is very similar to one told by a Miami FBI informant, Wanda Palacios, who reported in 1986 that she had witnessed Southern Air Transport planes being loaded with cocaine and unloading guns in Barranquilla, Colombia, in 1983 and October 1985. Palacios, the wife of a Colombian trafficker, said she'd accompanied Pablo Escobar in a limousine to the landing site and had spoken about it as well to Jorge Ochoa, who bragged that he was working with the CIA to get cocaine into south Florida. 

Palacios was interviewed in 1986 by the staff of Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, which was looking into allegations of Contra drug smuggling. Kerry's staff found her and her story credible and took an eleven-page statement from her. The senator and an aide took it to the Justice Department in September 1986, and met with William Weld, one of Attorney General Edwin Meese's top assistants. 

"Weld read about a half a page and chuckled," Kerry aide Jonathan Winer wrote in a memorandum after the meeting. "I asked him why. He said this isn't the first time today I've seen allegations about CIA agent involvement in drugs. . .he stated several times in reading Wanda's statement that while he couldn't vouch for every line in it. . .there was nothing in it which didn't appear true to him, or inconsistent with what he already knew." 

But when her allegations leaked out to the press, Palacios was publicly dismissed as a crank by top Justice Department officials, who said polygraph tests she'd been given were "inconclusive." Southern Air Transport called her "a lunatic" and sued or threatened suit against news organizations that aired her allegations. 

Her story was buttressed mightily by subsequent events, however. 

When the Sandinistas blew a Southern Air Transport C-123K out of the sky over Nicaragua in early October 1986, the dead pilot's flight logs revealed that he had flown several Southern Air Transport flights to Barranquilla, Colombia. The flights had occurred during October 1985, exactly as Palacios had claimed, and she was able to identify the pilot's picture in a lineup. Southern Air said in a statement that the planes were carrying drilling equipment, not drugs. 

The wrecked C-123K in which those flight logs were found had a history of involvement with cocaine, the Medellín cartel, and the CIA. It was the same airplane Louisiana drug dealer Barry Seal used in a joint CIA-DEA sting operation in 1984 against the Sandinistas. In that case the CIA had taken Seal's plane—which he'd recently obtained through a complicated airplane swap with the cartel—to Rickenbacker Air Force Base in Ohio and outfitted it with hidden cameras. Then Seal, who was working as a DEA informant, flew the aircraft to an airfield in Nicaragua and snapped pictures of men loading bags of cocaine into his plane.

One of Seal's grainy, almost indistinguishable photos was later shown on national television by President Ronald Reagan the night before a crucial vote in Congress on Contra aid. "This picture, secretly taken at a military airfield outside Managua, shows Federico Vaughn, a top aide to one of the nine commandantes who rule Nicaragua, loading an aircraft with illegal narcotics, bound for the United States," Reagan announced. "No, there seems to be no crime to which the Sandinistas will not stoop—this is an outlaw regime." 

But declassified CIA records show the Reagan Administration knew there was precious little to substantiate that. Even with the entire CIA contingent in Central America on the alert for Sandinista drug dealing, no evidence had been found. "Although uncorroborated reports indicating Nicaraguan involvement in the shipping of cocaine to the United States had been received, CIA was unable to confirm reports implicating high-level Sandinistas in drug trafficking," the CIA informed the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in April 1984. Two years later, Justice Department officials reached the same discouraging conclusion. 

A 1988 congressional investigation raised troubling questions about whether or not the Seal sting was even a real sting. It produced evidence suggesting that the whole episode had been stage-managed by Oliver North and the CIA as a domestic disinformation operation. Among other things, the House Judiciary Committee investigation revealed that the alleged Sandinista official named by Reagan, Federico Vaughn, may have actually been working for the U.S. government. Committee chairman William Hughes of New Jersey told reporters that "subcommittee staff recently called Vaughn's number in Managua, Nicaragua, and spoke to a 'domestic employee' who said the house belonged to a U.S. Embassy employee," and that his investigators were told the house had been "continuously rented" by the United States since 1981. 

Recently declassified CIA cables lend additional support to the idea that Vaughn was in fact a U.S. double agent. In March 1985 the CIA reported that Vaughn "was said to be an associate of Nicaraguan narcotics trafficker Norwing [sic] Meneses Cantarero." Meneses at that time was working with the DEA in Costa Rica, assisting the Contras. And Oliver North's daily diaries for that period contained several references to "Freddy Vaughn," including a July 6, 1984, entry that said, "Freddy coming in late July." 

Far from being a "top aide" to a Sandinista comandante, Vaughn was a deputy director of Heroes and Martyrs Trading Corporation, the official import/export agency of the Sandinista government, a firm that had been heavily infiltrated by CIA operatives. Records show that one of the Costa Rican-based drug traffickers working for North and the CIA, Bay of Pigs veteran Dagoberto Nunez, obtained a contract with H&M Corp. in order to cover an intelligence gathering operation aimed at Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega, his brother Humberto, and Interior Minister Tomas Borge. According to a 1986 memo from CIA operative Rob Owen to North, Nunez was preparing to sign an agreement with H&M for shrimping rights off the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua. "Nunez is doing this so he can help us. He will cooperate and do anything we ask," Owen told North. "He believes this will provide an opportunity to use his boats for cover operations, or to implicate the Ortegas and Borge in taking money on the side for their own pocket. He is right on both counts." 

Four DEA officials testified before Hughes's committee that they'd received pressure from North and the CIA to leak the news of Vaughn's involvement with drugs to the press. They also said North wanted to take $1.5 million in drug profits Seal had collected from the Medellín cartel and give it to the Contras. When the DEA refused to do either, the DEA officials testified, the story was leaked by the White House to the right-wing Washington Times, which was supporting the Contras both financially and editorially. 

The leak accomplished two things. It publicly linked the Sandinistas to drug trafficking right before a crucial Contra aid vote. And by prematurely exposing the sting, it blew the DEA's investigation of the Medellín cartel, which DEA agents said had been their most promising chance ever to break up the Colombian drug conglomerate. The drug lords went free, and Vaughn disappeared. 

"The Seal sting operation has North's fingerprints all over it," columnist Jefferson Morley wrote in the L.A. Times in 1986. After Seal flew his CIA/DEA missions, he never used the C-123K cargo plane again, parking it at the tiny Mena, Arkansas, airport for a year, then selling it back to the same company he'd gotten it from originally. In early 1986 it wound up with CIA contractor Southern Air Transport, where it was used for Contra supply runs and based at Ilopango until its last, fatal flight. 

Unfortunately, the informants' allegations of a guns-for-drugs deal between the Reagan administration and the Medellín cartel were never seriously investigated. The memo of Rudd's debriefing was sent to Iran-Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh by the Department of Justice a month later, with a note from Associate Attorney General Stephen S. Trott, which said that "no action is being taken by the Department pending a determination by your office as to whether you intend to assert jurisdiction." Walsh's office apparently just filed the memo away; National Archives researchers found it while working their way through the Iran-Contra prosecutor's closed investigative files. 

One of the lawyers who worked for Walsh told the CIA in 1997 that investigating Contra drug dealing comprised "only about one percent" of the Walsh probe's interest. "For the most part," the CIA reported, "any drug trafficking activity would have been 'stumbled on' in the course of the investigation of other issues, especially money laundering." 

In an interview, Walsh said he tried to stay away from the Contra drug trafficking issue as much as possible because it was outside his jurisdiction and because he knew Senator John Kerry's Senate subcommittee was investigating the topic. But it appears that Walsh's office never passed the Rudd memo along to Kerry's investigators. 

Castillo's investigation into Contra drug dealing at Ilopango met with a similar fate, thanks to the activities of the American ambassador in El Salvador, Edwin Corr, to whom Castillo was regularly reporting. Corr said he thought Castillo "was a very professional and a good agent" and had no reason to doubt what Castillo was telling him about what was going on Ilopango. But, Corr told Justice Department investigators, Castillo was making a lot of people nervous, including him, because his investigation had the potential to "destroy relationships with Salvadoran officials that had taken so long to build." 

Worried, Corr sent a secret "back channel" cable to the State Department requesting an internal DEA review of Castillo's allegations. The DEA, he said, informed him that "a lot of [Castillo's] information was just totally inaccurate" and Castillo soon was "told by his superiors to close his investigation. . .and move onto something else." But Corr said the headstrong agent "continued to snoop around the airport and make allegations" until the Ambassador was personally forced to take matters in hand. 

Corr said he ordered Castillo to "stop the witch hunt" and warned him that "they were dealing with a very sensitive matter and Castillo would have to take care not to make false allegations." Just what was false about the allegations Castillo was investigating isn't clear; indeed, most of his information has since been corroborated by the CIA and the traffickers. 

Castillo now suspects that the Costa Rican DEA cable alerting him to Contra drug trafficking at the two hangars was less a request for him to investigate it than a way to cover the DEA office in Costa Rica in case his investigation got anywhere. Since Castillo had been sending his Contra drug reports to Washington for months, it is likely they were being shared with Nieves, the top DEA official in the country where the drug flights were allegedly originating. 

If, as Meneses aide Miranda claims, the Ilopango operation was part of Meneses drug pipeline into the United States, Castillo's probe might have raised some very sticky questions about how well the DEA was monitoring its top-level informant.

Denied access to the military side of Ilopango, Castillo settled on another tactic: he would hit an off-base location linked to the Ilopango operation. He and his informants zeroed in on a likely suspect: a New York weapons dealer and U.S. military contractor named Walter "Wally" Grasheim. The tall, bearded arms broker was the Salvadoran sales representative for the Litton Corp. and other American weapons makers, and had a booming business selling night vision goggles, Steyer sniper rifles, and assorted other gear to the Salvadoran military. He was also advising and training Salvadoran army units in long-range reconnaissance operations on behalf of the U.S. government. One of Castillo's informants at Ilopango told him Grasheim was intimately involved with the Contra drug operation there, and Castillo claims that DEA computers turned up several references to Grasheim as a suspected drug trafficker. 

On September 1, 1986, Salvadoran police working with Castillo raided Grasheim's elegant hillside home in San Salvador. A pound of marijuana was reportedly found, but that was nothing compared to what else was in the place. "Some of the rooms in the house had munitions and explosives piled to the ceiling, including automatic weapons, M-16's, hand grenades and C-4 [plastic explosives]," Castillo later told the FBI. "The raid at Grasheim's house uncovered Embassy license plates, radios and ID's in Grasheim's name. Castillo. . .showed Grasheim's U.S. Embassy ID to the interviewer." 

Grasheim, who says the weapons were legally his, strenuously denied he had anything to do with either the Contras or drugs and believes Castillo was duped by his informants, whom he says were secretly working for the CIA. "The Agency put Castillo onto me as a way of getting him away from whatever it was they were doing at Ilopango," Grasheim insisted in an interview. "The person who claimed I was a drug trafficker was on the payroll of the CIA. I've never been involved with drugs in my life." The marijuana found at his house, Grasheim said, probably belonged to a U.S. Army colonel who was a frequent visitor. 

According to the Justice Department Inspector General's report, Grasheim is not entirely wrong. Castillo's informant, the ever-helpful Murga, was indeed working for the CIA and had been for quite some time. And soon after he put Castillo on Grasheim's trail—fingering him as "head of smuggling operations at Ilopango"—the CIA decided to take Murga back. 

Castillo's boss, Robert Stia, "recalled being asked by the CIA station chief in El Salvador to relinquish the use of informant STG6. The Station Chief had explained that the CIA had established the informant before he had ever worked for the DEA" and wanted the DEA to stop using him because "he was currently a CIA informant." Stia complied, but complained internally that the CIA had cost the DEA a valuable asset. 

Though Castillo's 1986 investigation was killed, he picked up word three years later that Hangar No. 5 at Ilopango was once again being used for drug trafficking, this time by members of the Salvadoran Air Force. He opened up another investigation, much to the irritation of U.S. Embassy personnel, who regarded Castillo with hostility due to his "reputation as a man who is always digging up things," the Justice Department Inspector General reported. 

This time the CIA intervened directly and refused to allow Castillo to set foot on Ilopango. When Castillo asked how he was supposed to investigate drug trafficking allegations if he couldn't get on the airbase, a CIA officer told Castillo that it was "not necessary" because the CIA was on the case. "The CIA Chief of Station assured [Castillo] that there was no drug activity associated with Hangar No. 5," the Justice's Inspector General wrote. 

In an ironic turn of events, Castillo soon found himself under investigation by the DEA. He spent the next five years fending off accusations that he had gotten too close to his Central American informants, accepted improper gifts, inappropriately handled firearms, and a number of other technical, administrative failures. Castillo's boss complained to his superiors that the charges against Castillo were unfair, and ultimately the DEA gave Castillo a disability retirement. In his 1994 memoirs, he blamed the fallout on his investigation of Ilopango. 

The DEA declined to respond to questions about Castillo, and in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, it claimed it had no reports from Castillo about drug trafficking at the Salvadoran air base. Like so much of what the DEA has said about Castillo and Ilopango over the years, that was a lie. The Justice Department Inspector General had no trouble locating the agent's reports and quoted from them liberally. 

The quashing of Castillo's investigation ended any official U.S. government interest in trafficking at Ilopango. But the issue refused to stay buried. At the same time the Contra drug pipeline in El Salvador was being hastily covered back up, police officers thousands of miles away in Los Angeles were starting to prying the covers off the other end of it. 

As one of them would sadly remark ten years later, they had no idea what a Pandora's box they were opening. 

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