DRUGS 36
4-2ad 1970s and 1980s, PANAMA
For more than a decade, Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega was a highly paid CIA asset and
collaborator, despite knowledge by U.S. drug authorities as early as 1971 that the general was
heavily involved in drug trafficking and money laundering. Noriega facilitated ”guns-for-drugs” flights
for the contras, providing protection and pilots, as well as safe havens for drug cartel otficials, and
discreet banking facilities. U.S. officials, including then-ClA Director William Webster and several
DEA officers, sent Noriega letters of praise for efforts to thwart drug trafficking (albeit only against
competitors of his Medellin Cartel patrons). The U.S. government only turned against Noriega,
invading Panama in December 1989 and kidnapping the general once they discovered he was
providing intelligence and services to the Cubans and Sandinistas. Ironically drug trafficking through
Panama increased after the US invasion. (John Dinges, Our Man in Panama, Random House, 1991;
National Security Archive Documentation Packet The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations.)
4-2ae 1980s, CENTRAL AMERICA
The San Jose Mercury News series documents just one thread of the interwoven operations linking
the CIA, the contras and the cocaine cartels. Obsessed with overthrowing the leftist Sandinista
government in Nicaragua, Reagan administration officials tolerated drug trafficking as long as the
traffickers gave support to the contras. In 1989, the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics,
and International Operations (the Kerry committee) concluded a three-year investigation by stating:
“There was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zones on the part of individual
Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots mercenaries who worked with the Contras, and Contra
supporters throughout the region…. U.S. officials involved in Central America failed to address the
drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua…. In each case, one or another
agency of the U.S. govemment had intormation regarding the involvement either while it was
occurring, or immediately thereafter…. Senior U S policy makers were not immune to the idea that
drug money was a perfect solution to the Contras’ funding problems.” (Drugs, Law Enforcement and
Foreign Policy, a Report of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on
Terrorism, Narcotics and Intemational Operations, 1989)
In Costa Rica, which served as the “Southern Front” for the contras (Honduras being the Northern
Front), there were several different ClA-contra networks involved in drug trafficking. In addition to
those servicing the Meneses-Blandon operation detailed by the Mercury News, and Noriega’s
operation, there was CIA operative John Hull, whose farms along Costa Rica’s border with
Nicaragua were the main staging area for the contras. Hull and other ClA-connected contra
supporters and pilots teamed up with George Morales, a major Miami-based Colombian drug
trafficker who later admitted to giving $3 million in cash and several planes to contra leaders.
In 1989, after the Costa Rica government indicted Hull for drug trafficking, a DEA-hired plane
clandestinely and illegally flew the CIA operative to Miami, via Haiti. The US repeatedly thwarted
Costa Rican efforts to extradite Hull back to Costa Rica to stand trial. Another Costa Rican-based
drug ring involved a group of Cuban Amencans whom the CIA had hired as military trainers for
the contras. Many had long been involved with the CIA and drug trafficking. They used contra
planes and a Costa Rican-based shnmp company, which laundered money for the CIA, to move
cocaine to the U.S. Costa Rica was not the only route.
Guatemala, whose military intelligence service — closely associated with the CIA — harbored
many drug traffickers, according to the DEA, was another way station along the cocaine highway.
Additionally, the Medellin Cartel’s Miami accountant, Ramon Milian Rodriguez, testified that he
funneled nearly $10 million to Nicaraguan contras through long-time CIA operative Felix Rodriguez,
who was based at Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador. The contras provided both protection
and infrastructure (planes, pilots, airstrips, warehouses, front companies and banks) to these
ClA-linked drug networks. At least four transport companies under investigation for drug trafficking
received US govemment contracts to carry non-lethal supplies to the contras. Southern Air
Transport, “formerly” ClA-owned, and later under Pentagon contract, was involved in the drug
running as well. Cocaine-laden planes flew to Florida, Texas, Louisiana and other locations,
including several military bases Designated as ‘Contra Craft,” these shipments were not to be
inspected. When some authority wasn’t clued in and made an arrest, powerful strings were pulled
on behalf of dropping the case, acquittal, reduced sentence, or deportation.
4-2af 1980s to early 1990s, AFGHANISTAN
ClA-supported Moujahedeen rebels engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting against the
Soviet-supported govemment and its plans to reform the very backward Afghan society.
The Agency’s principal client was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the leading druglords and leading
heroin refiner. CIA supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used
to transport opium to laboratories along the Afghan Pakistan border. The output provided up to one
half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western
Europe. US officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against the
drug operabon because of a desire not to offend their Pakistani and Afghan allies. In 1993, an official
of the DEA called Afghanistan the new Colombia of the drug world.
4-2ag MlD-1980s to early 199Os, HAITI
While working to keep key Haitian military and political leaders in power, the CIA turned a blind
eye to their clients’ drug trafficking. In 1986, the Agency added some more names to its payroll
by creating a new Haitian organization, the National Intelligence Service (SIN). SIN was purportedly
created to fight the cocaine trade, though SIN officers themselves engaged in the trafficking, a
trade aided and abetted by some of the Haitian military and political leaders.
William Blum is author of Killing Hope: U.S Military and CIA Interventions Since World War ll
available from Common Courage Press, P.O. Box 702, Monroe, Maine, 04951
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-real-drug-lords-a-brief-history-of-cia-involvement-in-the-drug-
trade/10013
4-2ba Article two
Washington’s Hidden Agenda: Restore the Drug Trade
By Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, October 01, 2016
In 2014 the Afghan opium cultivation has once again hit a record high, according to the United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s 2014 Afghan Opium Survey.
In the course of the last four years, there has been a surge in Afghan opium production. The
Vienna based UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reveals that poppy cultivation in 2012
extended over an area of more than 154,000 hectares, an increase of 18% over 2011.
A UNODC spokesperson confirmed in 2013 that opium production is heading towards record
levels.
Source: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s 2014 Afghan Opium Survey.
According to the 2012 Afghanistan Opium Survey released in November 2012 by the Ministry
of Counter Narcotics (MCN) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
potential opium production in 2012 was of the order of 3,700 tons, a decline of 18 percent in
relation to 2001, according to UNODC data.
There is reason to believe that this figure of 3700 tons is grossly underestimated. Moreover,
it contradicts the UNOCD’s own predictions of record harvests over an extended area of cultivation.
While bad weather and damaged crops may have played a role as suggested by the UNODC,
based on historical trends, the potential production for an area of cultivation of 154,000 hectares,
should be well in excess of 6000 tons. With 80,000 hectares in cultivation in 2003, production was
already of the order of 3600 tons.
It is worth noting that UNODC has modified the concepts and figures on opium sales and heroin
production, as outlined by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction
(EMCDDA).
A change in UN methodology in 2010 resulted in a sharp downward revision of Afghan heroin
production estimates for 2004 to 2011. UNODC used to estimate that the entire global opium
crop was processed into heroin, and provided global heroin production estimates on that basis.
Before 2010, a global conversion rate of about 10 kg of opium to 1 kg of heroin was used to
estimate world heroin production (17). For instance, the estimated 4 620 tonnes of opium
harvested worldwide in 2005 was thought to make it possible to manufacture 472 tonnes of
heroin (UNODC, 2009a). However, UNODC now estimates that a large proportion of the Afghan
opium harvest is not processed into heroin or morphine but remains ‘available on the drug
market as opium’ (UNODC, 2010a). …EU drug markets report: a strategic analysis, EMCDDA,
Lisbon, January 2013 emphasis added
There is no evidence that a large percentage of opium production is no longer processed into
heroin as claimed by the UN. This revised UNODC methodology has served, –through the
outright manipulation of statistical concepts– to artificially reduce the size of of the global trade
in heroin.
According to the UNODC, quoted in the EMCDDA report:
“An estimated 3 400 tonnes of Afghan opium was not transformed into heroin or morphine
in 2011. Compared with previous years, this is an exceptionally high proportion of the total crop,
representing nearly 60 % of the Afghan opium harvest and close to 50 % of the global harvest
in 2011.
What the UNODC, –whose mandate is to support the prevention of organized criminal activity–
has done is to obfuscate the size and criminal nature of the Afghan drug trade, intimating –
without evidence– that a large part of the opium is no longer channeled towards the illegal
heroin market.
In 2012 according to the UNODC, farmgate prices for opium were of the order of 196 per kg.
Each kg. of opium produces 100 grams of pure heroin. The US retail prices for heroin (with a
low level of purity) is, according to UNODC of the order of $172 a gram. The price per gram
of pure heroin is substantially higher.
The profits are largely reaped at the level of the international wholesale and retail markets of
heroin as well as in the process of money laundering in Western banking institutions.
The revenues derived from the global trade in heroin constitute a multibillion dollar bonanza
for financial institutions and organized crime.
The following article first published in May 2005 provides a background on the history of the
Afghan opium trade which continues to this date to be protected by US-NATO occupation
forces on behalf of powerful financial interests.
Michel Chossudovsky, January 2015
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