But Louis Dupart, the CIA's compliance officer for the contra project, had one. "The agency position was not to get involved in the matter," he told CIA inspectors. "It had nothing to do with the agency but with the National Security Council. It was someone else's problem."
That sentiment was echoed by the CIA's Central American Task Force chief Alan Fiers. "My recollection is that because of the NSC connection and the possibility that this could be somehow connected to [North's] Private Benefactor program . . . a decision was made not to pursue this matter, but rather to turn it over to Judge Lawrence Walsh, the Independent Counsel for Iran-contra," Fiers said.
The issue of drugs and the NSC never arose during the congressional Iran-contra hearings or during North's later trial for lying to Congress. Nor does it appear from Walsh's files that any great effort was made to settle the question. In an interview, Walsh recalled that his prosecutors spent little, if any, time investigating North's links to drug traffickers because it was outside the very narrow confines the courts had put on his probe.
The CIA report also makes it clear that the congressional committees charged with overseeing the CIA were "not taken" with the contra drug issue, either. In fact, some staffers helped the CIA keep the information bottled up. One of the most striking aspects of the CIA report is just how much drug-related information the CIA did reveal to Congress and how little of it leaked out to the public.
So where was the watchdog press while the Reagan administration, Congress and the CIA were scrambling to keep a lid on the contra drug connection? Dishing out the official story as fast as it could be manufactured. "For all the charges and countercharges," Los Angeles Times reporters Doyle McManus and Ronald Ostrow authoritatively reported on Feb. 18, 1987, "the DEA says it has yet to find a credible drug case against the contra organizations."
Only now-nearly 12 years later-can we fully appreciate what an astounding lie that was and how eagerly it was swallowed by a gullible Washington, D.C., press corps. At the time McManus was writing his story, dismissing the issue as the combined fantasies of dopers and contra-haters, the DEA was sitting on information from several reliable informants-eyewitnesses on the U.S. government's payroll-who reported that the contras were selling drugs in Los Angeles and San Francisco with the CIA's connivance.
In one case, a contra official who was part of Blandon's South-Central drug ring, Ivan Torres, told an undercover DEA operative that "CIA representatives are aware of his drug-related activities and that they don't mind. He said they have gone so far as to encourage cocaine trafficking by members of the contras because they know that it is a good source of income." Torres reported receiving "counterintelligence training from the CIA, and he had avowed that the CIA 'looks the other way' and in essence allows them [contras] to engage in narcotics trafficking as long as it is done outside the United States."
That 1987 DEA report corroborated information the drug agency had received two years earlier from another member of the Blandon/Meneses cocaine ring, Renato Pena, the FDN's military representative in San Francisco. In 1985, Pena told the DEA that "the CIA was allowing the contras to fly drugs into the United States, sell them, and keep the proceeds." Pena told CIA inspectors that "Norwin Meneses and Danilo Blandon told him they were raising money for the contras through drug dealing and that Blandon stated that the contras would not have been able to operate without drug proceeds. Meneses allegedly told Pena that contra leader Enrique Bermudez was aware of the drug dealing."
Ironically, these recently declassified reports are still secret to most Americans. The Los Angeles Times, for instance, has yet to write a word about the CIA report's release. In a recent Internet posting, McManus said the Times was thinking about writing something "in the not-too-distant future that puts all the newly available evidence into perspective."
