Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (14 page)

The most detailed account of CIA and contra involvement in the cocaine trade during the two years when the Boland Amendment was in effect (1984-1986) is to be found in the report of Senator John Kerry’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, part of a larger 1988 report,
Drugs, Law Enforcement, and Foreign Policy
, by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. The report concluded both that “individuals associated with the contra movement” were traffickers and that cocaine smugglers had participated in “contra supply operations.” The report cites two particularly important examples of contra- and CIA-linked trafficking of cocaine into the United States. The first is that of Eden Pastora, the ex-Sandinista guerrilla turned commander of the contra southern front when it opened in 1983. Pastora’s commanders struck an alliance with George Morales, a leading Colombian smuggler based in Miami. In late 1984, Morales supplied Pastora’s front with a C-47 aircraft and money—according to the Senate committee report—“to fly narcotics shipments from South America to sites in Costa Rica and Nicaragua for later transport to the United States.” Between October 1984 and February 1986, the C-47 made twenty-four flights from America to southern-front bases along the Nicaragua-Costa Rica border with 156,000 pounds of matériel and returned carrying “unspecified quantities of drugs.” The second example of major trafficking is that of a Costa Rica-based American rancher named John Hull. In the words of the committee report, Hull became a “central figure in contra operations when they were managed by Oliver North, from 1984 through late 1986.” Scattered
across Hull’s sprawling ranch were six airstrips from where regular “guns for drugs” flights flew straight across the U.S. border without having to go through any customs checks.

The Senate committee also noted that the CIA had made “payments to drug traffickers … for humanitarian assistance to the contras, in some cases after the traffickers had been indicted … on drug charges.” One such contract pilot for the CIA’s “humanitarian aid” flights to the contras was Marcos Aguado, a Nicaraguan who had become a senior officer in the Salvadoran air force. In 1990, after another operative, Norman Menses, was arrested in Nicaragua for trying to transport 750 kilograms of cocaine, Enrique Miranda, a former intelligence officer in Somoza’s national guard, testified that “Aguado flew Salvadoran air force planes to Colombia to pick up cocaine shipments and delivered them to US Air Force bases in Texas.”

There developed in Nicaragua—as in Laos—a close affinity between covert military operatives and criminal drug syndicates. Both groups specialize in clandestine work and work outside the parameters of the law, far from the glare of publicity and the constraint of public scrutiny. Both shun environments shaped by either a rule of law or a democratic order.

This affinity came to the surface during the Iran-contra affair, most dramatically in the person of Oliver North. In 1989, the National Security Archive (NSA), a Washington-based public-interest group, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and obtained access to the handwritten notebooks of Oliver North, “the National Security Council aide who helped run the contra war and other Reagan administration covert operations.” The NSA released the declassified information on its own Web site. A number of entries from the notebooks show that “North was repeatedly informed of contra ties to drug trafficking,” most often by his own
liaison with contras, Robert Owen. A memo from Owen dated April 1, 1985, warns North that new southern front units include “people who are questionable because of past indiscretions,” citing José Robelo’s “potential involvement with drug running” and Sebastian Gonzalez as “now involved in drug running out of Panama.” In another entry, dated August 9, 1985, North records a meeting with Owen: “Honduran DC-6, which is being used for runs out of New Orleans, is probably being used for drug runs into U.S.” Yet another memo from Owen, dated February 10, 1986, refers to “a plane being used to carry ‘humanitarian aid’ to the contras that was previously used to transport drugs.” The plane belonged “to the Miami-based company Nortex, which is run by Michael Palmer, one of the largest marijuana traffickers in the United States.” In an accompanying note, the NSA observes that Oliver North—along with Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliott Abrams and CIA officer Alan Fiers—oversaw the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Aid Office (NHAO), which paid Palmer more than $300,000 “to ferry supplies to contras … despite Palmer’s long history of drug smuggling.”

Oliver North was also a key link between the Reagan administration and the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, whose collaboration with Colombian drug traffickers had been the subject of a series of
New York Times
articles in June 1986. Soon after, Noriega approached North, suggesting a deal for help in cleaning up his official record. In an e-mail to Reagan’s national security adviser, John Poindexter, dated August 23, 1986, North laid out Noriega’s proposal: if U.S. officials can “help clean up his image” and lift the ban on arms sales to the Panamanian Defense Forces, Noriega will “take care of the Sandinista leadership for us.” North then suggested “paying Noriega a million dollars—from ‘Project Democracy’ funds raised from the sale of U.S. arms to Iran—for
the Panamanian leader’s help in destroying Nicaraguan economic installations.” North’s notebook contains details of his September 22 meeting with Noriega in a London hotel. The two “discussed a commando training program in Panama, with Israeli support, for the contras and Afghani rebels” and “spoke of sabotaging major economic targets in the Managua area.” The NSA commentary adds: “These plans were apparently aborted when the Iran-Contra scandal broke in November 1986.”

The Iran-Contra Scandal

Faced with congressional limitations on support to contras, the Reagan administration took a second initiative. This, too, turned out to be of lasting significance. The initiative involved expanding the search for proxies, from overseas groups to domestic ones. The religious right was no longer dominated by a few centralized organizations, such as the Moral Majority and Christian Voice, as had been the case in the 1970s; the 1980s saw the formation of numerous grassroots organizations, each with a specific purpose. Christian-right activism in foreign policy focused on Central America and began with Guatemala, where General Efrain Ríos Montt had been converted to Pentacostalism by a group of young Californians who had brought their Gospel Outreach church to Guatemala after a devastating earthquake. Following the 1982 coup that installed Montt as dictator of Guatemala, Pat Robertson and other Christian-right leaders lobbied successfully for the resumption of U.S. military aid to the country. When Montt’s army annihilated entire Indian villages, Gospel Outreach members defended the “scorched earth” campaign in religious terms. One enthusiastic pastor put it: “The Army doesn’t massacre the Indians. It massacres demons, and the Indians are demon possessed;
they are communists. We hold Brother Efrain Ríos Montt like King David of the Old Testament. He is the king of the New Testament.”

The contra war “became a laboratory for the administration’s use of private organizations,” both religious and secular. Here, too, Oliver North turned out to be a key link between the administration and organizations on the religious right. By 1984, leading contra fund-raisers in the United States fell into three categories: paramilitary mercenary outfits, Christian-right “ministries,” and the secular political network of conservative lobbies. Key among the Christian-right supporters were Pat Robertson—who had already used his tax-exempt television broadcast to raise $3 million for the FDN—and the founder of the Unification Church, Reverend Sun Myung Moon, whose
Washington Times
had established the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund. Another important Christian-right organization in the contra-support network was Concerned Women for America (CWA), which was otherwise active in providing legal counsel for parents who sought to remove “secular humanist” books from public schools. Appearing at its 1987 convention, President Reagan thanked the CWA for its grassroots support of the contras. Sara Diamond concludes her study of right-wing movements in the United States with the observation that the congressional investigation of the Iran-contra scandal “neglected Oliver North’s role in recruiting Christian right activists for the multi-tentacled contra aid network.”

It is now widely known that North had formed a private network to fund the contras after official aid was sharply reduced. At the heart of this network was the Israeli connection, and its most ambitious initiative involved the sale of arms to Iran, with the proceeds used to purchase war supplies for the contras. Israel emerged as a significant military supplier to El Salvador, Guatemala, and
Nicaragua in the late seventies and early eighties after those countries were found guilty of human rights violations and the Carter administration terminated military aid to all three. As “a quid pro quo for El Salvador’s decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,” Israel supplied the military regime “with over 80% of its weaponry for the next several years, including napalm for use against the Salvadoran civilian population.” In Guatemala in 1983, as the government carried out massacres of Indian villagers, a
Time
magazine correspondent reported the “the Israelis have sold the government everything from anti-terrorism equipment to transport planes” and that “army outposts in the jungle have become near replicas of Israeli army field camps.” Finally, Israel moved into Nicaragua as soon as the Carter administration cut off aid: “Israel sold Somoza 98% of the weapons he used against the Nicaraguan population” between September 1978 and his ouster the following July.

The first major Israeli arms deliveries to the contras began shortly after the pullout of Argentine trainers and suppliers from Central America in the aftermath of the Falklands War.
Time
magazine reported that Argentine advisers were replaced by “retired or reserve Israeli army commanders … hired by shadowy private firms.” Haifa University professor Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi confirmed that “when the CIA was setting up the contra organization in 1981, the Mossad was also there, carrying out the training and the support for the first units.”

Israel’s military links with Iran began with the Iraq-Iran War. As Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon told the
Washington Post
in May 1982, justifying Israeli arms sales to Tehran, “Iraq is Israel’s enemy and we hope that diplomatic relations between us and Iran will be renewed as in the past.” Four months later, he told a Paris press conference, “Israel has a vital interest in the continuing
of the war in the Persian Gulf, and in Iran’s victory.” Retired General Aharon Yariv, formerly Israel’s head of military intelligence, was even more candid when he told a conference at Tel Aviv University in late 1986 that “it would be a good idea if the Iran-Iraq wars ended in a tie, but it would be even better if it continued.” Israel and the United States shared the same strategic objective: to prolong the Iraq-Iran War as long as possible. To realize that objective, each armed a different side.

Most observers agreed that, in the face of chilled relations with both the United States and the Soviet Union, Israel had emerged as an important supplier of parts and arms for the Islamic government of Iran. In March 1982, the
New York Times
cited documents indicating that Israel had supplied half or more of all arms reaching Tehran in the previous eighteen months, amounting to at least $100 million in sales. Foreign intelligence sources told
Aerospace Daily
in August 1982 that Israel’s support was “crucial” to keeping Iran’s air force flying against Iraq. Israeli sources told
Newsweek
that “they sold the Iranians much of the light weaponry and ammunition that the Israeli army had captured during its invasion of Lebanon; subsequently, they sold overhauled jet engines, spare-parts for American-made M-48 tanks, ammunition and other hardware—$100 million worth in 1983 alone.”

The Israelis both openly defied the official American ban on the supply of U.S. arms to Iran and tried to get the Reagan administration to deal with the Iranians. In return, they agreed to take on at least a part of the burden of supplying the contras as Congress began to put restrictions on the supply of U.S. military aid. The heart of the deal that came to be known as Iran-contra was that the United States agreed to sell arms to Iran, either directly or
through Israel, at prices sufficiently inflated to use the difference to purchase arms for the contras. After a White House briefing, Representative Jim Wright (D-TX) was able to provide a breakdown of one such transaction: Iran had paid the Israelis $19 million: $3 million of that had gone back to the Pentagon, $4 million went to arms brokers, and $12 million went to the Swiss account for the contras. Some of the money went to the Israeli government, which, according to North, established the prices that Iran would have to pay. Most observers agreed that the idea for the deal came from the Israelis. The normally cautious
Times
of London said that “the Senate Intelligence Committee had been given secret evidence strongly suggesting that the plan to divert money from the Iran arms operation to the Nicaraguan Contras was first put forward by Mr. Shimon Peres, then the Israeli Prime Minister.” Yo’el Marcus wrote in the Israeli daily
Ha’aretz:
“There is even room to fear that Israel is the moving force behind the whole idea of assistance to Iran. Evidence of this lies in the fact that as early as July 1980 the Jewish lobby was actively trying to convince the administration that the shipment of military spare parts and equipment to Iran would help in getting the hostages [members of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran] released! … It is exactly the same thesis, only now with different hostages.” The reference was to the kidnapping, among others, of the CIA’s Beirut station chief William Buckley in March 1984. Buckley was a prize catch: according to Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, “Buckley’s encyclopedic knowledge of terrorism, and familiarity with every CIA agent in Lebanon, made him a priceless catch, particularly since the destruction of the CIA station in the Beirut embassy bombing had left the United States with very few eyes and ears in the region.” This crisis influenced the Reagan administration to deal with the Islamic regime of Iran. North’s memo to the president,
delivered in summary form by National Security Advisor John Poindexter on January 16, 1986, ended: “They [Israel] also point out … [that] this approach through the government of Iran may well be our only way to achieve the release of the American hostages held in Beirut.”