I Volunteer to Kidnap Ollie North: Mike Levine

I Volunteer to Kidnap Oliver North
by Michael Levine

Undercover DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena was tortured to death slowly by professionals. Every known maximum-pain technique, from electric shocks to his testicles to white hot rods inserted in his rectum, was applied. A doctor stood by to keep him alive. The heart of the thirty-seven year old father of two boys refused to quit for more than twenty-four hours. His cries, along with the soft-spoken, calm voices of the men who were slowly and meticulously savaging his body, were tape-recorded. Kiki, one of only three hundred of us in the world (DEA agents on foreign assignment), had been kidnapped in broad daylight from in front of the U.S. Consular office in Guadalajara, Mexico by Mexican cops working for drug traffickers and, apparently, high level Mexican government people whose identities we would never know. They would be protected by people in our own government to whom Kiki’s life meant less than nothing.

When teams of DEA agents were sent to Mexico, first, to find the missing Kiki, then to hunt for his murderers, they were met by a the stone wall of a corrupt Mexican government that refused to cooperate. To the horror and disgust of many of us, our government backed down from the Mexicans; other interests, like NAFTA, banking agreements and the covert support of Ollie North’s Contras, were more important than the life of an American undercover agent. DEA agents were ordered by the Justice Department, to keep our mouths shut about Mexico; an order that was backed up by threats from the office of Attorney General Edwin Meese himself. Instead of tightening restrictions on the Mexican debt, our Treasury Department moved to loosen them as if to reward them for their filthy deed. As an added insult Mexico was granted cooperating nation in the drug war status, giving them access to additional millions in American drug war funds and loans.

Somehow a CIA  unaware that their own chief of Soviet counter intelligence, Aldrich Ames, was selling all America’s biggest secrets to the KGB for fourteen years with all the finesse of a Jersey City garage sale  was able to obtain the tape-recordings of Kiki’s torture death. No one in media or government had the courage to publicly ask them explain how they were able to obtain the tapes, yet know nothing of the murder as it was happening; no one had the courage to ask them to explain the testimony of a reliable government informant, (during a California trial related to Camarena’s murder), that Kiki’s murderers believed they were protected by the CIA. Nor did our elected leaders have the courage to investigate numerous other reports linking the CIA directly to the murderers.

Our government’s sellout of Kiki Camarena, of all DEA agents, of the war on drugs, was such that United States Congressman, Larry Smith, stated, on the floor of Congress:

“I personally am convinced that the Justice Department is against the best interests of the United States in terms of stopping drugs… What has a DEA agent who puts his life on the line got to look forward to? The U.S. Government is not going to back him up. I find that intolerable.”

What does Oliver North have to do with this?

A lot of us, Kiki’s fellow agents, believe that the Mexican government never would have dared take the action they did, had they not believed the US government to be as hypocritical and corrupt as they were and still are. And if there was ever a figure in our history that was the paradigm of that corruption it is the man President Reagan called “an American hero”; the same man Nancy Reagan later called a liar: Oliver North.

No one person in our government’s history more embodied what Senator John Kerry referred to when he called the US protection of the drug smuggling Contras a “betrayal of the American people.”

Few Americans, thanks to what one time CIA chief William Colby referred to as the news media’s “misplaced sense of patriotism,” are aware that the Nobel prize winning President of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias as a result of an in-depth investigation by the Costa Rican Congressional Commission on Narcotics that found “virtually all [Ollie North supported] Contra factions were involved in drug trafficking”—banned Oliver North, U.S. Ambassador Lewis Tambs, National Security Advisor Admiral John Poindexter, Presidential Advisor Richard Secord and C.I.A. station chief Jose Fernandez, by Executive order, from ever entering Costa Rica for their roles in utilizing Costa Rican territory for cocaine trafficking.

In fact, when Costa Rica began its investigation into the drug trafficking allegations against North and naively thought that the U.S. would gladly lend a hand in efforts to fight drugs, they received a rude awakening about the realities of America’s war on drugs as opposed to its “this-scourge-will-end” rhetoric.

After five witnesses testified before the U.S. Senate, confirming that John Hull a C.I.A. operative and the lynch-pin of North’s contra re supply operation—had been actively running drugs from Costa Rica to the U.S. “under the direction of the C.I.A.,” Costa Rican authorities arrested him. Hull then quickly jumped bail and fled to the U.S. according to my sources with the help of DEA, putting the drug fighting agency in the schizoid business of both kidnapping accused drug dealers and helping them escape; although the Supreme Court has not legalized the latter . . . yet.

The then-President of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias was stunned when he received letters from nineteen U.S. Congressman including Lee Hamilton of Indiana, the Democrat who headed the Iran-contra committee warning him “to avoid situations . . . that could adversely affect our relations.” Arias, who won the Nobel prize for ending the contra war, stated that he was shocked that “relations between [the United States] and my country could deteriorate because [the Costa Rican] legal system is fighting against drug trafficking.”

In my twenty-five years experience with DEA which includes running some of their highest level international drug trafficking investigations, I have never seen an instance of comparable allegations where DEA did not set up a multi-agency task force size operation to conduct an in-depth conspiracy investigation. Yet in the case of Colonel North and the other American officials, no investigation whatsoever has been initiated by DEA or any other investigative agency.

The total “public” investigation into the drug allegations by the Senate was falsely summed up in the statement of a staffer, on the House select committee, Robert A. Bermingham who notified Chairman Hamilton on July 23, 1987, that after interviewing “hundreds” of people his investigation had not developed any corroboration of “media-exploited allegations that the U.S. government condoned drug trafficking by contra leaders . . . or that Contra leaders or organizations did in fact take part in such activity.” Every government official accused of aiding and covering up for the contra drug connection, Colonel Ollie included, then hung his hat on this statement, claiming they had been “cleared.”

The only trouble was that investigative journalists, Leslie and Andrew Cockburn  after interviewing many of the chief witnesses whose testimony implicated North and the contras in drug trafficking, including several whose testimony was later found credible enough to be used to convict Manuel Noriega could find not one who had been interviewed by Bermingham or his staff. In fact, the two journalists seem to have caught Bermingham red-handed in what can only be described, at best, as a gross misrepresentation of fact, when he (Bermingham) quoted the chief counsel of a House Judiciary subcommittee, Hayden Gregory as dismissing the drug evidence and calling it “street talk.” Gregory told the Cockburns that the “street talk” comment was taken out of context; that he had not even met Bermingham until July 22 (two days before Bermingham wrote the report) and that he had in fact told Bermingham that there were “serious allegations against almost every contra leader.”

When President Bush said, “All those who look the other way are as guilty as the drug dealers,” he was not only talking about a moral guilt, but a legal one as well. Thus, if any U.S. official knew of North and the contra’s drug activities and did not take proper action, or covered up for it, he is “guilty” of a whole series of crimes that you to go to jail for; crimes that carry a minimum jail term; crimes like Aiding and Abetting, Conspiracy, Misprision of a Felony, Perjury, and about a dozen other violations of law related to misuse and malfeasance of public office. I’m not talking about some sort of shadow conspiracy here. As a veteran, criminal investigator I don’t deal in speculation. I document facts and evidence and then work like hell to corroborate my claims so that I can send people to jail.

What I am talking about is “Probable Cause” a legal principle that every junior agent and cop is taught before he hits the street. It mandates that an arrest and/or criminal indictment must occur when there exists evidence that would give any “reasonable person” grounds to believe, that anyone” U.S. government officials included” had violated or conspired to violate federal narcotic laws. Any U.S. government law enforcement officer or elected official who fails to take appropriate action when such Probable Cause exists, is in violation of his oath as well as federal law; and under that law it takes surprisingly little evidence for a Conspiracy conviction.

As an example, early in my career I arrested a man named John Clements, a twenty-two year old, baby-faced guitar player, who happened to be present at the transfer of three kilos of heroin”an amount that doesn’t measure up to a tiny percentage of the many tons of cocaine, (as much as one half the U.S. cocaine consumption), that North and his Contras have been accused of pouring onto our streets. Clements was a silent observer in a trailer parked in the middle of a Gainesville, Florida swamp, while a smuggler—whom I had arrested hours earlier in New York City and “flipped” (convinced to work as an informer for me)” turned the heroin over to the financier of the operation. Poor John Clements, a friend of both men, a “gofer” as he would later be described, was just unlucky enough to be there.

The twenty-two year old guitar player couldn’t claim “national security,” when asked to explain his presence, nor could he implicate a President of the United States in his criminal activities as Colonel North did. John Clements wrote no self-incriminating computer notes that indicated his deep involvement in drug trafficking, as North did; he didn’t have hundreds of pages of diary notes in his own handwriting also reflecting narcotics trafficking. John Clements did not shred incriminating documents and lie to congress as North did; nor was he responsible for millions in unaccounted for U.S. government funds as North was. Clements did not have enough cash hidden in a closet slush fund to pay $14,000 cash for a car, as North did while earning the salary of a Lieutenant Colonel. John Clements only had about $3 and change in his pocket.

Nor did John Clements campaign for the release from jail of a drug smuggling, murderer whose case was described by the Justice Department as the worst case of narco terrorism in our history, as North did. Poor young John wouldn’t have dreamed of making deals with drug dealer Manny Noriega to aid in the support of the drug smuggling Contras, as North did. No, John Clements was certainly not in Ollie North’s league, he couldn’t have done a millionth of the damage North and his protectors have been accused of doing to the American people, even if he wanted to.

But John Clements did do something Ollie North never did and probably never will do he went to jail. A jury of his peers in Gainseville Florida found more than enough evidence to convict him of Conspiracy to violate the federal drug laws. The judge sentenced him to thirty years in a Federal prison. Ollie North on the other hand was only charged with lying to a Congress so mistrusted and disrespected by the American people that he was virtually applauded for the crime.

Criminality in drug trafficking cases is lot easier than proving whether or not someone lied to Congress and is certainly a lot less “heroic.” Statements like “I don’t remember,” “I didn’t know,” and “No one told me,” or “I sought approval from my superiors for every one of my actions,” are only accepted as valid defenses by Congressmen and Senators with difficulties balancing check books not American jurors trying drug cases. And when you’re found guilty you got to jail you don’t run for a seat on the Senate.

And why would I volunteer to kidnap Ollie? For three reasons: first, kidnapping is now legal; second, I have experience kidnapping; and third, it is the only way those tens of millions of Americans who have suffered the betrayal of their own government will ever see even a glimmer of justice.

Several years after Kiki’s last tape-recorded cries were shoved well under a government rug, a maverick group of DEA agents decided to take the law into their own hands. Working without the knowledge or approval of most of the top DEA bosses, whom they mistrusted, the agents arranged to have Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain, a Mexican citizen alleged to have participated in Kiki’s murder, abducted at gun point in Guadalajara Mexico and brought to Los Angeles to stand trial.

On June 16, 1992, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Machain Decision that the actions of those agents was “legal.” The ruling said in no uncertain terms that U.S. law enforcement authorities could literally and figuratively kidnap violators of American drug law in whatever country they found them and drag them physically and against their will to the U.S. to stand trial. Immediately thereafter the Ayatollahs declared that they too could rove the world and kidnap violators of Islamic law and drag them back to Iran to stand trial. Kidnapping, therefore, has now become an accepted tool of law enforcement throughout the world.

Resorting to all sorts of wild extremes to bring drug traffickers to justice is nothing new for the U.S. government. At various times during my career as a DEA agent I was assigned to some pretty unorthodox operations nothing quite as radical as invading Panama and killing a thousand innocents to capture long-time CIA asset Manny Noriega but I was once, (long before the Machain Decision), assigned to a group of undercover agents on a kidnapping mission. Posing as a soccer team, we landed in Argentina in a chartered jet during the wee hours of the morning, where the Argentine Federal Police had three international drug dealers two of whom had never in their lives set foot in the United States waiting for us trussed up in straight-jackets with horse feed-bags over their heads, each beaten to a pulpy, toothless mess. In those years we used to call it a “controlled expulsion.” I think I like the honesty of kidnapping a little better.

By now you’re probably saying, “Get real Levine you live in a nation whose politicians ripped their own people off for half a trillion dollars in a savings and loan scam, a nation whose Attorney General ordered the FBI to attack a house full of innocent babies, and this is the decade of Ruby Ridge, Waco and Whitewater-gate; your own people sent Kiki Camarena to Mexico to be murdered and then gave aid and comfort to those who murdered him how can you expect justice?”

If you aren’t saying these things you should be. And you’d be right. Under the current two-party, rip-off system of American politics with their complete control of main stream media, I expect Ollie North to have a bright future in politics, while hundreds of thousands of Americans like John rot in jail. Ollie North, after all, is the perfect candidate. But there is one faint glimmer of hope remaining, and it isn’t in America.

Since the democratic and staunchly anti-drug Costa Rica is, thus far, the only nation with the courage to have publicly accused Oliver North, a US Ambassador and a CIA station chief of running drugs from their sovereignty to the United States, I find myself, duty-bound to make them, or any other nation that would have the courage to make similar charges, the following offer:

I, Michael Levine, twenty-five year veteran undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, given the mandate of the Supreme Court’s Machain Decision and in fulfillment of my oath to the U.S. government and its taxpayers to arrest and seize all those individuals who would smuggle or cause illegal drugs to be smuggled into the United States or who would aid and abet drug smugglers, do hereby volunteer my services to any sovereign, democratic nation who files legal Drug Trafficking charges against Colonel Oliver North and any of his cohorts; to do everything in my power including kidnapping him, seizing his paper shredder, reading him his constitutional rights and dragging his butt to wherever that sovereignty might be, (with or without horse feed-bag); to once-and-for-all stand trial for the horrific damages caused to my country, my fellow law enforcement officers, and to my family.

Is Anyone Apologizing to Gary Webb?
by Michael Levine

Gary Webb, just in case you’ve already forgotten him, was the journalist who, in a well researched, understated article entitled “The Dark Alliance,” linked the CIA supported Contras to cocaine and weapons being sold to a California street gang and ended up literally being hounded out of journalism by every mainstream news peddling organization in the Yellow Pages. Even his own employer The San Jose Mercury piled on for the kill.

And guess what? The CIA finally admitted, yesterday, in the New York Times no less, that they, in fact, did “work with” the Nicaraguan Contras while they had information that they were involved in cocaine trafficking to the United States. An action known to us court qualified experts and federal agents as Conspiracy to Import and Distribute Cocaine  a federal felony punishable by up to life in prison.

To illustrate how us regular walking around, non CIA types are treated when we violate this law, while I was serving as a DEA supervisor in New York City, I put two New York City police officers in a federal prison for Conspiracy to distribute Cocaine when they looked the other way at their friend’s drug dealing. We could not prove they earned a nickel nor that they helped their friend in any way, they merely did not do their duty by reporting him. They were sentenced to 10 and 12 years respectively, and one of them, I was recently told, had committed suicide.

I have spent three decades as a court qualified expert and federal agent and am not aware of any class of American Citizen having special permission to violate the law that we have been taxed over $1 trillion in the past two decades to enforce; the law that every politician, bureaucrat and media pundit keeps telling us protects us against the most serious danger to American security in our history.

The interesting thing to me, about the Webb article is that the CIA is provably (and now admittedly) responsible for much larger scale drug trafficking than Webb alleged or even imagined in his report.

In fact, according to a confidential DEA report entitled “Operation Hun, a Chronology” that I used as part of the proof to back up the undercover experiences detailed in my book The Big White Lie, (optioned for a movie by Robert Greenwald Productions) the CIA was actively blocking DEA from indicting many members of the ruling government of Bolivia, from 1980-83, during a time period that these same people were responsible for producing more than 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States. As CIA Inspector General Hitz himself stated before congress, it was during this time period that Nicraguan Contra supporters were buying large amounts of cocaine from these same CIA protected Bolivians.

Do you think Congress wants to see this proof?

The gang that can’t spy straight, as they are known to my listeners and about whom President Lyndon Johnson once said, “When Rich folks don’t trust their sons with the family money they send them on down to the CIA,” certainly did a lot more damage to this nation than, for example, computer company owner Will Foster who was sentenced to 93 years in prison for possession of 70 marijuana plants for medicinal use.

Of course, true to their shifty, sleazy form, while admitting that they did aid and abet Contra drug trafficking, they are now refusing to release their own final investigative report which details the damning proof. The same report that CIA Inspector General Fredrick Hitz, during February, 1998, had promised congress and the American people was forthcoming “shortly”, because, as CIA Director George Tenet now claims, CIA does not have enough money in its budget to properly classify it.

You believe that then I know an old guy with a beard named Fidel, wandering the streets of South Miami with an Island about 90 miles off the coast for sale. He says the money is for his retirement.

How, you ask, do they get away with it?

Well for one thing, mainstream media, the so-called Fourth Estate, does all it can to help. During the Iran-contra hearings, when Senators Kerry and D’amato were making pronouncements before the Senate indicating that the CIA was involved with drug trafficking, Katherine Graham, the owner of The Washington Post, addressed a class of CIA recruits at CIA’s Langley headquarters in Novemeber, 1988, by saying:

“There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets, and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows..”

Apparently CIA protection of drug trafficking was among those secrets.

Thus, it should have been no surprise to those CIA agent recruits when Washington Post reporter and drug expert Michael Itsikoff wrote that there was “no credible evidence” linking the CIA supported contras to cocaine trafficking at the same time very credible evidence was being heard by Senator Kerry’s committee indicating that the Contras may have been the top purveyors of drugs to Americans in our history.

Neither should it have been a surprise to anyone who heard her statement when mainstream media refused to print the news that Oliver North, US Ambassador to Costa Rica, Lewis Tambs and various top level CIA officers were banned from ever entering Costa Rica by Nobel Prize winning President Oscar Arias, for drug running. The drugs, by the way, all going to us.

Nor should it have been a surprise when Gary Webb was destroyed by mainstream media, for doing nothing more or less than telling the truth as he found it. And now, while CIA admits their felonies to the press but refuses to release the proof, and, Janet Reno, the head of the Obstruction of Justice Department has done the unprecedented by classifying her own department’s investigation into CIA drug trafficking, the partnership for a Drug Free America is spending $2 billion of our tax money on already-proven-fruitless anti-drug ads. And where do you think the money goes? Answer: to every major media corporation on the big board. Gary Webb, my friend, you are owed a huge apology. But I doubt that you’ll get it. Not in this lifetime.

Going Bad — Corruption in the war on drugs, from the inside out.

by Michael Levine
Copyright, December, 1990

“There is something in corruption which, like a jaundiced eye, transfers the color of itself to the object that it looks upon, and sees everything stained and impure.”
— Thomas Paine, The American Crisis (1776-83)

“It’s like they want us to go bad, ” said Al 1, using the not-so-euphemistic term DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agents use to describe the taking of a bribe, the stealing of drugs and money, the selling of drugs or any of the other myriad of ways a law enforcement officer can cross the line from upholder of the law to violator of the law. He picked up a heavy barbell and continued speaking through a violent, chest-slamming, set of curls.

“They give the FBI an extra twenty-five thousand bucks a year to work in this God damned city and us nothing and half those feebs come to work in car pools And Lawn (Jack Lawn, ex-Administrator, DEA) doesn’t say a fucking word .What does he care? He retired and got himself a big paying job Vice President  of the fucking Yankees. ”

I paused in the middle of a set of push-ups to listen. The place was the New York, DEA office Gym, which I continued to use after my retirement. Street agents and cops will always be my favorite people; not the “suits” — the political appointees and administrative types who direct this whackier-every-day War on Drugs from behind desks. I had levelled some strong criticisms against them in my book, Deep Cover, accusing them of an incompetence that cost agents’ lives; of running a fraudulent drug war; of being motivated by greed, self-aggrandizement and a quest for media exposure and lucrative second careers — of everything and anything, other than really winning. I doubted that they were happy that I was still using the gym. But I figured after retiring with three herniated discs, a bad knee and shattered ankle-momentos of my career — I had earned the right.

“Yeah,” said another agent skipping rope. “He took care of himself pretty good, didn’t he. And Stutman’s no better. (Robert Stutman, retired head of DEA’s New York office) Now that he cashed in on his DEA job and got named the CBS drug expert, he’s saying the government oughtta spend less for law enforcement.”

“Christ,” said Al in exasperation. “They’re all whores. A fucking saint would go bad in this business.”

The words jarred some old memories loose — and some not so old. I had known too many guys who had gone bad and every one of them was the last guy in the world anyone would have believed it of; and most of them had “gone over” during the past thirteen years. The past decade, in fact, has brought with it the worst epidemic of corruption in the history of law enforcement, making the years of prohibition look like a Boy Scout weenie roast — and almost all of it related to our war on drugs.

Within the ranks of DEA, alone, cases of “misconduct” have increased during the past several years at a whopping rate of 176 percent, 40 percent of which involved cases of bribery, fraud, obstruction of justice and the selling of drugs. The situation has become so critical according to the DEA brass that experts are being consulted to determine what the problem is and how to meet it.

A little more than a decade ago cases of corruption were rare. The idea among DEA agents, that one of us would go bad was almost inconceivable. Most of the people selected for the position of Special Agent were, and still are, products of a highly moral background, (as verified by lengthy and exhaustive reputation and background investigations); conservative men and women who seem to take the job out of the highest of ideals (as verified by intensive personal interviews before panels of agents and supervisors). If anything, events of recent years have made DEA more discriminating than ever about its candidates; only granting employment interviews to those who have graduated college with a cumulative B average or higher, and who have passed the Federal Entrance Examination in the top ten percentile.

If you add to that the continuous brainwashing we are subjected to, driving home the message that failure to inform on a fellow agent you know to have violated the law makes you as guilty as he and subject to the same penalties, the incongruously rough sentences narcotics officers convicted of corruption are given, and our intimate knowledge of the, particular, horrors awaiting us as inmates in the penal system — to be caught going bad, for a DEA agent, is a fate worse than death. I had known men, during those early drug war years, who, on learning that they were under investigation — even for seemingly minor violations of law like overstated voucher expenses — committed suicide.

So what is happening to cause DEA agents — once thought of as the least likely candidates for corruption imaginable — to suddenly go bad at a record pace? I think I know the answer; and it’s not one the politicians and drug war bureaucrats want you to discern or spend much time thinking about.

A Strange Case and the Beginning of a Trend

On a warm spring day in 1977, I found myself in a Connecticut motel room, with an informer with the unlikely name of James Bond, on one of the strangest undercover assignments of my career — posing as a Mafia hood trying to buy information from DEA’s secret files.

In 1977, for a DEA agent, the drug war was still a simple matter of good versus evil. I had been a federal law enforcement officer for twelve years in four federal agencies, (IRS, Intelligence Division; Alcohol, Tobacco And Firearms; Bureau of Customs, Hard Narcotics Smuggling Division and DEA beginning in 1973) during which time I had personally known only three men who had been arrested and accused of corruption; and only one of them was a DEA agent who was accused of stealing money. Most of us actually believed the rhetoric of the politicians; that the youth of our nation were being poisoned by the deadliest and most loathsome enemy Americans have ever had to face — the evil drug dealer. And that putting them in jail — by any means — was God’s work. And with a brother who had just committed suicide after nineteen years of heroin addiction, I doubt that there was another agent or cop more fanatically dedicated to doing just that, than I was.

I could not have been more “off the wall.”

There were of course some disquieting rumors that the CIA was involved in protecting drug dealers in the Far East for political reasons. There were even some who claimed the agency itself was involved in drug trafficking — but who the hell would believe that? A meticulously researched and documented book like The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred McCoy, that should have had Americans screaming for investigations into the conduct of a drug war already dripping with evidence of high-level government deception and fraud and the senseless sacrifice of human life, was little known, poorly distributed and successfully ignored by the bureaucrats and politicians. No right-thinking DEA agent would ever read anything like it, anyway. To do so was damned near un-American. What kind of man — CIA agent or not — could protect a drug dealer and still call himself an American? The rumors were obviously part of some commie disinformation plot.

So in the Spring of 1977, I was the quintessential representative of a DEA still in its years of innocence; a fledgling agency not yet adept enough internationally to threaten special interests like the $40 billion debt the cocaine producing nations owed American bankers; or people with “special” relationships with the CIA, Pentagon or State Department — people like Manuel Noriega. We just didn’t know what the score was. But times were changing, and changing quickly.

There was a light knock on the motel door. I raised my arms and signalled at the hidden cameras. In another room video and sound equipment began recording what would be the first case of its kind in DEA’s history.

A short while later in the smoke filled motel room, a young, clean cut looking guy by the name of George Girard promised me that for $500 a name he could check out any name I gave him in the DEA computer system.

“You could tell me if the guy’s an informer?” I asked.

“No sweat,” said Girard who had quit DEA after seven years on the job to open a private detective agency.

I couldn’t believe my ears. No DEA agent alive would sell the name of an informer — it was murder. Girard was out of DEA, so there was no way he could make good on the promise. I was sure he was just running a con job on me. He probably figured stealing money from the Mafia’s no crime, so screw it! But still, before I gave him the name that had already been rigged into the DEA computer system as an informant, I had to be sure he knew that — if he did get me the information — he was killing a man, just as surely as if he were pulling a trigger.

“If this guy is a stool pigeon,” I said, trying to rivet him with my eyes. “I’m going to kill him.”

“I don’t want to know that,” said Girard quickly. “That’s your business.”

“The name’s Lumieri,” I said. “Richard Lumieri.”

Days later I met with Girard in the motel and was stunned when he gave me, almost verbatim, the information that had been planted in the DEA computer system. Over the next several weeks I kept feeding the ex-DEA agent requests for information from DEA’s files. He was unfailing in his ability to furnish me with everything I requested including the identities of other informers. To see how far he would go, I offered him cocaine as payment instead of money, and he accepted.

I kept dealing with Girard until we learned that his inside connection was an agent named Paul Lambert, one of the best thought of agents in DEA headquarters. The whole agency was shocked as Lambert was arrested at his desk and led out in handcuffs. The Administrator of DEA, Peter Bensinger, who had been kept in the dark throughout the investigation, was outraged. Nothing like it had ever happened before. Lambert, besides having a promising DEA career was known to be independently wealthy. The few hundred-dollars a name he received for running computer checks could not have meant anything to him. He hired — at no small cost — one of the best defense attorneys in the land, Charles Shaffer, who also defended John Dean of Watergate fame.

After a two month, well-publicized trial, Girard and Lambert were convicted and sentenced to ten and twelve years in prison, respectively. Their lives were destroyed.

But why? And, for what?

During the weeks of undercover with Girard I had tried to get some idea of what motivated him. The clearest answer I got was his description of the drug war as, “The whole thing was bullshit.” I never knew Lambert; although those who did, said that his participation in the scheme made less sense than Girard’s. For me the whole episode ended with the unanswered question — Why?

DEA, of course, revamped its security system and the suits breathed a sigh of relief. The case was an aberration, they said. It was not — they assured the media — part of a growing pattern of corruption.

They could not have been more wrong. And all of us on the inside could feel it — the times were changing.

The Strange Case of Sandy Bario

“The Case Of Agent Bario,” was the title that Time magazine used in its January, 29, 1979, edition, reporting the strange life and even stranger death of DEA agent Sante Bario. The article synopsized how one of DEA’s top undercover agents went bad, using his post as DEA’s, Assistant Country Attache in Mexico City to smuggle drugs into the United States. “Sandy,” as those of us who knew him well called him, was arrested by DEA’s Internal Security Division after he had allegedly conspired with one of his informants in the smuggling and distribution of eleven pounds of cocaine stolen during a DEA raid in Mexico City.

On December 16, 1978, while sitting in his jail cell, Sandy took a bite of a peanut butter sandwich. He stood up and threw the rest in the toilet. Moments later, according to reports, he was found in convulsions. He slipped into a coma from which he would never recover. Preliminary tests made while he was still alive revealed strychnine in his blood. The warden told Sandy’s wife that he had been poisoned. Subsequent tests, according to DEA, mysteriously, failed to reveal any traces of poison. The first tests were ruled “in error. ” The final autopsy report indicated that Sante Bario had “choked to death” on his peanut butter sandwich. To this day there are many in DEA who secretly (and not so secretly) believe that Sandy was either killed by DEA’s Internal Security, or the CIA because “he knew too much about secret U.S. government involvement in narcotics trafficking.”

But who, in 1979 could believe that?

I was already stationed in Argentina when I heard about Sandy’s arrest and death. The news was more than a shock to me. I had known him for many years. He was one of the best, most decorated undercover agents this government has ever had, laying his life on the line on a daily basis with the kind of courage that only comes from the deepest of conviction. Sandy was a legend among undercover agents. I doubt that his record of arrests and convictions for a deep cover penetration of the Mafia will ever be equalled.

Sandy and I had known each other for more than ten years. We had met as agents in the IRS Intelligence Division. “This country’s biggest enemy is going to be drugs,” he told me before transferring to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1965. His words — and then later learning of my brother’s heroin addiction — were what convinced me to follow his path.

In 1975 we were working in the same DEA, international enforcement group when Sandy was transferred to Mexico. An Internal Security Division — at the time without much corruption to investigate — tried to hold up Sandy’s transfer, investigating him for living with his girlfriend “out of wedlock.” I don’t think there are any words to convey the pain a man who daily lays his life on the line for his government suffers when that same government turns on him in such a shabby, cheap way.

Sandy — in righteous indignation and without any of the traditional fear agents have for standing up to the dreaded Internal Security Division — fought the investigation boldly and finally won a written apology from one of the suits. He was a man with nothing to fear or hide — a truly heroic figure. There is no way I will ever believe that the Sandy Bario who left for Mexico in 1975 was the same man who smuggled drugs and died in a Texas jail four years later. Something had to have happened that changed him; and it had to be something radical.

Within months of Sandy’s death my education into the realities of our so-called War on Drugs would begin. It would leave me with an understanding of why Sandy and scores of men like him have gone bad and why countless more will follow, unless things are changed quickly and drastically.

The “Coca Revolution” — (The Sellout of The Cocaine War)

Early in 1980, from my post in Buenos Aires, I began to put together a deep cover “sting” operation against a Bolivian named Roberto Suarez who was putting together a combine of all his country’s major coca growers for mutual protection, economy of production and to eliminate competition. It was the birth of what, nine years later, DEA would call “the General Motors of cocaine.” The deep cover operation — in spite of many behind-the-scenes moves on the part of DEA and other government agencies to sabotage it — was eventually accomplished. Attempts at destroying the investigation were so overt, frequent and outrageous — at times exposing us to life-threatening situations — that by the end of the operation the rallying cry of the undercover team had become, “Let’s make this case in spite of DEA.” 2

Our efforts; however, turned out to be in vain. After the arrests, seizures, indictments and the media ballyhoo giving the suits and politicians credit for “the greatest sting operation in history;” 3 those of us who had accomplished the feat, then watched horrified and helpless as the CIA supported the same people we had arrested, indicted and identified as the biggest drug dealers in history,4 in their takeover of the Bolivian government in the now infamous July, 1980 “Cocaine Coup,” one of the bloodiest revolutions in Bolivian history. Our government’s greatest drug war victory had been turned into its greatest defeat; a fact that received no media coverage whatsoever.

I would later learn that the Suarez organization had convinced the CIA that the civilian government — some of whom had cooperated with us in the sting operation — were “leftists.” Our secret government then made what they had been conned into believing was a choice between communism and drugs, for us. They helped in the destruction of the only Bolivian government officials having any anti-drug sentiments at all. And if any proof of the new military government’s real aims were needed, their first act was to destroy all the drug trafficking files in Bolivia’s Hall of Justice. Bolivian cocaine traficking would never again be truly threatened. The drug war had taken a back seat to politics, as it still does.

From that point on Bolivia began supplying cocaine base to the then fledgling Medellin Cartel in Colombia as though it were a legal export. At the same time the demand for cocaine in the United States began to boom. It was the beginning of a decade that gave us crack, crack babies and the worst crime and violence statistics of any nation in history; and it could not have been done without the help of our own government.

I, along with many of my brother DEA agents, watched the fraud from the sidelines with aching and frightened hearts. The times indeed were a changing.

The Roberto Suarez case also heralded in a decade during which the the drug economy’s value as a political and economic tool rose sharply while, in contrast, the the value of the lives of American’s in general and narcotics officers in particular, plummeted. Within the U.S., police and narcotic agents fought a bloody, urban drug war, while our politicians, CIA and Pentagon were in bed with the biggest drug dealers alive. Many DEA agents began to realize that they were sacrificial pawns in a fraudulent, no-win war like Vietnam; that their true purpose was to pile up meaningless arrest and drug seizure statistics — and at times, die in the streets — in order to convince voting and tax-paying Americans that there was a drug war; and that international narcotic enforcement was a “minefield” of Roberto Suarezes and Manuel Noriegas.

It seemed no small coincidence to me that, during the same time period the incidents of corruption in DEA began to spiral upward, involving criminal indictments against the least likely people imaginable. People like my friend DEA agent Darnell Garcia — a legendary martial arts expert and profound believer in Bushido, (The Way of the Warrior), as antithetical a system of beliefs to acts of corruption, as exists on this earth — who was arrested and charged with stealing and selling drugs, and money laundering. People like my friend Tom Traynor 5 — a deeply religious father of five and highly decorated DEA agent who neither drank, smoked nor (and I’m not kidding) used profanity — who was arrested and charged with smuggling large quantities of cocaine from South America. And more just like them followed — too many more. To me it was mind boggling.

The increase in drug war corruption was not only limited to DEA, it was happening everywhere. Law enforcement officers, elected officials and even judges were being indicted for everything from accepting bribes to selling drugs. In one investigation that I supervised in the New York City Joint Task Force (US V Cesar Ramirez), I arrested two New York City detectives who had accepted bribes and helped a drug dealer in covering up the murder of his wife, and was then astounded to learn that some of the cocaine and money we had seized during the investigation had been stolen by Assistant United States Attorney Daniel Perlmutter — a Phi Beta Kapa graduate of Williams College and NYU Law School — the man charged with prosecuting the case. The scholarly prosecutor — married to another prosecutor — had been stealing the drugs and money to support his and a model girlfriend’s cocaine habits.

To a DEA agent in the 1980s, the whole world had become corrupt. No one could be trusted — not even our own government. And if we needed proof of how little our lives were valued alongside our government’s special interests in the drug war, the death of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena was all the proof necessary.

The “Sacrifice” of Enrique Camarena

It was almost inevitable that the sacrifice of the life of DEA agent Enrique Camarena would occur in Mexico, one of the countries in this hemisphere most corrupted by the drug economy and most protected by our government’s special political and economic interests. It was also a country that would play a heavy role in events that would mold the rest of my life; events during which I often thought of Sandy Bario and wondered what secrets he might have revealed about the hypocrisy and corruption of our drug war, had he lived — and how much he had been through before he had gone bad.

Some six years after Sandy’s death, Kiki Camarena and his brother DEA agents assigned to Guadalajara Mexico, would write memorandums and cables to DEA headquarters in Washington and Mexico city, complaining of the anarchic conditions in Mexico and pleading for additional agents, more DEA, State and Justice Department support or — at the very least — getting diplomatic status for agents assigned there so that they might arm and protect themselves.

They were ignored.

Economic and political considerations were deemed more important than our drug problem. No one wanted to “upset” Mexican officialdom by bringing up the “D” word (drugs) — or worse yet: the “C” word (corruption). And the DEA suits — more politicians than law enforcement officers, and willing pawns of any special interest group — were more interested in maintaining the illusion of a “special” and “cordial” relationship between the U.S. and Mexican governments than the complaints of a couple of street agents. Camarena finally prophesied his own death when he said, “Does someone have to die before something is done?”

On February 7, l985, DEA agent Enrique Camarena, married and the father of three young boys — who, on his own, working around and in spite of obstacles placed in his path by DEA suits, the State Department and other special interest groups, managed to cause the biggest Mexican marijuana seizure in history — was kidnapped in broad daylight in front of the American Consul in Guadalajara by Mexican policemen working for drug traffickers. He was tortured to death over a twenty four hour period, while his murderers tape-recorded his cries.

Mexican government officials were so disdainful of our hypocritical drug war that they aided his killers in escaping from right under the noses of frustrated and powerless DEA agents. It would be a month before Camarena’s body would be found and years before some — but not all — of those responsible for his death would be brought to justice. The whole affair, were it not for the rage of Kiki’s brother street agents in keeping the investigation alive, would have been quickly swept under a rug.

The suits were in a rush to “normalize” U.S. relations with Mexico. There were items far more important than Kiki’s murder — items like the Mexican debt, and trade and oil agreements, not to mention secret Mexican support of the Contras and other CIA programs. Instead of pressuring Mexico economically to aid in identifying those responsible for the murder, our Treasury Department was negotiating a new bail-out package of loans and the State Department was planning to increase Mexico’s share of the narcotics aid budget. And among the supporters of this move was DEA Administrator, John Lawn. 6 Hearings into the Camarena murder and the actions — or lack thereof — of our drug war “leaders,” by the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s task force on international narcotics control, would result in its chairman, Representative Larry Smith saying,

“I personally am convinced that the Justice Department is against the best interests of the United States in terms of stopping drugs…I just don’t think the Justice Department is committed to pushing the Mexicans on a resolution to the Camarena case. What has a DEA agent who puts his life on the line got to look forward to? The United States Government is not going to back him up. I find that intolerable!” Â

So did we DEA agents, but what could we do? Where and how could we vent our rage and frustration?

In the years following Kiki’s death, drug war corruption increased to levels unprecedented in our nation’s history. Of course I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that during the same period of time evidence was revealed during the Iran-Contra hearings indicating that secret elements of our government were using the proceeds of drug sales to fund the Nicaraguan Contra movement and circumvent the wishes of our elected officials; and that evidence that might have convicted high level U.S. government officials of drug trafficking was withheld from senate investigators for “national security” reasons.

It was a time when “heros” like Colonel Oliver North and other U.S. officials were banned from Costa Rica for “drug and gun running activities” by that country’s very credible, Nobel Prize winning president, Oscar Arias; a time when the DEA agent assigned to Honduras documented 50 tons of cocaine entering the U.S. at the hands of U.S. supported Contras and Honduran military, (half the estimated U.S. cocaine consumption), and was then immediately transferred out of Honduras to get him out of the hair of the Pentagon and CIA; a time when DEA agents like Everett Hatcher and local cops like New York City patrolman Chris Hoban would be gunned down trying to take grams and ounces of drugs off our streets, while our own government aided and abetted in the trafficking of tons.

It was a time when our President would tell us that “everyone who looks the other way” condoning drug trafficking was “just as guilty” as the drug traffickers. He would then order our troops to invade Panama at a cost of hundreds of innocent lives to arrest a drug dealer whose activities our government had condoned by looking the other way for almost two decades. It was a time when I would witness the intentional destruction of one of the biggest and most far-reaching drug cases in the history of the drug war (Operation Trifecta, the subject of Deep Cover ) because it threatened other U.S. interests deemed more important.

It was a time when we DEA agents would realize that, as Pogo said, after tracking full circle, “We have found the enemy and he is us.”

A mighty thump brought me back to the present. Al was now pounding a heavy-bag suspended from the ceiling in the middle of the gym. “In a dirty card game,” he grunted, jabbing at the bag, “only a fool plays it straight.” He punctuated the sentence with a thumping right cross. He turned from the bag shaking his head in frustration. No amount of sweat would lighten the burden all narcotics officers carry. “How do they blame a guy for going bad, when the whole fucking government has gone bad?”

One of the defenses classically used by people arrested for selling drugs to an undercover agent, is claiming that the conduct of the government’s agents was either criminal, immoral, or such that the defendant was enticed into doing something he ordinarily would never have done — entrapment. It seems to me that our government’s conduct in its so-called war on drugs has become so criminal and immoral, that anyone arrested for going bad might have a valid entrapment defense.

What do you think?   Â

1 Not his real name.

2 these events are synopsized in Deep Cover Delacorte Press, March,1990 and will be documented in greater detail in the forthcoming Queen of Cocaine to be published in October, 1991 (Delacorte Press).

3 September, 1982, Penthouse , “The Great Bolivian Cocaine Scam,” by Jonathan Kandell.

4 Roberto Suarez was called the “biggest drug dealer alive,” by Mike Wallace on a “60 Minutes,” show aired, 3/1/81

5 I changed his name because the case received little publicity and I think his family has suffered enough.

6 Ironically, years later, Lawn — who claimed never to have seen any of Kiki’s memos; a claim that was never investigated — was depicted as a “hero” in an NBC television movie version of Kiki’s death, called The Drug Wars.