“Most of the time, the story will be about how some obscure writer took on an under-reported story as a passion project, only to watch as weeks later, outfits with bigger megaphones pick up on the news and reap acclaim without acknowledging the folks that did the heavy lifting. Occasionally, however, you find stories like the one Bill Conroy is telling, which go a step beyond.

Conroy writes for The Narco News Bulletin, a website dedicated to covering the news of the Drug War. As Conroy describes, for six years now, the site has been covering what’s come to be called the ‘House of Death’ story.”

We’re proud to be associated with this guy.

”

HIALEAH, Fla. (WSVN) — A family is claiming federal agents raided
their house when they were looking for someone who was not there.

The
Boveda family said federal agents raided and ransacked their home
Thursday morning. Even the front window was smashed. Broken glass was
scattered across the floor and nearly every door in the house was busted
open. Even their closets were cracked.

“I can’t believe what I
was seeing. I said don’t break the window, I’ll open the door for you,
but you got the wrong house, you got the wrong house,” said Orlando
Boveda.

Federal agents said the raid was part of a larger
operation to arrest alleged drug smugglers, and the house they raided
was the last known address of a suspect who they were looking for.”

Informant info gone bad, once again?

The above is from Stephan Salisbury’s amazing article “Stage Managing the War on Terror“, which details just how bad the situation of informant handling has become… and how it puts us at risk.  Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Salisbury about this incredibly well-researched piece.

About the guest:

Stephan Salisbury is the senior cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he has been a reporter for three decades.

He has won numerous awards for his work and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize as part of an Inquirer investigative team looking into local election fraud.

He is author of the recently published Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland published by Nation Books.

Links:

Stage Managing the War on Terror – Stephan Salisbury’s brilliant article.

The 100 Years Episode – 4 Federal Agents talk about the state of Security and intelligence both in the U.S. and around the world.

Then…

We talked about the story last week – but this week, we got someone who is actually involved in the case. Mark interviews David Rocah, ACLU attorney for Anthony Graber – the motorcyclist who is being prosecuted for wiretapping after he posted a video of a law enforcement officer pulling him over on a highway exit ramp.

Here’s the video in question… the action begins at about the three-minute mark:

Our favorite reporter Bill Conroy joins us to discuss these and more…

About the Guest:

Bill Conroy has worked as a reporter or editor for the past eighteen years at newspapers in Wisconsin, Arizona, Minnesota and Texas.

His investigative reporting over the past five years has focused on corruption and discrimination within federal law enforcement agencies.

He is also a journalist for Narco News. His investigative pieces, particularly those on the House of Death, have made him our most-favored guest.

More info on related topics:

Bill Conroy’s article – U.S. federal agents nationwide bilked by brazen Ponzi scheme

Carlos Miller’s blog post about citizen videotaping

Congressional Resolution 298

Critical Mass NYPD Bicyclist Assault video referred to in the broadcast:

(Reuters) – The U.S. government has shut indefinitely its consulate in Mexico’s most violent drug war city Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, to evaluate security conditions.

The U.S. embassy in Mexico City said in a statement on Thursday that the Ciudad Juarez consulate would “remain closed until the security review is completed.”

A U.S. enforcement official who declined to be named said the consulate had closed after receiving a “credible threat” but did not have more details. The embassy was not immediately available for comment.

It is not the first time the consulate, which processes Mexicans looking to travel or emigrate to the United States, has been shuttered. It closed briefly in March after three people connected to the consulate were murdered by drug hitmen.

LONDON — WikiLeaks’ editor-in-chief claims his organization doesn’t
know who sent it some 91,000 secret U.S. military documents, telling
journalists that the Web site was set up to hide the source of its data
from those who receive it.

Julian Assange didn’t say whether he meant he had no idea who leaked
the documents or whether his organization simply could not be sure. But
he did say the added layer of secrecy helps protect the site’s sources
from spy agencies and hostile corporations.

“We never know the source of the leak,” he told journalists
gathered at London’s Frontline Club late Tuesday. “Our whole system is
designed such that we don’t have to keep that secret.”

U.S. federal agents nationwide bilked by brazen Ponzi scheme
Posted by Bill Conroy – July 25, 2010 at 9:16 pm

Law enforcement agencies actually paid crook to sponsor “seminars” used to hook his marks

Investment broker Kenneth Wayne McLeod was found dead, Vince Foster-style, inside his SUV in a park in southeast Jacksonville, Fla., on June 22.

The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Department said he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to media reports. A rumor now popular among some federal law enforcement agents casts a bit of bitter irony over McLeod’s fate, indicating that he killed himself with a pistol given to him by the DEA to commemorate his years of service to the agency.

Whether that rumor has any basis in reality is not clear, but it speaks volumes about how some law enforcers feel about what McLeod did to a number of DEA agents, as well as dozens of other former and retired federal agents.

McLeod’s death came only some five days after he confessed to Securities and Exchange Commission investigators that he had been operating a 22-year-long Ponzi scheme that had victimized hundreds of government employees, primarily federal law enforcement agents.

— By Victoria Rossi
| Mon Jul. 26, 2010 4:00 AM PDT

Valerie Plame Wilson suddenly went from being a CIA covert operations officer to a household name in the summer of 2003, when the Bush administration outed her to the press in retribution for her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, dismantling its shaky claims about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions. After unwillingly becoming a public figure, Plame laid low for a couple of years. But now she’s lent her expertise as an expert on nuclear proliferation to Countdown to Zero, the new documentary from the makers of An Inconvenient Truth that aims to jumpstart a post-Cold War movement to ban the bomb. (See David Corn’s recent article on the making of the film.) The film will leave you wondering why one of the world’s 23,000 nuclear bombs hasn’t already gone off—and how much longer it is until one does.

KGB man: MI5 agent told me that David Kelly had been ‘exterminated’

By Glen Owen
Last updated at 2:45 AM on 25th July 2010

The mystery over the death of David Kelly took a further twist last night after a former KGB officer said he had evidence that the scientist did not commit suicide.

Boris Karpichkov, who worked as a Russian spy for 15 years before fleeing to Britain, has sent a dossier to Attorney General Dominic Grieve in which he claims to relay information from an ‘MI5 agent’ that Dr Kelly had been ‘exterminated’.

Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports made public Sunday.

These archives are currently being rebuilt in this new format, and being added to a master RSS feed that will allow you to access ALL of our past shows.  Your patience is appreciated – we’re an all-volunteer unit here, and there are well over a decade of shows to post.

Those of you who feel intrepid can browse the raw folder of audio files while we reconstruct.

Also – you can now subscribe to our podcast – both through that RSS feed, or through iTunes.

The film opens with the conviction of Ponzi King Bernie Madoff, whose acknowledged criminality drove a $65 billion dollar pyramid scheme. It argues that the wrong doing committed by a few individuals distracts from the real story, implicating the best-known institutions that financed and profited from fraudulent sub prime lending. This connection is now being investigated by the FBI as part of a probe into what it calls a “fraud epidemic.”

PLUNDER shows how these firms created special securities to repackage and resell these dubious loans after they were re-rated as Triple A. These firms then bet against many of these toxic assets with credit default swaps and other insurance scams. By leveraging these investments, they recklessly put trillions of dollars and the world economy at risk.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Danny Schechter about the film, media and about 20 other things…. a great, freewheeling conversation with the “Uber-investigative-journalist.”

More on the film, including how to get it on both DVD and iTunes – at the Plunder website.

About the guest:

Danny Schechter is a journalist, author, television producer and an independent filmmaker who also writes and speaks about economic and media issues.

He is the executive editor of MediaChannel.org, the world’s largest online media issues online network, and recipient of many awards including the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2001 Award for Excellence in Documentary Journalism.

His latest films are “Barack Obama, People’s President [2009], an examination of how Obama won and “IN DEBT WE TRUST: America Before The Bubble Bursts,” [2007] an investigation of the impact of credit and debt on American society.

In Debt We Trust was one of the first films or media coverage to expose subprime lending and warn of an economic crisis. He was a director on “Viva Madiba,” a feature-length biopic tribute to Nelson Mandela on his 90th Birthday. (2008).

He is the author of nine books.

Schechter is co-founder and executive producer of Globalvision, a New York-based television and film production company now in its 21st year. He founded and executive-produced the TV series “South Africa Now” and co-produced the series “Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights Television.”

Schechter has specialized in investigative reporting and producing programming about the interface between human rights, journalism, popular music and society. His career began as the “News Dissector” at Boston’s leading rock station, WBCN. Later, he moved into television as an on-camera reporter for WGBH (Channel 2) in Boston and then as a producer for WLVI (Channel 56) and WCVB (Channel 5).

Schechter then joined the start-up team of CNN and later became a producer for ABC News 20/20. He produced 50 segments for ABC News, winning two national Emmys and nominated for two others.

He has produced and directed many TV specials and documentary films. click here for a full listing. He has spoken at scores of universities – from Harvard to Hamline, from Minnesota to MIT, NYU to Georgia State, Santa Monica to the University of Hawaii, Princeton to Cornell.

A Cornell University graduate, he received his Master’s degree from the London School of Economics, and an honorary doctorate from Fitchburg College. He was a Neiman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard, where he also taught in 1969. After college, he was a full time civil rights worker and then communications director of the Northern Student Movement, and worked as a community organizer in a Saul Alinsky-style War on Poverty program. Then, moving from the streets to the suites, Schechter served as an assistant to the Mayor of Detroit in 1966 on a Ford Foundation grant.

Schechter has reported from 61 countries. He was an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and taught investigative reporting at the New School. Schechter’s writing has appeared in leading newspapers and magazines including the Newsday, Boston Globe, Columbia Journalism Review, Media Studies Journal, Detroit Free Press, Village Voice, Z, Mediachannel.org, OpedNews.com, ZNET, Creative1, Global Research, Alternet and many others.

You can follow him on Twitter here.

Find him on Facebook here.

Closing music from the show:

“Man Walking” from Mark’s “New Eye” album.

Tonight – a rollicking conversation with Howard Bloom about war, intelligence, history and the future of energy.

About the guest:

Howard Bloom, a Visiting Scholar at New York University, is founder of the International Paleopsychology Project, executive editor of the New Paradigm book series, a founding board member of the Epic of Evolution Society, and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, The International Society of Human Ethology, and the Academy of Political Science. He has been featured in every edition of Who’s Who in Science and Engineering since the publication’s inception.

Bloom has taken an unusual approach to the study of mass moods and cultural convolutions. He started out normally enough, building his first Boolean algebra machine at the age of twelve, becoming a dedicated microscopist that same year, codesigning a computer which won a Westinghouse Science Award before he left grade school, and being granted a private brainstorming session with the head of the Graduate Physics Department of The State University of New York, Buffalo, at the age of thirteen. By sixteen he was a lab assistant at the world’s largest cancer research center, the Roswell Park Memorial Research Cancer Institute, where he helped plumb the mysteries of the immune system. And before his freshman year of college he designed and executed research in Skinnerian programmed learning at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education.

Then came an act of academic heresy. After graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from New York University, Bloom turned down four graduate fellowships and embarked on a 20-year-long urban anthropology expedition to penetrate what he calls “society’s myth-making machinery”–the inner sanctums of politics and the media. During his foray into “the dark underbelly of mass emotion” he edited a magazine which won two National Academy of Poets prizes, founded the leading avant-garde art studio on the East Coast, was featured on the cover of Art Direction Magazine, then gave up listening to Beethoven, Bartok, and Mozart to become editor of a rock magazine. Using correlational studies, focus groups, empirical surveys, ethnographic expeditions into suburban teen subcultures, and other scientific techniques, Bloom more than doubled the publication’s sales, and was credited by Rolling Stones’ Chet Flippo with having founded a new genre–the heavy metal magazine. Seeking still further ways to infiltrate modernity’s mass mind, Bloom formed a public relations firm in the music and film industry and won the confidence of those whose territory he’d invaded. The payoff in knowledge proved invaluable.

Bloom worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, John Cougar Mellencamp, Kiss, Queen, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Joan Jett, Diana Ross, Simon & Garfunkel, The Talking Heads, AC/DC, Billy Idol, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run D.M.C., Simply Red, and the heads of many a media conglomerate. He was adept at spotting new subcultures, entering them, and helping their members achieve their goals…a skill which gave him an inside role in the rise of rap, disco, and punk rock.

The pinnacles of fame provided surprising scientific revelations. “When you’re at the center of the sort of attention-storm which hits when you’re working with a superstar,” Bloom says, “it’s as if the laws of physics change. Hormones charge you up in ways you never imagined. Time perception alters. You resolve crisis in minutes, seeing solutions instantly which previously would have taken you weeks.

“More important is the impact of a communal ritual like a rock concert. The star onstage is taken over by a self he doesn’t know, one that seems to surge through him as if he were a length of empty pipe. The force of this strange passion welds the audience in an almost transcendent bond.” Bloom’s task was to first experience the exaltation, then to dissect it. “The model for this work,” he says, “came from William James, who attempted to feel the ecstatic experience of mystics, then to probe it scientifically, a process which led to his 1902 book The Varieties of the Religious Experience.”

Bloom’s forays into power and its manipulations were also intense. “In the music and film industry everyone knew that money and career advancement were on the line. But few realized how deeply what they did affected the lives of millions, and even fewer felt the responsibility that demands. It was an amazing privilege to work as an equal with the entertainment industry’s elite, many of whom I either had to woo or thwart to help my clients reach their audience with a message of genuine value. Some executives were master strategists but used their intelligence to increase their own stature, often at a brutal cost to others. Others were far more ethical. Yet even the best-intentioned employed boardroom and backroom tactics handed down from the politics of chimpanzees. Without knowing it, they used tricks of leadership we share with social animals from lizards and lobsters to baboons and mountain apes.”

The subculture of Washington politics was, to Bloom, the most disturbing of them all. Bloom founded Music in Action, a national anti-censorship organization. This brought him into head-on combat with Tipper Gore, wife of Vice President and eventual presidential candidate Al Gore. Says Bloom, “Tipper and the right wing religionists who used her for their ends were masters of perceptual manipulation. They perpetrated hoaxes of outrageous transparency, yet still managed to convince the press and public that their falsifications were true.”

Twenty pages in The Billboard Guide to Music Publicity are devoted to Bloom and the antidote he invented, “perceptual engineering,” which he defines as “a way of finding a valid truth which the herd refuses to see, then turning the herd around and making that truth self-evident. It’s what we do in much of science–seeing the ordinary from a new perspective, then revealing what makes it tick and in the process altering society’s views.”

Says British neuroscientist Dr. John Robert Skoyles of Howard Bloom’s science and of his photography, “Michelangelo walked around a piece of marble trying to sense the work within. Bloom hunts the banal of modern environment trying to sense the aesthetics hidden away in what we overlook.”

In 1981, Bloom organized the material he’d unearthed and began the formal research for a new theoretical structure that would first reveal itself in The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History. However he continued pursuing scientific truths in unconventional ways. In 1995 Bloom headed an insurgent academic circle called “The Group Selection Squad” whose efforts precipitated radical re-evaluations of neo-Darwinist dogma within the scientific community. In 1997, he founded a new discipline, paleopsychology, whose participants included physicists, psychologists, microbiologists, paleontologists, entomologists, neuroscientists, paleoneurologists, invertebrate zoologists, and systems theorists. Paleopsychology’s mandate is to “map out the evolution of complexity, sociality, perception, and mentation from the first 10(-32) second of the Big Bang to the present.”

Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has written that with his unusual insights Bloom has “raced ahead of the timid scientific herd” often “vaulting over their heads” with a “grand vision” that “we do strive as individuals, but we are also part of something larger than ourselves, with a complex physiology and mental life that we carry out but only dimly understand.” In The Lucifer Principle and his new book Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, Howard Bloom brings those understandings from dimness into the light.

More about Howard (there’s MORE???!?!?!?!) at his website.

Army Intelligence Specialist Bradley Manning is alleged to have turned over a large volume of classified material about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to Wikileaks.org, including the recently posted U.S. military video showing American helicopters gunning down two Reuters journalists and about 10 other Iraqi men in 2007. Two children were also injured.

The 22-year-old Manning was turned in by a convicted computer hacker named Adrian Lamo, who befriended Manning over the Internet and then betrayed him, supposedly out of concern that disclosure of the classified material might put U.S. military personnel in danger. Manning is now in U.S. military custody in Kuwait awaiting charges.

PLUS

A congressional report on Iran/Contra was written haphazardly and deceptively, including an apparently false claim that Reagan’s innocence was approved unanimously by a House task force.

A recent reexamination of the task force’s work also reveals that evidence implicating Reagan’s campaign in a pre-election deal to delay the release of 52 Americans then held hostage in Iran was kept from the U.S. public and even from members of the task force; that senior staff investigators shelved late-arriving evidence of Republican guilt; and that dissent within the task force was suppressed.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Robert Parry about these two important stories.

About the guest:

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com.

His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.

His investigative journalism website, consortiumnews.com, is an incredibly important resource.  Please visit the site, and support them any way you can.

The Consortium News stories we cover tonight:

Wikileak Case Echoes Pentagon Papers

The Tricky October Surprise Report

Related links:

http://collateralmurder.com/
The Wikileaks site about the leaked video

The strange and consequential case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks
The great article by Glenn Greenwald at Salon, including an interview with Adrian Lamo

All border stories, plus an amusing piece from Slate.

This is a jam-packed show with Bill Conroy of Narco News, covering the above and more.

About the Guest:

Bill Conroy has worked as a reporter or editor for the past eighteen years at newspapers in Wisconsin, Arizona, Minnesota and Texas.

His investigative reporting over the past five years has focused on corruption and discrimination within federal law enforcement agencies.

He is also a journalist for Narco News. His investigative pieces, particularly those on the House of Death, have made him our most-favored guest.

Links to tonight’s stories:

U.S. Consulate worker in Juarez was targeted for assassination

HIDTA task force on border mired in corruption charges

Real threat to U.S. national security may be along northern border

U.S. Military has Special Ops “Boots on the Ground” in Mexico

OPR Review
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/userfiles/70/FOIA_4.pdf

And here’s a link to the ONDCP’s review of the larger New Mexico Region HIDTA program.
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/userfiles/70/FOIA_3.pdf

Stupid Drug Story of the Week
The Associated Press on the arrival of “deadly, ultra-pure heroin.”

And lastly – Here’s a link to all 5 hours of our talk with Tosh Plumlee.

Music from the show:

Mid-break:

Closing:

On the heels of a botched car bombing attempt in Times Square – Mike and Mark are joined by author and veteran reporter Leonard Levitt to talk about the relationship between the NYPD and Federal Inteligence agencies, and much much much more.

About the Guest:

From 1995 to 2005, Leonard Levitt wrote the column “One Police Plaza” for the newspaper Newsday about the New York City police department. Before joining Newsday, he worked as a reporter for the Associated Press and the Detroit News, as a correspondent for Time Magazine, and as the investigations editor of the New York Post. His work has appeared in Harper’s, Esquire and the New York Times magazine.

Levitt is the author of six books, the most recent of which is NYPD Confidential: Power and Corruption in the Country’s Greatest Police Force. He received the 2005 non-fiction Edgar Award for Conviction: Solving the Moxley Murder.

A graduate of Dartmouth College and the Columbia School of Journalism, Levitt served two years in the Peace Corps in Tanzania, East Africa, and has been the recipient of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for the Humanities.

Related Links:

Leonard Levitt’s Blog Post – “Failure to Communicate”

The homes of many American citizens have been raided and searched on the basis of police claiming information from an informant that doesn’t exist.

You may be astounded to learn that, in the past 20 years, at least 40 innocent people have been killed by law enforcement offices taking part in such raids.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Dennis Fitzgerald, an expert on the subject of informant handling, on this profoundly disturbing story.

About the Guest:

Dennis G. Fitzgerald has been assisting the defense bar for more than a decade. He has 35 years experience in both international and domestic law enforcement and law enforcement training. He has served as a police supervisor with the City of Miami Police Department and as a Special Agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. He was the co-founder and director of the National Institute for Drug Enforcement Training and a visiting faculty member at the FBI’s International Law Enforcement Training Academy.

Fitzgerald is the author of Informant Law Deskbook (West Publishing, 1997), Informants and Undercover Investigations: A Practical Guide to Law, Policy, and Procedure (CRC Press, 2007), several criminal justice training manuals and related magazine articles, including Inside the Informant File.

Some excerpts from Fitzgerald’s résumé:

Provided counsel to CEE and NIS government and law enforcement officials on the development of initiatives and legislation to combat corruption, organized crime, money laundering and related white-collar crimes. Focused on undercover operations, the use of informants and electronic surveillance. Those countries included Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

Assisted Lithuania’s Ministry of Interior in the creation of its first Witness Security Program. The initiative has led to the signing of the Baltic States Witness Security Trilateral Agreement. The pact allows for the movement of threatened witnesses between Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.

Credited by international observers for being instrumental in the development of Lithuania’s first anti-corruption agency, the Special Investigation Service. His efforts continued with assistance to the State Security Service in the design of a national anti-corruption strategy for Lithuania.

EDUCATION:
Seattle University School of Law, J. D., 1988.
Florida International University, B. S., Criminal Justice, 1974.
U. S. Drug Enforcement’s National Training Academy, Commissioned as Special Agent, Criminal Investigator, 1974.
City of Miami Police Academy, Commissioned as Police Officer, 1969.

SPECIALIZED TRAINING:
Witness Protection Training, U.S. Marshals Service
International Money Laundering and Asset Forfeiture Training,
National Institute on Economic Crime
Bank Secrecy Act Compliance and Money Laundering and Asset Forfeiture Training, National Institute on Economic Crime
Financial Manipulation Analysis Training, ANACAPA Sciences,
Miami-Dade Police Training Institute
DEA/FBI Asset Removal Training, DEA National Training Center
I.R.S. Financial Investigation of Economic Crime
Financial Manipulation Analysis Training
Wiretap and Electronic Surveillance
Electronic Surveillance Training, National Institute on Economic Crime
Management of Drug Investigation Training
Conspiracy, RICO, and Continuing Criminal Enterprise Training
U.S. Department of Justice
Drug Diversion Investigation Training
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
U.S. Department of Justice and the American Bar Association Central and East European Law Initiative (DOJ/ABA/CEELI), Anti-Corruption Strategy Coordinator – Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.
Headquartered – Kyiv, Ukraine (2000-2002)

U.S. Department of Justice and American Bar Association Central and East European Law Initiative (DOJ/ABA/CEELI), Criminal Law Liaison. Headquartered – Vilnius, Lithuania (1996-2000)

National Institute for Drug Enforcement Training, Director/Instructor (1989-2000)

U.S. Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration
Special Agent/Criminal Investigator. Planned and conducted both domestic and international investigations of persons and organizations suspected of engaging in the illegal manufacture, diversion, importation, or sale of narcotics or dangerous drugs and related money laundering offenses (1974-1986)

Intelligence Coordinator – The Vice-President’s Joint Task Group. Evaluated overall effectiveness of drug enforcement activities, both domestically and internationally. (1982-1983)

City of Miami Police Department
Police Officer (1969–1970)
Detective (1970–1972)
Sergeant (1972–1974)
Group Supervisor, assigned to Federal Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (1973–1974)

PUBLICATIONS:
Informants and Undercover Investigations: A Practical Guide to Law, Policy, and Procedure
CRC Press, New York, 2007

A Practical Guide to Witness Protection
© 2003 Dennis Fitzgerald

Informant Law Deskbook
West Publishing Company, New York, 1999

“Inside the Informant File,” The Champion magazine
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers

“Snitches, Narcs and Making Cases,” The Champion magazine
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers

“Informants: Handle With Care,” Narc Officer Magazine
International Narcotics Officers Association

Related Links:

Dennis Fitzgerald’s article on wrong-door raids. (pdf)

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with retired detective Jeannie Webb, the officer who courageously arrested ROBINSON (in spite of the feds) and subsequently paid with her career.

About the Guest:

Jeannie Webb was a Detective in the Crimes Against Children/Sex Crimes unit (they handled all adult assaults as well). She’s had a total of 24 years experience in Law Enforcement, 20 of those years with the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department.

She retired in 2004 and is now working part time as the Foster Care Coordinator for Rio Grande and Mineral Counties in Colorado.

The House of Death is the story of how an informant for Homeland Security, working “undercover” under the direct control of a Bush appointed United States Attorney, participated in a macabre house of horrors in which more than a dozen people were tortured to death. There have been a continuing series of articles at Narco News on the subject, reported by Bill Conroy, who has been a frequent guest.

In previous broadcasts, for the first time anywhere, Bill Conroy brought us the voice of the informant himself. Now, after an extended court battle, that informant has won the right to stay in the U.S. – as extradition to Mexico would certainly result in his death.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Bill Conroy about the House of Death and this informant – and also about how another online organization has taken to plagiarizing Bill’s work on the subject. See below for details.

Lastly – we discuss the latest in the Richard Horn case.

About the Guest:

Bill Conroy has worked as a reporter or editor for the past eighteen years at newspapers in Wisconsin, Arizona, Minnesota and Texas. His investigative reporting over the past five years has focused on corruption and discrimination within federal law enforcement agencies. He is also a journalist for Narco News. His investigative pieces, particularly those on the House of Death, have made him our most-favored guest.

More info on related topics:
Read Bill Conroy’s Investigative pieces on the House of Death

Bill Conroy’s article on the court decision for the HOD informant

Bill Conroy’s article about the HOD and plagiarism.

read the Examiner article for yourself – and feel free to leave a comment.

Bill’s article about the Richard Horn case.

After repeatedly fingering the “wrong guy”, the final FBI investigation of an incident that terrified an already-terrified nation leaves more questions than it answers.

It was, by many accounts, the most extensive investigation in the history of the FBI – but there are many, including members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, who aren’t satisfied with the final result.

“…the 96 page FBI report is predicated on the assumption that the anthrax letters attack was carried out by a ‘lone nut.’ The FBI report fails to entertain the possibility that the letters attack could have involved more than one actor. The FBI admits that about 400 people may have had access to Ivins’ RMR-1029 anthrax preparation, but asserts all were “ruled out” as lone perpetrators. FBI never tried to rule any out as part of a conspiracy…”

This from Dr. Meryl Nass – an expert in the subject.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Dr. Nass about the case.

About the guest:

Dr. Meryl Nass has a CV as long as your arm.

Professional chronology:
BS Biology 1974, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Lab Technician 1974-1976, Immunology Department. John Curtin School of Medical Research, Canberra, Australia
MD Degree 1980; attended New Jersey Medical School 1976-78, attended University of Mississippi Medical School, 1978-80
Birth of two children, 1980 and 1981, with part-time work as medical consultant for Social Security Disability, 1980-1982
Internal Medicine Residency 1982-5, University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson, Mississippi
Emergency Room Physician 1985-1999, Parkview Hospital, Brunswick ME (2 years), Wing Hospital, Palmer MA (10 years), Farren Hospital, Turners Falls MA (1 year) , Franklin Medical Center, Greenfield MA (1 year)
Instructor, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Department of Internal Medicine, 1989-1993
Internal Medicine Physician 1993, Kaiser Permanente, Amherst Massachusetts; 1999-2002 solo practitioner, Freeport, Maine
Removal of spinal cord meningioma 2002, necessitating closure of my solo practice
Internist and Hospitalist 2003-present, Mount Desert Island Hospital, Bar Harbor, Maine

Anthrax highlights:

• Evaluated government-sponsored anthrax research in relation to military policy and Biological Weapons Convention norms, 1989-1991.
• Used anthrax as a model for discussion of how to prevent biological warfare, 1991-1992.
• Reviewed anthrax vaccines and other therapies to create a model for effective biological warfare prophylaxis, 1997-1999.
• Produced numerous reports, academic and popular articles, and spoke widely throughout the US to educate military servicemembers, Congress and the public about anthrax, the science underlying biological warfare prophylaxis and the range of available methods for responding to a bioterrorism threat. Produced testimonies at the requests of the House Subcommittee on National Security, the House Armed Services Committee, and the House Committee on Government Reform. Assisted Congressional staff in hearing preparations. Spoke before two Institute of Medicine committees: on Gulf War Illness exposures, and safety and efficacy of the anthrax vaccine. Critiqued the March 2002 Institute of Medicine Report on anthrax vaccine safety and efficacy. 1998-2005.
• Developed a range of recommendations for dealing with the anthrax domestic terrorism crisis as it unfolded, published on my website, and adopted by other authors, 2001.
• Quoted in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, USA Today, The Lancet, New Scientist and scores of other newspapers and journals, regarding anthrax attacks, anthrax vaccine, and preventing and responding to bioterrorism, 1990-present.
• Interviewed on all major US TV networks and scores of radio/TV programs in the US, Japan, France, Germany, Spain, Canada and Australia, 1998-present.
• Investigated the cause of chronic symptoms in survivors of inhalation anthrax; this problem was discussed on page A1 of the NY Times September 16, 2002.

Links:

Dr. Nass’ blog

Dr. Nass’ CV

Federal Bureau of Invention: CASE CLOSED (and Ivins did it) – the article that brought the good Dr. to our attention.

Howard Bloom returns…

“The first decade of the twenty-first century gave the Western World one skull-cracking slap after another. The Great Crash of 2008, the downing of New York’s World Trade Center, the implosion of major corporations like General Motors, Chrysler, Merrill Lynch, and Citibank, and the growth of China to superpower status–these were wakeup punches. They handed you and me–CEOs, researchers, artists, students, and thinkers–what may be our greatest opportunity and our greatest responsibility since the Great Depression and the Nazis threatened to topple the Western way of life in the 1930s.

Our civilization is under attack. But many of us don’t want to defend it. Why? There’s a void in our sense of meaning. We’ve been told that the “the Western system” is one in which the rich stoke artificial needs to suck money, blood, and spirit from the rest of us. We’ve been told 9 that the barons of industry work overtime to turn us from sensitive humans into consumers–mindless buyers listlessly watching TV while growing obese on the artificial flavors, chemical preservatives, and the cheap sugars of junk food. And some of that is true.

But the problem does not lie in the turbines of the Western way of life–it does not lie in industrialism, capitalism, pluralism, free speech, and democracy. The problem lies in the lens through which we see. Emotional flows have powered our past and will drive our future, too. But we’ve never had the perceptual lens to bring them into view. Capitalism works. It works for reasons that don’t appear in the analyses of Marx or in the statistics of economists. It works clumsily, awkwardly, sometimes brilliantly, and sometimes savagely. The Genius of the Beast: A Radical re-Vision of Capitalism attempts to show you how and why.”

The above is an excerpt from Howard Bloom’s latest book The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism Putting Soul In the Machine. Tonight, Howard returns to the show to speak with Mike and Mark about this amazing book.

About the guest:

Howard Bloom, a Visiting Scholar at New York University, is founder of the International Paleopsychology Project, executive editor of the New Paradigm book series, a founding board member of the Epic of Evolution Society, and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, The International Society of Human Ethology, and the Academy of Political Science. He has been featured in every edition of Who’s Who in Science and Engineering since the publication’s inception.

Bloom has taken an unusual approach to the study of mass moods and cultural convolutions. He started out normally enough, building his first Boolean algebra machine at the age of twelve, becoming a dedicated microscopist that same year, codesigning a computer which won a Westinghouse Science Award before he left grade school, and being granted a private brainstorming session with the head of the Graduate Physics Department of The State University of New York, Buffalo, at the age of thirteen. By sixteen he was a lab assistant at the world’s largest cancer research center, the Roswell Park Memorial Research Cancer Institute, where he helped plumb the mysteries of the immune system. And before his freshman year of college he designed and executed research in Skinnerian programmed learning at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education.

Then came an act of academic heresy. After graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from New York University, Bloom turned down four graduate fellowships and embarked on a 20-year-long urban anthropology expedition to penetrate what he calls “society’s myth-making machinery”–the inner sanctums of politics and the media. During his foray into “the dark underbelly of mass emotion” he edited a magazine which won two National Academy of Poets prizes, founded the leading avant-garde art studio on the East Coast, was featured on the cover of Art Direction Magazine, then gave up listening to Beethoven, Bartok, and Mozart to become editor of a rock magazine. Using correlational studies, focus groups, empirical surveys, ethnographic expeditions into suburban teen subcultures, and other scientific techniques, Bloom more than doubled the publication’s sales, and was credited by Rolling Stones’ Chet Flippo with having founded a new genre–the heavy metal magazine. Seeking still further ways to infiltrate modernity’s mass mind, Bloom formed a public relations firm in the music and film industry and won the confidence of those whose territory he’d invaded. The payoff in knowledge proved invaluable.

Bloom worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, John Cougar Mellencamp, Kiss, Queen, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Joan Jett, Diana Ross, Simon & Garfunkel, The Talking Heads, AC/DC, Billy Idol, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run D.M.C., Simply Red, and the heads of many a media conglomerate. He was adept at spotting new subcultures, entering them, and helping their members achieve their goals…a skill which gave him an inside role in the rise of rap, disco, and punk rock.

The pinnacles of fame provided surprising scientific revelations. “When you’re at the center of the sort of attention-storm which hits when you’re working with a superstar,” Bloom says, “it’s as if the laws of physics change. Hormones charge you up in ways you never imagined. Time perception alters. You resolve crisis in minutes, seeing solutions instantly which previously would have taken you weeks.

“More important is the impact of a communal ritual like a rock concert. The star onstage is taken over by a self he doesn’t know, one that seems to surge through him as if he were a length of empty pipe. The force of this strange passion welds the audience in an almost transcendent bond.” Bloom’s task was to first experience the exaltation, then to dissect it. “The model for this work,” he says, “came from William James, who attempted to feel the ecstatic experience of mystics, then to probe it scientifically, a process which led to his 1902 book The Varieties of the Religious Experience.”

Bloom’s forays into power and its manipulations were also intense. “In the music and film industry everyone knew that money and career advancement were on the line. But few realized how deeply what they did affected the lives of millions, and even fewer felt the responsibility that demands. It was an amazing privilege to work as an equal with the entertainment industry’s elite, many of whom I either had to woo or thwart to help my clients reach their audience with a message of genuine value. Some executives were master strategists but used their intelligence to increase their own stature, often at a brutal cost to others. Others were far more ethical. Yet even the best-intentioned employed boardroom and backroom tactics handed down from the politics of chimpanzees. Without knowing it, they used tricks of leadership we share with social animals from lizards and lobsters to baboons and mountain apes.”

The subculture of Washington politics was, to Bloom, the most disturbing of them all. Bloom founded Music in Action, a national anti-censorship organization. This brought him into head-on combat with Tipper Gore, wife of Vice President and eventual presidential candidate Al Gore. Says Bloom, “Tipper and the right wing religionists who used her for their ends were masters of perceptual manipulation. They perpetrated hoaxes of outrageous transparency, yet still managed to convince the press and public that their falsifications were true.”

Twenty pages in The Billboard Guide to Music Publicity are devoted to Bloom and the antidote he invented, “perceptual engineering,” which he defines as “a way of finding a valid truth which the herd refuses to see, then turning the herd around and making that truth self-evident. It’s what we do in much of science–seeing the ordinary from a new perspective, then revealing what makes it tick and in the process altering society’s views.”

Says British neuroscientist Dr. John Robert Skoyles of Howard Bloom’s science and of his photography, “Michelangelo walked around a piece of marble trying to sense the work within. Bloom hunts the banal of modern environment trying to sense the aesthetics hidden away in what we overlook.”

In 1981, Bloom organized the material he’d unearthed and began the formal research for a new theoretical structure that would first reveal itself in The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History. However he continued pursuing scientific truths in unconventional ways. In 1995 Bloom headed an insurgent academic circle called “The Group Selection Squad” whose efforts precipitated radical re-evaluations of neo-Darwinist dogma within the scientific community. In 1997, he founded a new discipline, paleopsychology, whose participants included physicists, psychologists, microbiologists, paleontologists, entomologists, neuroscientists, paleoneurologists, invertebrate zoologists, and systems theorists. Paleopsychology’s mandate is to “map out the evolution of complexity, sociality, perception, and mentation from the first 10(-32) second of the Big Bang to the present.”

Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has written that with his unusual insights Bloom has “raced ahead of the timid scientific herd” often “vaulting over their heads” with a “grand vision” that “we do strive as individuals, but we are also part of something larger than ourselves, with a complex physiology and mental life that we carry out but only dimly understand.” In The Lucifer Principle and his new book Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, Howard Bloom brings those understandings from dimness into the light.

More about Howard (there’s MORE???!?!?!?!)  at his website.

The New York City Police Department, U.S. Army, and CIA, for whom he also secretly worked, reported Olson’s death as a suicide. In 1975, a Presidential-appointed commission inadvertently released information publicly that revealed that, days before his death, the CIA had surreptitiously dosed Olson with LSD. The CIA admitted that it had given the drug to Olson, but refused to reveal any details of the so-called “experiment”, or about what Olson’s work for the CIA involved. The American media briefly examined the perplexing mysteries surrounding Olson’s “suicide”, but soon lost interest. Twenty-years later, further investigation into Olson’s death revealed that there was ample reason to believe that he had been murdered. The Olson case grew even more mysterious and strange after the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office convened a grand jury inquiry into the odd death. Critical witnesses died strangely only days and weeks before they were to be questioned by prosecutors; government officials refused to speak and those that did suddenly developed severe memory problems; crucial documents were destroyed and lost; and investigators were intimidated and threatened.

Who killed Frank Olson and why? Why did the U.S. government actively work for over 50 years to conceal and cover up the facts surrounding Olson’s death? What were the bizarre connections between Olson’s death and Lee Harvey Oswald, foreign drug traffickers, and deadly government-sponsored assassins and undercover agents? What was the horrible experiment conducted by the U.S. government that cost Olson his life? What was Frank Olson’s self-admitted “terrible mistake”?

Today, following over ten years of investigation, the shocking truth about Olson’s work and murder is revealed by H.P. Albarelli Jr. in his remarkable and stunning book, A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with H.P. Albarelli Jr. about this amazing book.

About the guest:

H.P. Albarelli Jr. is a writer and investigative reporter who lives in the Tampa Bay area of Florida . He has written numerous feature articles about the 9/11 anthrax attacks; the history of biological warfare; the mysterious death of Dr. Frank Olson; the Cuban revolution; and social and political affairs. Some of these articles can be found on the World Net Daily, Pravda, Cubanet, Counterpunch, and Crime Magazine websites.

Albarelli has also written feature articles for Tampa ‘s alternative newspaper, The Weekly Planet . His work has been acknowledged and cited in American History magazine, and in books by many distinguished authors, including: The Biology of Doom by Ed Regis (Henry Holt and Co., 2001); Alston Chase’s classic, Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist (W.W. Norton, 2003); and The Eighty Greatest Conspiracies of All Time by Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen (Citadel Press, 2004). An accomplished scriptwriter and playwright, Albarelli’s LIFE GOES ON , written with his brother, Dean Albarelli, was published by Witness, a literary journal; in 1995 he produced and directed a regional production of Academy Award winner’s Steve Tesich’s play, On the Open Road . (Brilliantly scored by composer Sam Geppi.)

Albarelli’s six-year investigation into the controversial death of Army biochemist Dr. Frank Olson was the focal point of an hour long television documentary, Mind Control Murder , produced by London’s award-winning Principal Films (David Presswell, director) for A&E’s Investigative Reports, and by independent film producer, Scott Calonico, for the short film LSD a Go-Go shown at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. Albarelli is a graduate of Antioch Law School and has traveled extensively throughout Europe, South Africa , and Asia. He is a noted expert on the history of the CIA’s behavior modification and assassination programs of the 1950s. Books to be published by Albarelli in the near future include: THE HEAP , a novel; A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments ; and STORMY MONDAY , a fictional account of infamous narcotics agent George Hunter White’s activities in the 1950s.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with T.J. English about this devastating article.

About the guest:

Thomas Joseph “T.J.” English comes from a large Irish Catholic family of ten brothers and sisters. Early in his writing career, English worked as a freelance journalist in New York City during the day and drove a taxi at night. He often refers to cab driving as a metaphor for what he does as a writer – cruising the streets, interviewing strangers, exploring the unknown, reporting on what he sees and hears from his sojourns in and around the underworld.

In 1990, English published his first book, The Westies, an account of the last of the Irish Mob in the infamous Manhattan neighborhood known as “Hell’s Kitchen.” The book was the result of a series of reports English wrote for a weekly Irish American newspaper based in New York…
His second book, Born to Kill (1995), was an unprecedented inside account of a violent Vietnamese gang based in New York’s Chinatown, that operated up and down the East Coast. In 2005, English published Paddy Whacked, a sweeping history of the Irish American gangster in New York, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, and other U.S. cities. Most recently, English published Havana Nocturne (2008), an investigative account of U.S. mobster infiltration of Havana, Cuba, in the years before the Revolution swept Fidel Castro into power.

As a journalist, English has written for many magazines and newspapers including: Esquire, Playboy, Irish America, The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times…

In the mid-1990s, he wrote a three-part series for Playboy entitled “The New Mob” that explored the changing face of organized crime in America. His work as a writer has taken him to Cuba, Jamaica, Hong Kong, Mexico, Ireland, and all around the U.S… Most of his articles are on the subject of crime and criminal justice, though English writes on a wide variety of subjects including music, politics, and movies. He has published full-length interviews with Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, actor Bill Murray, director Martin Scorsese, and comedy legend George Carlin, to name a few.

In addition, English is a screenwriter and has penned episodes for the television crime dramas “NYPD Blue” and “Homicide,” for which he was awarded the prestigious Humanitas Prize.

He lives in New York City.

You can find out more about him at his website.

(unedited draft of essay now published in
INTO THE BUZZSAW, Prometheus Press, edited by Kristina Borjesson)

Everything you need to know about mainstream media’s vital role in perpetuating our nation’s three—decade, trillion dollar War on Drugs despite overwhelming evidence that it is a fraud  you can learn by watching a Three Card Monty Operation.

Three Card Monty is a blatant con game where the dealer lays three cards on a folding table,  shows you that one of them is the Queen of Spades, turns them over, shuffles them quickly.  You’re sure you know where the queen is and you saw a guy before you win easily a couple of times,  so you bet your money. If that dopey looking guy can win, so can you.   But, incredibly, you’ve guessed wrong. You lost.  You’ve been taken for a sucker.

The suckers in Three Card Monty cannot possibly win, it’s an obvious and well known con game,  yet, as you walk away, you see a whole line of other suckers, eyes gawking, jaws slack, hands deep in their pockets mesmerized by the show and ready to lay down their money as fast as the dealer can get to them.  Why?    Because they also saw the same dopey looking guy win too, only what they don’t know is that he’s a shill.

Shills are the conmen (and women) who entice suckers into the phony game by putting on a show intended to convince those watching that the game is honest, that if you keep playing you can actually win.  A good shill also helps cover-up the operation by distracting the police away from the illegal action.  In a court of law where three Card Monty dealers are considered crooks and thieves,  shills are considered their “co-conspirators.” They are liable to an equal penalty if indicted and found guilty after trial.   In the Drug War Monty game, mainstream media is nothing less than a shill.

Media’s success as a shill is unparalleled in the history of scams, con jobs and rip-offs and can best be measured by how effectively they continue to sell us a fraud so obvious and so impossible to win that it makes South Bronx Gold Mine certificates look like a conservative investment.

Here’s some of the true history that—thanks to excellent shilling—most of you are unaware of:

When President Nixon first declared war on drugs in 1971, there were less than a half million hard-core addicts in the entire nation,  most of whom were addicted to heroin with the problem being largely centered in inner city areas, the largest percentage of which were all found in the New York City metropolitan area.   Only two federal agencies were charged with any significant  enforcement of  the drug laws—the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and US Customs.  Two agencies that were greater enemies to each other than they would ever be to any drug cartel. The total drug war budget was less than $100 million.

Three decades later, despite the expenditure of $1 trillion in federal and state tax dollars,  the number of hard-core addicts is shortly expected to exceed 5 million.  Our nation has become the Wal-Mart  of the drug world with a wider variety and more drugs available at cheaper prices than ever before.  The problem now not only affects every town and hamlet on the map, it is difficult to find a family anywhere that is not somehow affected.   There are now fifty-five federal and military agencies involved in federal drug enforcement alone (not counting state and local agencies) and US military troops are now invading South and Central American nations under the banner of drug war.  The federal drug war budget alone (not counting state and municipal budgets)  is now well over $20 billion a year,  and my personal quest to find one individual anywhere in the world who could honestly testify that the trillion-dollar , US war on drugs had somehow saved him or her from the white menace has thus far been fruitless.

Do you need a cop to tell you that this is evidence of an overwhelming fraud?  If your stockbroker invested your money the way our elected leaders have done with our Drug War Monty dollars, you’d have jailed or shot him before 1972, yet the game continues.

Why?

Because mainstream media, as they did during  the Vietnam War,   shills us,  by means of an incessant flow of fill-in-the-blanks bullshit “victory” stories into believing that Drug War Monty is a real war that our leaders intend to win.  Media shills, which now includes Hollywood and “entertainment” television and the publishing industry, are continuously conning us into believing that,  if in a fit of sanity, we really tried to end the costly and deadly fraud, some unspeakable horror, like  Mexican and Colombian drug dealers led by the latest Media created “Pablo Escobar” invading across our (for ever) insufficiently protected borders to force-feed our kids heroin and cocaine.    We might even have to arm the Partnership for a Drug Free America with missiles and rockets.

Unless of course our kids “Just say No” as Nancy Reagan’s billion dollar media boondoggle campaign taught them.

And when mainstream media hasn’t directly shilled  us into supporting Drug War Monty, as they do to this day,  they have aided in its perpetuation with their censorship, by conscious omission,  of scandalous events that— had they been reported with the fervor the Washington Post showed during the Watergate era—would have brought the whole deadly and costly charade crumbling to the ground three decades ago.   I know this first hand because I took part in some of the most significant of those events either as a  federal agent, and/or court qualified expert witness, and/or a journalist.

Outrageous Acts:   My Personal Experiences

on Both Sides of The Drug-War-Monty Table

The Vietnam War

The undercover case that brought me into Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War was the most dangerous of my career, only the source of  that danger was not just the dealers.  It was the case that first brought me face-to-face with the fact that, like Vietnam War, the War on Drugs was never intended to be won and that it was a deadly fraud perpetrated against the people paying  for it.  It was also the first case that taught me that a runaway, corrupt federal bureaucracy could count on mainstream media to shill for it.  Ironically, it began on July 4, 1971.

At that time President Nixon had recently declared war on drugs.  Our political leaders had already begun pimping Americans through media megaphones into believing that our growing drug problem was the fault of evil foreigners and that—other than the Vietnam War—the drug problem was our number one national security concern.   I was a young agent with US Customs assigned to the Hard Narcotics Smuggling Unit in New York City. My 25 year old brother David at that point had been a heroin addict for 10 years and I was a TB (True Believer).

It was on that July 4th day that I arrested John Edward Davidson at JFK  International Airport in New York City with three kilos of 99 percent pure white heroin hidden in the false bottom of a Samsonite suitcase and the investigation known as US v Liang Sae Tiew et al began.[1]

By nightfall the investigation had brought my team deep inside a desolate swamp on the outskirts of Gainesville, Florida where a lone trailer was parked at the end of barely visible trail.  During the pre-dawn hours we raided the trailer and arrested the US based financier of the smuggling operation, Alan Trupkin,  and his heroin addicted gofer 22 year old John Clements (remember this name, we’ll see him later).  By the following day I had all the details I needed to destroy one of the biggest heroin import operations on the globe. But there was one major problem to contend with that neither I nor any of the senior officers to whom I reported could have, in our wildest dreams, imagined:  the CIA.

Two years earlier, Davidson, stationed with the army in Vietnam had taken R&R leave in Bangkok.  There he had connected with a Chinese heroin dealer, Liang Sae Tiew a/k/a Gary.  The prices were the cheapest in the world, the supplies unlimited.  After Davidson’s discharge,  all he had to do was smuggle the stuff into the US and he and his partners would be rich.  Seven trips and 21 kilos later  his luck ran out and I arrested him.

Now, to do my job in accordance with my training and the very philosophy of the entire war on drugs, I had to take the next step and go for the source.

One month later I arrived in Bangkok, posing as Davidson’s heroin dealing partner.  Within days I made contact with his heroin connections Gary and some called  “Mr. Geh.” (UC photo available).  At first my presence in Bangkok was kept secret from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, the sworn enemies of US Customs. The war between the two agencies for budget and media had reached the level of fist fights, the arrests of each others’ informants and had, in fact, even come close to a shoot-out. But that’s another story.   My presence I Bangkok was also kept secret from the Thai police whose only competition for the most corrupt police force in recorded history, in my experience, was their Mexican counterparts,  and, the fact was, I was in their country illegally.  At the time undercover operations were illegal in most of the world. It was unthinkable that cops would be permitted to commit crimes to catch criminals.  I’d already been warned by my own bosses that  if the Thai police got wind of me being there to do a drug deal, undercover or otherwise, they would bust my ass and disappear me and my own country would disavow all knowledge.  In short, my butt was way out on a limb and I knew it, but I did not know the half of my problems.

After a week of hanging with the dopers, I had managed to convince that them that I was the capo di tutti fruti of the Mafia hooked into individual Mafiosi across the US, each looking for large quantities of drugs. I was The Main Man.  I told them that I needed a new supplier because my previous source, the French Connection, had been busted.

At the time the largest heroin seizure in history was in the neighborhood of 200 kilos, part of the original French Connection, I knew the case well, I’d played a small role in it.  The two Chinese heroin dealers were as aware of the American market as I was and assured me that these amounts were child’s play  compared to their operation. They had a “factory” in Chiang Mai run by Mr. Geh’s uncle that was churning out a couple of hundred kilos a week.  What didn’t go to the soldiers in Vietnam was going into the veins and brains of American kids. Like my own brother.

I cut a deal:  I would buy a kilo of Dragon Brand for $2500 cash and send it to my US Mafia customers as ‘samples.”  I’d then remain in Thailand awaiting their orders.  I gave Gary and Mr. Geh an estimate that I might need as much as 300 kilos as a first order. The dopers’ price for a 300 kilo load: $2000 a kilo or a very paltry $600,000.  That amount of heroin, at that time, could have met the entire US demand for about 2-3 weeks.  The cost to our nation in death, destruction and taxes was incalculable; the potential profits to the dopers breathtaking.

French Connection heroin was then selling wholesale, delivered in the US, at $20,000 a kilo. The purity of the Dragon Brand heroin I was buying in Asia was as good or better.  It was close to 100% pure, meaning that you could cut (dilute) the stuff up to fourteen times for the street.  The US street price per ounce was $2,000, meaning that a single kilo (40 ounces) of Asian heroin at $2,000 could theoretically gross $1,120,000.  Now just multiply that by 300 kilos and your original investment of $600,000 has now yielded more than $300 million.

At the moment I had everything I needed to destroy the operation but its location, but I knew how to remedy that.   I made one proviso:  I demanded to personally inspect their heroin producing facilities in Chiang Mai— “The Factory”—before finalizing the deal.   If they agreed, I would be one step away from destroying them.

Within days, the two dealers made contact with the factory’s owner, Mr. Geh’s uncle.  He agreed to go forward with the transaction and authorized me to inspect The Factory after I bought the first sample kilo.

Sitting in my room at the Siam Intercontinental that night, alone, I replayed the words of the heroin dealers on a mini—recorder. The implication of what I had just learned to our nation, to my own heroin-addicted brother, mixed with the bullshit exhortations of our political leaders, seemed to sink deep inside of me.  I felt as if I were playing some hero role in a John Wayne (now Tom Clancy) movie.   I was in position to do what our leaders and mainstream media had psyched me to do: strike at the heart of America’s greatest enemies.

I was on a mission from God.

I was a naïve idiot.

Bam! The adrenaline was pumping.  I was moving.  I made contact with my control officer, Customs Attaché Joe Jenkins.  At a pre-dawn meeting I brought him up to date.  He was as excited as I was but a lot more reserved. I could tell there was something he wasn’t telling me but  at the moment I had a pressing need.  I was almost broke. I needed cash to maintain my cover as a ‘big time” dope dealer, $2500 cash for the first kilo of heroin.  Hell, I didn’t even have enough money left to pay my hotel bill.  I was already receiving notes under my door from the management asking me to bring it up to date.

Jenkins instructed me to meet him later at a girlie bar on Sukamvit.   By that time he assured me, he’d have headquarters and—more important— embassy approvals  for the operation to proceed.  And—most important— he’d have money.

Late that night I met Jenkins again.  As three butt naked, Oriental doll women in 4” spike heels performed a somnambulistic, wriggle-writhe-squat over beer bottles, on the bar above us to a Rolling Stones album blasted on monstrous speakers, Jenkins shouted that he had neither approvals nor money.   From that point on, things got strange.  Very strange.

The suddenly nervous Jenkins, his eyes jerking at every movement in the shadows around us,  gave me Kafkaesque, bureaucratic reasons for the delays, saying he needed specific signatures from specific bureaucrats in Washington who were, for some reason or other, unavailable.   He fed me other bullshit that only a brain-numbed, government employee would find normal.

I went back to my room and began stalling both the hotel and the drug dealers. My people are being cautious; they are sending me a courier.  They take no chances.  Etc., etc., etc, ad nauseum.

At first the dopers thought that the caution of “my people” was admirable, but when more than a week had passed and the delays continued I found myself out of excuses and in serious danger.  For the first time in my life I heard myself utter the threat “I’m going to the press.” Jenkins looked at me and just rolled his eyes. He recognized an idiot when he saw one.

Some time before dawn, I was called into the embassy for a meeting with the first CIA  officer I’d ever knowingly met. He gave no name, I didn’t ask for one.  Joe had told me he was CIA, that was all I needed.  The guy was short, stocky, bald and wearing what I would come to know was a typical CIA uniform: a khaki leisure suit.  He looked at me with a mixture of bemusement and disdain that I would also learn was typical.

“You’re not going to Chiang Mai” he said. “We just lost a man up there. It’s dangerous.”

“But I’m an undercover,” I protested. “Already certified crazy.  I didn’t take this job to be safe.”

Like I said: a naive  idiot.

After not much discussion the spook looked at his watch and cut the conversation short.  “You served in the military, right? (He didn’t wait for my answer) Well, our country has other priorities [than the drug war].”   He was firm—I was not going to Chiang Mai and that was it.   CIA had made the decision for us—a harbinger of things to come.   My instructions were to buy the single kilo of heroin and set up the arrest whomever delivered it.  Then I was to leave the country ASAP.  Case closed.

This was years before the CIA would come to be known among DEA agents assigned overseas as The Criminal Inept Agency and later the Cocaine Import Agency.  Years before anyone with a government job questioned the judgment of the gang that can’t spy straight.  Years before I would state on my own radio show that the CIA seal at Langley, instead of reading  “…and the truth shall set you free”  ought to read “…and the truth shall piss you off.”[2]

I’d stumbled into a quick look at an ugly truth that would haunt me for the rest of my life, but at that moment I was not prepared to believe it. I had served three years in the military as an Air Force Sentry Dog Handler—combat trained military police.  I’d been an undercover federal agent for six years. I was a good soldier, trained to follow orders. I believed in the virtue and morality of my leaders.   Like the devoted husband who catches his beloved wife exchanging a torrid look with the pizza delivery boy, the truth was too emotionally charged for me to absorb.  It was much easier for me to accept that the CIA man knew more than I did and that it was in our national interest for me to simply follow orders.

And that’s what I did. I ordered the kilo of heroin and busted the two Chinese dealers on the spot.  Back in the US I received a Treasury Act Special Award for the first case of its kind, one agent traveling the globe to “destroy” a heroin operation.  Another “victory” for the US media shill factory.

For a while I was lost in my own press notices.

But I was no longer the same unquestioning young undercover agent. My cop instinct nagged at me,  told me something was wrong. Within a year I would learn that the Chiang Mai “factory” that I’d been prevented from destroying by CIA was the source of massive amounts of heroin being smuggled into the US in the bodies and body bags of GIs killed in Vietnam.[3] All I could do was pray that CIA knew what it was doing.   At that time I rather foolishly believed that they had the best interests of the American people at heart, but how competent were they?  And if they weren’t competent, who do you turn to blow the whistle? Congress?  The media?

I was a well trained, experienced undercover operative who, when in doubt, observes closely, documents what he sees but takes no action—one of the reasons, I believe, that I survived my career.    And in the early 1970s there were very few in a better position than I was to observe the development of Drug War Monty.

My unit, the Hard Narcotics Smuggling Squad, was a small, group of men (16-20)  charged with the investigation of all heroin and cocaine smuggling through the Port of New York, the home of the majority of our nation’s hard-core drug addicts. By necessity my unit became involved in the investigation of every major smuggling operation known to law enforcement.  We could not avoid witnessing CIA protection of major drug dealers.

In fact throughout the Vietnam War, while massive amounts of heroin emanating from the Golden Triangle Area were documented by us as flooding into the US, and tens of thousands of our fighting men were coming home addicted, not a single important heroin source in Southeast Asia was ever indicted by US law enforcement. This was no accident.  Case after case, like US v Liang Sae Tiew et.al., was killed by CIA and State Department intervention and there wasn’t a damned thing we could do about it.

It was also during those years that we became aware that CIA had gone well beyond simply protecting their drug dealing assets. Agency owned proprietary airlines like Air America were being used to ferry drugs throughout Southeast Asia allegedly in support of our “allies.” (With friends like these…)    CIA banking operations were used to launder drug money.  CIA was learning the drug business and learning it well.

Those of us on the inside who were aware of the these glaring inconsistencies between drug war policy as reported through mass mainstream media and its reality, were afraid to turn to either congress or to media for help.  It seemed impossible that anyone with any knowledge whatsoever of our growing drug problem would not have noticed the absence of enforcement in Southeast Asia.   It was just too big, too out in the open.   During those years I believe a good journalist would have had many frustrated, “inside sources” to quote from, yet no stories appeared.

It was also during those waning years of Vietnam that CIA protection of drug dealers spread to other areas under our watch.   As cocaine traffickers grew  in economic and political importance in South and Central America  so did their importance to CIA and other covert US agencies.

For example, in 1972, being fluent in Spanish I was assigned to assist in a major international drug case involving top Panamanian government officials whom were using diplomatic passports to smuggle large quantities of heroin and other drugs into the US.  The name Manuel Noriega surfaced as prominent in the investigation.  Surfacing right behind Noriega was the CIA to protect him from US law enforcement.

After President Nixon declared war on drugs in 1971 and all our political leaders began bleating about how drugs were our number one national security threat, Congress began to raise our taxes and the drug war budget on a regular basis that continues to this day.  Meanwhile, CIA and the Department of State were protecting more and more politically powerful drug traffickers around the world: the Mujihideen in Afghanistan, the Bolivian  cocaine cartels, the top levels of the Mexican government, top Panama-based money launderers, the Nicaraguan Contras, right wing Colombian drug dealers and politicians, and others.[4]

Under US law, protecting drug trafficking was and still is considered Conspiracy to Traffic in Drugs—a felony violation of federal and state laws. President George Bush Sr. Once said it: “All those who look the other way at drug trafficking are as guilty as the drug dealer.”  Ironically, not too many years earlier as head of CIA, Mr. Bush had authorized a salary for Manuel Noriega as a CIA asset, while the little dictator was listed in as many as forty DEA computer files as a drug dealer.  Seems only fitting that CIA named its headquarters after Mr. Bush.

In any case,  it was clear to us on the inside of international drug enforcement that Congress was either well aware of what was going on, or guilty of terminal ineptitude.  It was also clear to us that CIA protection of international narcotic traffickers depended heavily on the active collaboration of mainstream media as shills.

Media’s shill duties,  as I experienced them firsthand,  were twofold: first, keep silent about the gush of drugs that was allowed to continue unimpeded into the US;  second, to divert the public’s attention by shilling them into believing the drug war was legitimate by falsely presenting those few trickles law enforcement was permitted to stop as though they were major “victories” when in fact we were doing nothing more than getting rid of the inefficient competitors of CIA assets.

I began to notice the fill-in-the-blanks drug stories.  Every week a new “drug baron”, a new drug-corrupted government was (and continues to be) presented by media as a new “threat” to American kids.   Every case, many of which I took part in,  was headlined in the media as a “US Authorities Announce Major Blow Against (fill in the blank) Drug Cartel.”  Every country and national leader that CIA and State wanted to slander (i.e. Castro and Cuba, the Sandanistas and leftist guerrillas anywhere)— was headlined as “US Sources Say  (fill in the blanks) Poses New Narco-Trafficking Threat. ”  Foreign leaders and nations whose images CIA and State wanted to keep clean (i.e.  Manny Noriega for two decades and Mexico and every one of its Presidents since NAFTA) were headlined as,  “ (fill in the blanks) New Anti-drug Efforts Win Trust of US Officials.”[5]

The media continues to do their shill job well and Drug War Monty continues to grow massively as does our nation’s drug problems.

The “Cocaine Coup”.

On July 17, 1980, for the first time in history, drug traffickers actually took control of a nation. It was not just any nation, it was Bolivia, at the time the source of virtually 100 percent of the cocaine entering the United States.[6] The “Cocaine Coup” was the bloodiest in Bolivia’s history. It came at a time that the US demand for cocaine was skyrocketing to the point that, in order to satisfy it, suppliers had to consolidate raw materials and production and get rid of inefficient producers.   Its result was the creation of what came to be known as La Corporacion—The Corporation—in essence, the General Motors or OPEC of Cocaine.

Immediately after the coup production of cocaine increased massively until, in short order, it outstripped supply.  It was the true beginning of the cocaine and crack “plague” as the media and hack politicians never tire of calling it.   July 17, 1980 is truly a day that should live in equal infamy along with December 7^th, 1941.  There are few events in history that have caused more and longer lasting damage to our nation.

What America was never told, in spite of mainstream media having the information and a prime, inside source who was ready to go public with the story,  was that the coup was carried out with the aid and participation of Central Intelligence.  The source would also testify and prove that, in order to carry out that coup,  the CIA, State and Justice departments had to combine forces to protect their drug dealing assets by destroying a DEA investigation—US v Roberto Suarez, et al.    How do I know?  I was that inside source.[7]

All the events I am referring to are detailed in my book The Big White Lie, a book that,  to date,  has been virtually ignored by mainstream media—with good reason, as I hope this chapter makes clear.[8] The documentation of the events portrayed was carried out in accordance with accepted techniques and practices of evidence gathering as taught in each of the four federal law enforcement training academies I attended.  I took precisely the same precautions I would have taken were I preparing a case for a jury, backing up every assertion with solid evidence in the form of reports and tape-recorded conversations.

The Big White Lie is, at present, out-of-print, but it is available in libraries.  I can only urge the reader, particularly those in law enforcement and the legal professions to read it and judge its evidentiary value for yourselves.

During the months after the Bolivian coup I watched the massive news coverage with astonishment.  Nothing even came close to the true and easily provable events.  All of it was accurate in that it frighteningly  portrayed the new Bolivian government as one comprised of expatriate Nazis like Klaus Barbie and drug dealers like Roberto Suarez and that the power and influence of the drug economy was much greater than all the US experts had imagined, but it left out the most important fact of all:  It was CIA directed and US taxpayer dollars that had put these guys in power.

As I detailed in the book, the failure of US media to cover what was arguably the most significant  event in drug war history was enough to push me over the edge.

I was no hero, believe me.  I was an undercover operative who knew well how to play the angles, not someone who took unreasonable chances.  But this was not that long after Woodward and Bernstein and the Washington Post’s concentrated, full-court- press attack on the Watergate affair that resulted in real indictments and prison sentences for crimes a lot less serious than what I was about to report.  The media still seemed to offer some hope.  I could not believe that the failure to accurately cover the Cocaine Revolution was intentional.   I would provide them with the missing pieces. I would be the Drug War’s  Deep Throat.

The smoking gun evidence of the CIA’s role in the Bolivian coup could be found in the Roberto Suarez case, a complicated, DEA covert operation that I had run only two months before the Coca Revolution.  Media shills had trumpeted it as the greatest undercover sting operation in history.   Its finale occurred when Bolivian cartel leaders, Roberto Gasser and Alfredo Gutierrez, were arrested outside a Miami bank after I had paid them $8 million dollars for the then-largest load of cocaine in history.  Some of the actual facts of the case were used in the screenplay for Al Pacino’s Scarface.

What America was never told before the publication of my book was that within weeks of their headlined arrests, both Gasser and Gutierrez were released from jail.   When I learned from my post in Argentina that these two men and their drug cartel were key players in the Cocaine Revolution and that the whole thing was CIA  inspired and supported,  I wrote anonymous letters to The New York Times ,  The Washington Post and the Miami Herald.

In spite of the fact that the letters contained enough information to convince them that I was in fact “a highly placed source” and to furnish them with information and leads that would quickly and easily lead a true investigative journalist to the truth, nothing happened.  Ironically, the only journalists who were at all curious about the sudden disappearance of the case from mainstream media news and the DEA’s reluctance to even talk about it, were working for High Times. They wrote this about the Suarez case:

“The drug Enforcement Administration will confirm that the arrests were made but will go no further.  This is curious, because [the operation] may have been the all-time great sting operation….”

The other message mainstream media began to deliver with shill-like efficiency,  were the unquestioned bleatings of politicians, bureaucrats and media-anointed “experts” of how, as a result of the Cocaine Coup, it was more urgent than ever that more money be budgeted and more federal enforcement agencies and military branches  tasked to fight the war on drugs. President Carter even mandated CIA to get involved in fighting drugs.

When this last hit the news, I ran a little test at the embassy in Buenos Aires,  just so that I could say I did it.  I asked the CIA station chief to lend me a spy camera to cover an undercover operation I had going in Buenos Aires. “I’m back into the Bolivian cartel” I told him.    The top spook didn’t hesitate nor blink an eye when he said he didn’t have one single camera available. CIA was simply not going to help me in any way that might, no matter how remotely,  jeopardize their “assets.”  How, I wondered, could any

international, DEA agent who took his job and oath seriously,  be considered anything but a threat by CIA?  In my Secret Country Report for the year I put the “paradoxical” situation in as diplomatic terms as I could muster, pointing out that our policy makers, where the war on drugs was concerned, seemed to be at odds with each other.   Of course, as I expected, I received neither answer nor comment.

Then the “news” story hit that pushed me over the edge, the story that would change my life.  Larry Rohter and Steven Strasser of Newsweek had just authored a feature piece on the Bolivian Cocaine Coup that was, in my opinion, the hydrogen bomb of drug war scare stories.   Maybe the greatest Drug War Monty story of all time.  It detailed how drug money had not only funded the Bolivian cocaine coup but was now funding revolutions around the world.  How many of these revolutions, I wondered, were backed by CIA and American taxpayer dollars?  But then how, I wondered, could the journalists know the truth unless they had a Deep Throat to steer them straight?[9]

I flew into action without thinking.  I should have heeded the words of the CIA chief played by Cliff Robertson in Three Days of the Condor. — a warning that should be issued to all potential real-life government whistleblowers.  Near the end of the movie, after a CIA employee, played by Robert Redford,  had escaped two hours of Agency attempts to kill him to prevent him from blowing the whistle on some typically depraved CIA plot—although Hollywood CIA plots are always so much more clever than the real goofball variety— he is about to enter the front door of a major newspaper (think NY Times, Washington Post)).  There waiting for him is the head of the CIA played by Cliff Robertson who smiles shrewdly and utters the last line of the movie:   “What makes you think they’ll print the story?”

Fade to black.

But my mind was full of Woodwards and Bernsteins.    I sat down at my desk in the American embassy and wrote the kind of letter that I never  in life imagined myself writing.  After fully identifying myself I detailed, in three type-written pages written on official US embassy stationary, enough evidence of my charges to feed a wolf pack of investigative journalists along with my willingness to be a quotable source.   I addressed it directly to Strasser and Rohter care of Newsweek. And sent it registered mail return receipt requested.   Within a couple of weeks I received the receipt (which I still have) and waited anxiously to hear from them.  Two sleepless weeks later I was still sitting in my embassy office staring at the phone.  Three weeks later, it rang.

It was DEA’s Internal Security.  They were calling me to notify me that I was under investigation.   I had been falsely accused of everything from black-marketing and having sex with a married. female DEA agent during an undercover assignment to “playing loud rock music on my radio and disturbing other embassy personnel,”  an investigation that would wreak havoc with my entire life for the next four years.[10] My days as the whistle-blowing diplomat were cut short. I would end up a lot luckier than most high-level government whistle-blowers.  I would survive.    When push came to shove, I was a well trained undercover with the survival skills of a Bronx Roach.

DEA Headquarters

Back in the “Palace of Suits” I decided that to survive the ongoing and ever expanding onslaught from Internal Security, I would follow the sage advice of a veteran suit:  “A bureaucracy has a short memory. Keep your mouth shut and the suits will forget you even exist.”   And that’s exactly what did happen.  To survive, I became a Drug War Monty player.

On my first day back at DEA headquarters in DC, assigned to the Cocaine Desk,  I fielded a phone call from a wire service journalist.  The newsie wanted to know what percentage of drugs being smuggled into the US were intercepted at the borders.  During my negotiations with the Bolivian Cartel the top cocaine producers in the world at the time, I was told that they factored a less than one percent loss at the US borders.   Before I could answer,  one of the other desk officers overheard the conversation and said: “Tell him ten percent.  That’s the [official] number.”  I repeated the number and ten percent was the number published in the story.

It was that easy.  The same phony percentage was used over the next two decades without a single so-called journalist ever asking the logical questions: How can you possibly know that you are intercepting ten percent? and Who is doing the calculations?  It is interesting to note that the magic number has recently been drastically increased and it is Hollywood now helping out with the shill job.

I noticed what I recognized as a “rigged” scene in the recent hit movie Traffic.   (Its important to note that the movie was shot with both the cooperation and collaboration of the Drug War Monty suits). The “Drug Czar” played by Michael Douglas is visiting a US— Mexican border crossing.  He asks a real-life Customs officer (drafted for the movie role)  what percentage of drugs are intercepted at the border.  The answer, blasted in an unnaturally loud voice, is “forty-eight percent.”

Ten percent to forty-eight percent in twenty years, and there are more drugs on the streets than ever before??  An Academy Award winning movie?  If this isn’t shilling I don’t know what is.

But you’ve got to remember dealers and shills have no shame at all.   And, I suppose you could say that neither did I, because for the next five or so years, I took an active and conscious part in Drug War Monty.

Operation Hun and South Florida Task Force

I spent much of 1983 shuttling between an undercover assignment on “Operation Hun” and a temporary post as a supervisor in Vice President Bush’s south Florida Task Force.  Operation Hun, ironically,    was aimed at bringing down the same Bolivian  drug trafficking government that CIA had put into power three years earlier. As I detailed in The Big White Lie, the operation, which could have truly been one of the most successful in DEA’s history,  was still controlled by CIA and ultimately destroyed in order to hide the fact that protected CIA assets were the guys responsible for producing and distributing almost all the world’s cocaine at the time.  I can only urge everyone with an interest to read it as if it were one of my prosecution case reports.

When I wasn’t working undercover in Hun, I filled two consecutive assignments in Vice President Bush’s task force. My first was Watch Commander, which basically meant that, during my watch, I was to notify Washington of every drug seizure so that a press releases and Television appearances could be scheduled for Mr. Bush’s, first-in-history “Drug Czar,” Admiral Murphy.  My second task force assignment was as Supervisor of Miami Airport Operations.  I had about 14-16 DEA and Customs agents under my command. Our job was mostly to conduct follow-up investigations of customs drug smuggling arrests at the airport.   The trouble with both jobs and the whole South Florida Task force concept was that it was all an expensive Drug War Monty  publicity stunt. A massive shill job.

Vice President Bush and his Drug Czar, through the ever reliable media, would shill the public into believing that drug seizures in South Florida had doubled.  On any Sunday morning you couldn’t avoid seeing Drug Czar, Admiral Murphy— the “Little Admiral” as we used to call him— on two, three and four popular news shows, waving the drug war victory flags.   The media driven shilling of the public during this period was relentless.  Check it out for yourself. It’s easy to research on the Internet.  There was only one trouble with the claims of drug war victory:  they were pure Drug War Monty—bogus and easily disproved.

The same drug seizures that DEA,  Coast Guard and Customs were normally making in the South Florida area prior to existence of the task force,  were now being turned over to the task force and trumpeted as “victories” when in reality there were no more seizures than before.

What was even more fraudulent, if this was possible, was that the seizures were now being double counted for congressional budget hearings.  Customs would seize 1000 pounds of marijuana and turn it over to the task force.  Both the task force and customs would count the seizures on their yearly statistics for Congress.  The media points all went to the VP’s task force.  The bill, as always,  to the US taxpayer. And thanks to media shilling, everyone but the American taxpayer was aware of the fraud and the perpetrators were made to look like heroes.

Did the media know the truth and hide it?

I personally tipped off at least a dozen “journalists” who called for information and know of other agents who did the same.  It would not have taken much investigation to verify what we were saying—no more than a couple of phone calls to the agencies involved—yet nothing ever surfaced.  Shills don’t tell marks anything, do they?

Afghan and Contra Wars

While a barrage of media headlines continued to shill America’s attention toward Vice President Bush’s South Florida Task Force as a valiant and effective drug war effort—the sucker card—  the real action that was consciously omitted from news coverage was that some of the biggest drug dealers in the world were funneling  drugs directly into the veins and brains of America’s children with the protection of CIA and the State Department. Namely, the Nicaraguan Contras and the Mujihideen rebels in Afghanistan.

For the entire duration of the Contra war, we in DEA had documented the Contras—those “heroes” as Ollie North called them— as putting at least as much cocaine on American streets as the Medellin Cartel.  We had also documented the Mujihideen as vying for first place as America’s source of Heroin.   Yet, not a single case of any significance was allowed to go forward to prosecution against either entity.   All were effectively blocked by CIA and State.

The media’s shilling and misdirection was both relentless and effective. As an example, Ollie North was voted in a media poll as one of the “ten most admired” in the nation in spite of the fact that his efforts to protect major drug dealers and killers like Honduran army general Bueso-Rosa  from prosecution had been well documented by Congress.  Astoundingly, North, a CIA station chief and a US ambassador had been banned from entering Costa Rica for running drugs through that democratic nation into the US, (among other crimes), by that country’s Nobel prize winning President, Oscar Arias,  yet the news barely surfaced in the US.   Now compare this to Monica Lewinsky coverage.[11]

Even drug-dealing Contra supporters in other countries were being protected. In one glaring case, an associate of mine was sent into Honduras to open a DEA office in Tegucigalpa.  Within months he had documented that as much as fifty tons of cocaine had been sent into the US by Honduran military people who were supporting the Contras. Enough cocaine to fill a third of the US demand.  What was the DEA response?  They closed the office. [12] The tip-offs—both anonymous and straight out —to journalists continued to fly from sources within DEA and other agencies, yet not one significant truthful story ever surfaced.

Back in the Big Apple—the Drug War Media Capital

In 1984 I received a hardship transfer back to New York.  My daughter living there now had a drug problem.  By this time my brother David, a 19 year heroin addict had committed suicide in Miami, leaving a note that said: “I can’t stand the drugs any more.”  I was going to do whatever it took to save my little girl.

In New York City I was assigned as the supervisor of an active squad that was constantly being called out to stage raids for television news, CBS, ABC, etc. all the big players.  On a slow news day the SAC would get a call:  You guys got anything going down we can put on the eleven o’clock news?   We could always come up with something.  What was good for their ratings was good for our budget.

During those years if you linked every doper the media shilled as a member of either the Medellin or Cali Cartels, hand in hand, the chain would reach the moon.   The Cartels were so effectively painted as  devils that even the normally level headed Mayor Ed Koch called for the bombing of Colombia.  Ironically that is exactly what we’re doing now.

I played the game, led the bogus raids,  gave the newsies whatever they needed to sell papers or raise ratings. As an insider I learned the secret of the drug war generals’ control over the media shills.

Drug stories sold newspapers, got media ratings and made great screen stories for Hollywood and television—as they still do.  To get “access” to a police agency, that is to get the “inside story” and “credibility” the media executives, producers and editors have to play the game.  They can’t broadcast or write an unfriendly story  and expect an open door the next day.  You don’t make a tell-all movie and expect to film it with US government cooperation, do you?

The bottom line is money.  No one in mainstream media’s taken an oath to protect anything but their jobs—not a criticism, just a fact. Fourth estate might as well be fifth, sixth or seventh estate, it’s all bullshit.    For the money, mainstream media could (and can) be counted upon to shill the Drug War Monty game as if their collective bank accounts depended on it.  But this was only part of the media economic story.  It would get worse.  Much worse.

There were a few of us who, in sudden fits of madness or naiveté, did risk our lives and careers to blow the whistle.  More often than not we’d find ourselves telling some incredulous Columbia School of Journalism-trained newsie that the current “news” release issued by (fill-in-the-blank) Drug War Monty agency talking about the “new political hope” in Mexico and/or Colombia and/or (fill-in-blank) who was going to “clean up”  government drug corruption, was just a repeat of the same bullshit story that ‘s been printed every couple of months since the beginning of  time. And if they didn’t believe us, all they had to do was check their own archives.

We’d tell them that our first-hand experience on the front lines had taught us that, as long as Americans bought hundreds of billions in illegal drugs, there could be no new hope and that to ignore this history and to print or broadcast that bullshit  was no different than shilling for Three Card Monty.

The typical newsie answer would be a blank stare.   Blank because they didn’t have the slightest idea what we were talking about, nor the curiosity to research it.  Blank, because while they’ve been trained in sound bites, ellipses and correct language, they haven’t the slightest notion of the history or inner workings of  Drug War Monty.  They don’t even know that Conspiracy is the federal law responsible for the majority of humans in cages.   Their editors tell them that whatever “credentialed government spokespeople” say (usually some public affairs officer)  is the story. They are assigned to be reporters, not investigative journalists.

Meanwhile these encounters leave you, the potential whistleblower, with a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that makes you wish you’d kept your damned mouth shut.

But back then, except for those few fleeting moments of sheer madness, I no longer had the slightest desire to play the Robert Redford role in my own movie. I had a daughter on drugs, a mortgage and a debt-financed life.  The only thing between myself and ruination was my job. I had learned the Three Days of the Condor lesson well:  they most definitely would not print the story.

Then, in 1987, I was once again pushed over the edge.  There would be no turning back.

Operation Trifecta—Deep Cover

By 1987, as the DEA suit had predicted, I’d kept my mouth shut and my “sins” had been forgotten.  DEA Headquarters was now asking me to play a lead role in a deep cover sting operation that would become The New York Times best-selling book, Deep Cover.

Posing as a Puerto Rican-Sicilian Mafia chief, myself and a small cadre of  DEA and Customs undercover agents managed to penetrate to the top of the drug world in three countries: Bolivia, Panama and Mexico.  DEA called it “Operation Trifecta.” Customs name for it was “Operation Saber.”   Our fictitious little “Mafia” managed to make a 15 ton cocaine purchase and smuggling deal with the Bolivian drug cartel known as La Corporacion, the same group that the CIA helped in its takeover of Bolivia, the same  group responsible for most of the cocaine base being processed in Colombia to this day.

Hidden video cameras rolled as I negotiated the price and quantity of the drugs with top representatives of the cartel.  The deal done, I sent undercover pilots into the jungles of Bolivia to verify that the cocaine was on the ground and ready for delivery.  Then I arranged with top Mexican government officials for military protection of the drug shipments as they transited through Mexico into the United States.  Among those with whom I negotiated directly were Colonel Jaime Carranza, grandson of Mexico’s former President, Venustiano Carranza, and Pablo Giron, a bodyguard of Mexico’s President-elect at the time, Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

To verify that the Mexican government was keeping its part of the deal, “Mafia” representatives (undercover officers) were dispatched to Mexico to observe military units preparing our landing field.  As part of the deal, my first drug payment—five million dollars in cash— would be made to Remberto Rodriguez, chief money launderer for the Bolivian and Colombian Cartels.  His operation, as the Cartel leaders told me,  was protected by—  then, CIA asset— Manuel Noriega. I personally went to Rodriguez’s headquarters in Panama City where we made arrangements for the first transfer of the down payment of $5 million cash and shook hands on the deal.

During this harrowing assignment our undercover team gathered hard evidence in the form of secretly recorded video and audio—tapes, first hand observations and secret government intelligence reports that clearly indicated that members of the military and staff of incoming President of Mexico Carlos Salinas  de Gortari were planning to open the Mexican border for drug smuggling once he took office as President and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) was passed.  Hard evidence that that they had already begun to put their plan into action.

We had also stumbled onto evidence indicating that the corrupt Mexican officials we were negotiating with were also directly involved in training CIA-supported Contras.  We uncovered uninvestigated, personal links between US government officials (including at least one DEA officer) and corrupt Mexican government officials, some of whom may have been involved in the torture/murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena and/or its cover-up.

And we had proof that the US paramilitary operation in the Andean Region (then Operation Snowcap, now Plan Colombia and/or  The Andean Initiative) was a premeditated fraud on the American people, never intended to have any effect on the supply of drugs from its inception.

As I detailed in Deep Cover, once top officials in our government became aware of what we had uncovered, the CIA became involved.[1]We had gone too far and had to be stopped.    The top drug dealers, the Panama based money-laundering operation, and the high-ranking corrupt Mexican government officials that we had snared were effectively protected from prosecution.  Operations Trifecta and Saber were destroyed.

Once again I can only urge the reader of this chapter to read the book and judge it for its factual value keeping in mind that the information in it was never intended to be a book.

In the book, I detail how all the revelations listed above were first presented to DEA’s Internal Affairs in one lengthy memorandum that I named the “Memo Bomb.”  I was hoping—naively—that it would end up in the hands of someone in government with a conscience, some bureaucrat or politician who took his/her oath to defend the Constitution seriously.   When I learned that it was going to be covered up I didn’t even consider turning to media.  I began writing Deep Cover, which was published three months after I retired.

The book made The New York Times bestseller list despite being virtually ignored by mainstream media and Congress.  What little media coverage it did receive portrayed me as a disgruntled whistleblower.  Why?  Because that is what “credentialed government spokespeople” said I was.

DEA and Justice Department officials refused to comment on any of the specifics.  Not one single mainstream media journalist undertook to do what my publisher’s (Delacorte Press) attorneys had done: conduct a libel reading, or a detailed examination of how I had documented my facts.  I was a man whose words in courts across the land were credible enough to convict and sentence thousands to tens of thousands of years in prisons.  My book screamed in a loud clear voice that the drug war was a premeditated fraud, yet no one in media was interested in investigating the story.

In 1991, Bill Mayors’ “Project Censored” called Deep Cover one of America’s ten most censored stories.  During the taping of a show with Mr. Moyers he commented to me that he’d heard that Deep Cover was The best read and least talked about book between the [Washington DC] beltways.    I had already heard the same thing from my own sources inside DEA and other agencies.

I pointed out to Mr. Moyers that what I found both frightening and depressing about the whole affair was that, despite the fact that a team of US undercover agents had uncovered hard evidence of massive Mexican government drug corruption and involvement in the torture/murder of a DEA agent, our Congress had granted them “cooperating nation”  status in the drug war, meaning that they would be rewarded with US taxpayer dollars for their betrayal.   I also told Moyers that I was deeply disturbed that despite the book’s well-documented revelations showing that Operation Snowcap was a premeditated fraud, Congress was expanding the militarized South American drug war without even making a single inquiry.

All Mr. Moyers could do was shake his head the way a streetwise cop does when he watches the suckers line up to play Three Card Monty.

And as the Plan Colombia war body count continues
to mount, including the shooting down of an aircraft
belonging to religious missionaries.

Could this have happened if mainstream media had pursued the facts and leads revealed in Deep Cover with the aggressive persistence shown during the Watergate and Monica Lewinsky affairs?  I think not. Instead they averted their collective gazes and continued the barrage of fill-in-the-blanks Drug War Monty stories.  And the suckers watched the show and continued to pay.

Ten Years of Journalism

After my retirement and the publication of Deep Cover, I wrote Fight Back, How To Take Back Your Neighborhood, Schools and Families From the DRUG DEALERS, [13] followed by The Big White Lie (co-written with Laura Kavanau-Levine). Whatever I thought I knew about Drug War Monty and how to fight it was now in book form, but I still had a lot to learn, only now from the opposite angle.

Beginning with my retirement from DEA on 1/1/90 up to this moment, I have been active as a free-lance print journalist, media consultant and on-air drug and crime expert, as well as an Expert Witness on all matters related to drug trafficking and the use of deadly force in federal and state courts.  Since 1997, I have been the host of The Expert Witness Radio Show, which airs on WBAI, 99.5 FM in New York City and KPFK, 90.7 FM in Los Angeles.  The show features interviews with front-line participants in major Drug War Monty events and other crime and espionage stories that mainstream media have either misrepresented or consciously ignored.

The screaming need for the show was best illustrated during a three- hour interview of four veteran federal agents called  “100 Years Experience.”[1] It was a roundtable discussion with Ralph McGeehee (25 years with CIA), Dennis Dayle  (27 years with DEA), Wesley Swearingen (25 years with FBI) and me (25 years with DEA, Customs, IRS Intelligence and BATF).    All of us had taken part in some of the highest profile events in law enforcement, military and espionage history.  All of us easily agreed that not a single one of these events—from the Vietnam War and Cointelpro to the entire War on Drugs—had been reported honestly by mainstream media.   (CD Now available under title FIRST WARNING, from web site).

Dennis Dayle, a principal subject in James Mills’ best selling book, Underground Empire, stated that the CIA had interfered with and/or destroyed every major international drug dealing investigation he had ever conducted.  You remember seeing that anywhere in the news?

Now, as a journalist,  I want to give you details on some of the most important events that I experienced first-hand and the media shilling that went on as they unfolded.[1][14]

Drug War Invasion of Panama.[15]

As I’ve already said, it was as early as 1971, when I was serving in the US Customs Hard Narcotics Smuggling Unit, that I became personally aware that both US Customs and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs knew very well that Manuel Noriega was heavily involved in drug trafficking to the United States, and that he was protected from prosecution by the gang that can’t spy straight.

This wacky little drug dealer, like countless other criminals doing damage to America,  was on the CIA payroll.   He’d even had lunch with George Bush.   Ollie North had been assigned to “clean up his image.”     The protection had been going on for so long and was so well known that no one in the CIA had bothered to tell DEA agent Danny Moritz and federal prosecutor Richard Gregorie that the dude was off limits.[16]

So the same CIA that didn’t know that the Berlin Wall was coming down until the bricks were hitting them in the head, didn’t learn that their two-decade, drug dealing asset Manny “Pineapple Face” Noriega was getting indicted until it was too late.  Now there was a problem, a problem that only media shills could handle.[1]

On the evening of December 20, 1989, I watched with a mixture of horror and wonder as Noriega’s fortress of a home was blown to smithereens along with Chorillo, Panama City’s entire inner city area.  It was the opening shot of America’s first full scale drug war invasion.  Hundreds, perhaps thousands (depending on whom you believe) of Panamanians died.  Women, children, tiny babies.  Burned, shot, mutilated by our finest and most advanced weaponry.  It was a great opportunity to try out our stealth bombers and fighter planes.  I could not help but be reminded of the Nazi bombing of Guernica, Spain.

I guess the stuff really works.

Twenty-six American soldiers also died, many of them shot by friendly fire. All this awesome firepower and death to arrest a man whose drug dealing the CIA had been protecting for almost two decades.  How, I wondered, were the drug war generals and the CIA gonna hide the truth behind this grotesque atrocity?

Media shills to the rescue.

Within months, the media coverage had omitted and obliterated and/or minimized and/or  trivialized Manuel Noriega’s true history and reputation with the CIA and DEA and turned the event into a major drug war “victory.”  So effective was the media shilling that instead of being indicted as a co-conspirator, George Bush Sr. enjoyed a massive surge in his popularity ratings.  Lee Atwater, the Chairman of the Republican Party called the monstrous atrocity a “political jackpot.”

The damage this did to those in law enforcement with a conscience was incalculable. Whatever faith we ever had in media fulfilling its alleged Fourth Estate role was gone.

The “political jackpot”  comment was the final straw for me. I had just retired and felt (again, albeit foolishly) relatively safe from retribution, so I began firing off a barrage of articles to every media outlet I could think of.  It was really a futile attempt from the beginning and I knew it, but I had to try and keep trying.  It was only through alternative media and the then-nascent Internet that the truth surfaced, but who paid any attention to that?  And as long as alternative media had no affect on the polls, it would have no affect on American politicians.

I am close to many men and women who have spent their lives in law enforcement.  All of them, when sitting in comfortable little living rooms after having a couple of drinks, will lower their voices and admit that if any cop had done what those involved with the Noriega cover-up and the subsequent phony invasion had done, they’d have been buried under a federal jail. They’ll say the words that no shill journalist would ever print, that anyone who was responsible for that invasion ought to be tried as a war criminal.   It was the realization that our silence was the ugliest part of history repeating itself that kept me at my computer trying to out the true Noriega story.  But the wall of media shills was impenetrable.

It was after my son, Keith Richard Levine, a New York City police sergeant, was killed by crack addicts on 12/28/91 that The New York Times published one of my Noriega pieces.[17] [1]  I was never sure whether it was my son’s very public murder that changed their attitude or the upcoming Clinton-Bush election, but I was grateful, even hopeful.   My Bush-Noriega article—an Op-ed piece— was a tiny drop in a media tidal wave going the other way, but it made an important point. There was some hope in media.   It was not monolithic. While it was, by and large, controlled by easily frightened and manipulated little people of little courage, there were editors, producers and journalists out there who were still willing to risk taking a moral stand against the criminal and/or criminally inept exercise of power.

I was also learning another hard lesson: to force real congressional action against corruption and/or criminal ineptitude at the highest levels of government, one article or one television special is far from enough to combat the ocean of media shills.  What’s needed is a Watergate/Lewinsky-like wave of investigative journalism.  A sprinkling won’t work.  A sprinkling will only be used to shill us into thinking we really have a free, aggressive media.

Rise in Police Drug War Violence After Panama

It was after the mass murder of women and children in Panama that, as a journalist, I began to notice a distinct increase in the militarization of the drug war in the US.  A very clear acceptance by our elected “protectors” and the public of an increase in the use of deadly force in the drug war that continues to this day affecting all aspects of police-community relations.

This too could never have happened without mainstream media, television and Hollywood shilling us with bullshit- based, Drug War Monty  movies like Clear and Present Danger, television drug war specials and so-called “reality” based programs like Cops, and the incessant flow of fill-in-the-blanks drug stories with headlines like “New Threat in Drug Supply Discovered in (fill in nation of your choice)”  “New Link in Opium Trail Discovered in (fill in)”   “The Hunt for (fill in) New Leader of the (fill in) Cartel”  “Government Sources Alarmed by Increase in Flow of (fill in) ”  “Government Sources Allege Drug Corruption in  (fill in some nation CIA wants to initiate some, usually dangerous, foolish and very expensive action)”  “Startling Rise in Drug Use Predicted by (fill in the name of agency that wants a budget increase).” [18]

As an Expert Witness

Since my retirement, I’ve worked as an expert witness for attorneys defending people from the excesses of a Drug War Monty game gone wild.   I’ve been directly involved in a continuous flow of atrocities perpetrated on innocent citizens that, thanks to the reliable practice of censorship via omission by mainstream media shills, never get mainstream media exposure.

From my point of view, the use of the word “atrocities” is no hyperbole.  As a front-line participant, I’ve watched the drug war evolve from where, in 1973, DEA agents who raided a premises in Collinsville, Indiana in honest error were prosecuted for that error in federal court, to where the killing of innocent Americans in their own homes is now not only condoned under the drug war banner, but actively covered up by drug war generals with the acquiescence of media shills.

Here’s an example.  Donald Carlson, a Fortune 500 Company executive in San Diego who couldn’t distinguish cocaine from garden mulch, was gunned down in his own home, in 1992, by a federal-state, multi-agency, Drug Enforcement Task Force SWAT team that had conducted a military style invasion using machine guns and grenades.  They were acting on allegations made by a criminal informant who claimed that Mr. Carlson was concealing in his house five thousand pounds of cocaine and four Colombian hit men who had sworn never to be taken alive.

The very gringo Mr. Carlson, despite the drug agents’ best efforts to stop his clock, miraculously survived three gunshot wounds.  He decided to sue the government.   I was hired by his attorneys to examine the government’s reports related to the investigation and to provide an expert opinion—a job I had been trained to do as a DEA Inspector of Operations.

After reviewing more than 5,000 pages of government reports, transcripts of interviews, and statements, I came to the conclusion that the government agents had based their Probable Cause for the search warrant on the uncorroborated words of a street level criminal informant whom the telephone company did not trust enough to furnish with a telephone.  I concluded, citing specific examples from the governments own reports and statements,  that the agents and prosecutors were not only criminally negligent, but that they had knowingly violated all Mr. Carlson’s  constitutional rights against unlawful search of his home and that they then compounded this crime by perjuring themselves in an effort to cover up their misdeeds.  My recommendation was, as it would have been had I been doing the job for the Justice Department, that the evidence be put before a federal grand jury with an eye toward a federal indictment of the agents and prosecutors.

Instead of giving US citizens, in the form of a grand jury, the opportunity to review what had actually happened and make their own choice as to whether the agents and prosecutors deserved to be prosecuted themselves,  the United States Attorney, Allan Bersin, a recent Clinton appointee, called a press conference for the drug war shills.  He proclaimed that “the system failed,  but [that] the agents [and prosecutors] had done their job.”  This proclamation was the “news”  broadcast as far and wide as mainstream media could reach.

System failed?  What the hell does that mean?  Only drug war shills would accept a statement like this on face value, not real journalists.

The bottom line of the whole adventure came soon after I turned in my report.  The government settled for $2.7 million in damages to Mr. Carlson and all government reports were classified.

Classified? How in hell can the suits get away with classifying the events leading up to the shooting of an American citizen in his own home?  I kept waiting for some Woodward or Bernstein to even ask the question.  Never happened.  The media shills did their by then customary penguin walk, one following the other off the end of a rock their gazes rigidly pointed away from the truth.

Once again I tried to tell the story through any mainstream media outlet that would listen.   60 Minutes, which in my opinion is one of the few remaining hopes in mainstream media, was the only entity interested.  The Carlson debacle was run as part of a special called  “Informants”  during the summer of 1993. Unfortunately, the cover-up was omitted.

Here again, I re-learned the lesson that, as much of a media powerhouse as 60 Minutes is, a single story does not a change in government policy make.   As devastating as the “Informant” piece should have been to Drug War Monty, it was only another drop against the mighty torrent of mainstream media shilling.

The big question that the Fourth Estate should have been asking was:  if our drug warriors and prosecutors could get away with acting so criminally in the case of a Fortune 500 executive, what can the average citizen expect?

Ezekiel Hernandez is the answer.  In 1997, the 18 year-old recent high school graduate was gunned down by a Marine sniper on “anti-drug” patrol while herding his family’s goats in his own backyard.  The young man probably never knew what hit him, since the shot was fired from more than a distance of 250 yards.  I couldn’t help wondering whether or not they were trying out a new weapon.

No one in young Hernandez’s MacAllen, Texas community was aware that those odd moving bushes out on the range were marine snipers in cammo outfits assigned to patrol the Texas-Mexican border–in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.

As a radio journalist who also happens to be a court-qualified expert in the use of deadly force, I began my own investigation of the case, which, in my opinion, was at best a clear-cut case of negligent homicide and/or manslaughter.    At worst, it was an execution.

While mainstream media continued to shill the death of young Ezekiel as an unfortunate but justifiable error, I tried to get a government spokesman to come on my show and explain the government’s position on the young man’s murder to a court-qualified expert.   No one was willing.

I watched the media—television, newspapers, and magazines—closely.  No government spokesman would field questions on the matter.  Only self-serving, vague and misleading statements were released.   Why should the drug war generals explain the murder of an American citizen that occurred during an alleged anti-drug action, as long as mainstream media willingly shilled for them?

In this case, like the Carlson case, no government official admitted any wrongdoing. Why should they? The settlement with the Hernandez family was $1.7 million—significantly less than the very white and still living Mr. Carlson’s $2.7 million— but then again, why should that fact interest a shill? [19]

Drug War Monty Billions Paid Directly to the Shills:

A new level of the Drug War Monty con game began when President Clinton and Republican Majority leader Newt Gingrich raised each other’s hands in victory to announce a new billion dollar, “Say-No-To-Drugs” style ad campaign.  The money would be paid directly into the coffers of every Hollywood and mainstream media entity on Wall Street’s big board.  The first  $sixty-million would go to Disney Studios.  All the full-page “anti-drug” ads you see in The New York Times (for instance) are paid for from this taxpayer- funded pot.

I received a tip from an inside person in the upper ranks of government who finds me cheaper to talk to than a psychiatrist and a lot more reliable than anyone in mainstream media. “Fraud” this person said.  “Go get ‘em, Mike.” [1]

So I flew into Expert Witness investigative action. I mean, Get real!   Do you think some mainstream media journalist is going to investigate the source of his/her company’s millions?  Particularly at a time when advertising income is on the decline?

My investigation, buttressed by research that I had done for my book Fight Back, revealed that neither the Partnership for A Drug Free America, nor anyone else for that matter, had done any research into the effectiveness of this kind of advertising.  In fact, according to psychological studies conducted by neuro-linguistic experts, there was a growing body of evidence indicating that the ads weren’t just ineffective, they actually increased drug use by suggestion.  They actually put the idea of using drugs into the minds of kids to whom the idea had never occurred.

A lone article in Brand Week, the highly respected Madison Avenue trade magazine, pointed out that the full amount of taxpayer dollars that the Partnership for a Drug Free America was about to give away was $2 billion, making them the biggest advertisers on Madison Avenue.  The article called the giveaway “very suspect.”     My own DEA source pointed out that $2 billion would have been enough to buy up every coca leaf produced in South America that year.  It could have replaced all law enforcement and military operations in effectiveness.

If you put Three Card Monty dealers and shills in the can for ripping off hundreds of dollars from innocent suckers, what do you think these guys deserve?

CIA Drug Smuggling —The Venezuelan National Guard Case

What would be the appropriate action of a truly independent, mainstream media if say, the Central Intelligence Agency was caught red-handed actually smuggling as much cocaine into the US  as the Medellin Cartel, in direct violation of federal law and with no political excuse?

Well, precisely that did happen.

Sometime in 1990,  US customs intercepted a ton of cocaine being smuggled through Miami International Airport.  An investigation by Customs and DEA quickly revealed that the smugglers were the Venezuelan National Guard headed by General Guillen a CIA “asset” who claimed that he had been operating under CIA orders and protection.   A fact that was soon, albeit very reluctantly, admitted by CIA.   Once again, as in the Noriega case, it seemed that the gang that can’t spy straight had failed to notify DEA and Customs of what they were up to.  That would turn out not to be the case. If CIA is good at anything it is the complete control of American media.  So secure are they in their ability to manipulate media that they even brag about in their own in-house memos.

CIA pimps and shills by far outnumber and outclass the Drug War Monty variety, but in this case both con games—CIA Monty and Drug War Monty—were at grave risk.

The CIA Public Information Office, referred to by CIA insiders as “The Mighty Wurlitzer,” flew into action.   Result:  The story appeared nowhere in media for the next three years.

Example:  The New York Times actually had the story almost immediately in 1990 and did not print it until 1993.  It finally became news that was “fit to print” when the Times learned that 60 Minutes also had the story and was actually going to run it.[1]   The Times ran the story on Saturday, one day before the 60 Minutes piece aired.  There were, however, serious differences between the Times report and the one aired by 60 Minutes.

The Times piece said:

“No criminal charges have been brought in the matter, which the  officials said appeared to have been a serious accident rather than an intentional conspiracy. (Emphasis mine) But officials say the  cocaine wound up being sold on the streets in the United States.”

The highlight of the 60 Minutes piece is when Federal Judge Robert Bonner tells Mike Wallace:

“There is no other way to put it, Mike,  [what the CIA did]             is drug smuggling. It’s illegal…”  (emphasis mine).

Judge Bonner further revealed that his assertion came as a result of a secret joint investigation conducted by DEA and CIA’s internal affairs divisions.  As if that weren’t enough, Annabella Grimm, the DEA agent Country attaché in Venezuela when the incident occurred was interviewed on camera.  She too said that the CIA had simply smuggled drugs in violation of lots of US laws.

You don’t have to be a police detective to note that there are some serious differences in the two reports, or to suspect media shilling in the first degree.  The Expert Witness once again flew into action.  I did what I thought a real journalist should do—investigate the story.

Accompanied by my life’s partner, wife and co-writer, Laura Kavanau, I flew out to the coast to meet with Annabella Grimm, an ex colleague of mine whose work and forthrightness I had always admired.  After speaking with Annabella we spoke with another DEA officer who was directly involved with the incident.

The sum total of my investigation was that the CIA had not only been smuggling a lot more cocaine—around 27 tons–than the one ton they were caught with, but had been warned by DEA not to do it, that what they were proposing as an “intelligence gathering operation” was not only a “whacko idea,” but it was a felony violation of US law punishable by up to life in prison.

The identities of at least two, top level CIA personnel who had chosen to ignore DEA’s warning and had gone ahead with the massive smuggling operation had been turned over to the DEA for indictment but instead of focusing on these criminals, the investigation had turned on Ms Grimm and others.

As I investigated the incident I noticed that James Woolsey, the then head of CIA, was appearing on every mainstream media television and radio “news” show that would have him, (including NPR Radio) broadcasting the claim that no criminal act had taken place and that the event had all been a “snafu….a joint investigation between CIA and DEA that had gone awry.”

Woolsey’s public statement directly contradicted that of federal judge Bonner.  The overwhelming evidence, my DEA sources assured me, showed that Woolsey, an attorney, was lying and that mainstream media was shilling for him.  Any real journalist could have done what I was doing, but none—other than 60 Minutes—dared.  Was there ever a news story more important than one that should have read something like: “CIA BETRAYS NATION – CAUGHT RED-HANDED SMUGGLING MORE DRUGS ONTO US STREETS THAN THE MEDELLIN CARTEL”  or “ DRUG WAR A $TRILLION FRAUD”?

The facts behind the case seem to be proof positive that the whole War on Drugs has been the longest running, deadliest con game in the history of American mis-government. In The Venezuelan National Guard Case, there were top level credentialed government spokespeople ready to speak openly, to tell a devastating truth about the worst kind of treason possible being committed by CIA against its own people,  yet no mainstream media entity, other than 60 Minutes, deemed this news fit to pursue with the same in-depth zeal devoted to investigating the shape of President Clinton’s penis.

Censorship by omission?  Drug War Monty shilling?   I would say so.

Unfortunately for America, my Expert Witness Radio Show was among the very few places that this important truth could be heard. I should mention that when I called the Miami US Attorney’s office in charge of prosecuting General Guillen et al, I was told that “national security” interests prevented them from providing me with a case status, or any statement whatsoever for that matter.[1]

A fitting postscript for this event and the whole Drug War Monty game for that matter:  I was recently made aware that John Clements, the 20 year-old addict “gofer” featured in the Bangkok heroin investigation referred to at the beginning of this chapter, is about to be released from federal prison after having served most of his 35-year prison sentence.  Young Mr. Clements was convicted of “conspiracy” to traffic in heroin for driving a drug dealer (Alan Trupkin) to one single meeting to pick up drugs.  Of course, the rest of the story is that the media, while ignoring the massive flow of heroin coming into the US at the hands of CIA assets, had shilled the case to the point where there was no way the kid was going to get anything but the max.  Unfortunately I was as guilty as they were.

I can only hope this helps make up for it.

Black Tuesday – the Shilling Continues

The events of September 11th occurred after I’d completed this chapter make this short addendum vital.  If what I wrote before has convinced you that mainstream media has spent the last three decades shilling the American taxpayer into believing in the efficacy of a war on drugs when every bit of this so-called war was as fraudulent as a game of Three Card Monty then here’s what you should be asking  yourself about what happened on September 11^th:   Did mainstream media  also shill for an inept and bumbling FBI and CIA in a successful campaign at convincing Americans that our homeland defense was in the most capable hands possible, when in fact the Boy Scouts of America might have done a better job?  And, did this shilling play a role in making us vulnerable to the events of Black Tuesday?

Hard to believe, right?  Well, the fact is that—and you can read it for  yourself in federal court records, or obtain the actual recorded conversation from my web site —seven months before the first attempt at blowing up the World Trade Center in 1993, the FBI had a paid informant who had already infiltrated the bombers and had told the FBI of their plans to blow up the twin towers. Without notifying the NYPD or anyone else, an FBI supervisor “fired” Salem who was making $500 a week for his work.  After the bomb went off, the FBI hired Salem back and paid him $1.5 million to help them track down the bombers.

But that’s not all the FBI missed.  When they finally did catch the actual bomber, Ramzi Yousef (a man trained with CIA funds during the Russia-Afghanistan war), the FBI found information on his personal computer about plans to use hijacked American jetliners as fuel laden missiles.  The FBI ignored this information too.

If at this point you are scratching your head and asking yourself why you hadn’t heard this story, you can thank mainstream media “coverage” which for the most part gave the FBI “credit” for “solving” the case.  Media then went on to convince us that the FBI “solved” the Unibomber case as well, when in fact the only way the madman was caught was when his own brother turned him.

Had the media done a professional job of investigating and reporting the CIA and FBI’s amateurish failures, perhaps our elected protectors would have been moved to begin working feverishly on revamping a human intelligence system that appears to be competing with the Three Stooges for our enemies’ respect.

[1] Undercover by Donald Goddard, Random House/Times Books, March, 1988.

[2] The Expert Witness Radio Show, WBAI, New York City and KPFK, Los Angeles, or http://www.expertwitnessradio.com

2 US v Herman Jackson et al

[4] See Deep Cover, by Michael Levine, Delacorte, 1990.

[5] A typical example “Mexico’s New Anti-drug Team Wins the Trust of U.S.Officials” was taken from the New York times headlines, 7/18/01

[6] Testimony of Felix Milian-Rodgriguez, convicted Medellin Cartel Money Launderer, in Executive Session before Kerry committee, June, 1986.

[7] The Big White Lie, by Michael Levine and Laura kavanau, Thunder’s Mouth Press, October, 1993 & Deep Cover, by Michael Levine, Delacorte, 1990.

[8] The Big White Lie, by Michael Levine & Laura Kavanau, Thunder’s Mouth Press, October, 1993.

[9] The Big White Lie, by Michael Levine and Laura kavanau, Thunder’s Mouth Press, October, 1993

[10] The Big White Lie, by Michael Levine & Laura Kavanau, Thunder’s Mouth Press, October, 1993,  p.103-104.

[11] “I Volunteer to Kidnap Ollie North” by Michael Levine,  Journal of Law & Social Justice, Penn State University (and others), available for viewing at http://www.expertwitnessradio.com

[12] Politics of Cocaine, by Peter Dale-Scott and Jonathan Marshall,.

[13] Fight Back, by Michael Levine, Dell Publishing, March, 1991.

[14] For ease of research, all  articles, books and radio interviews  referred to, are available  at http://www.expertwitnessradio.com

[15] www.expertwitnessradio.com.  See, particularly,  interview with author David Harris , Shoot The Moon, and DEA supervising officer, Ken Kennedy , a participant in the  arrest and prosecution of Manual Noriega.

[16] Ibid.

[17] “The Drug War, Let’s Fight it at Home” New York Times, February 16, 1992, Op-ed pg. By Michael Levine.

[18] www.expertwitnessradio.com. See numerous interviews with front-line participants under “Drug War Media Mess.”

[19] Ezekial Hernandez Show, broadcast 8/97 on The Expert Witness Radio Show, WBAI, New York City and KPFK, Los Angeles, available on audio at www.expertwitnessradio.com

On April 1, 1992,  a House committee chaired by Congressman John Conyers Jr., declared that U.S. Customs and other Federal law enforcement agencies are poorly trained, badly supervised and that there is a “perception of cover-up” for their misdeeds.[1] (emphasis mine).  At about midnight,  August 25,  1992, just four months after those hearings, and a few days after the shooting of White Sepratist Randy Weaver’s wife and child by the FBI agents,    Customs, DEA, BATF and Border Patrol agents launched a joint, military style invasion of the San Diego home of Mr. Donald Carlson, a 41 year old, computer company executive.  The feds had a search warrant indicating that they expected to find 5,000 pounds of cocaine (having a street value of roughly $100 million),  and four heavily armed Colombian drug dealers hiding in Mr. Carlson’s garage.

The invasion was a two-pronged assault.    A squad of men crashed through the front door of the up-scale, suburban home tossing a stun grenade while another squad invaded the rear through a garage.   Mr. Carlson, awakened out of a sound sleep and believing his home was being invaded by a gang of armed thugs,  called 911 for help and then grabbed a legally owned pistol to defend himself.   One of the invading feds did a Rambo-roll across his foyer,  firing from 14 to 20 rounds from a sub-machine gun and hitting everything in the room but Mr. Carlson.  The evidence indicates that he fired before Mr. Carlson did.    Mr. Carlson then retreated to his bedroom where he was shot three times by a DEA agent and a Customs agent firing handguns—as the evidence indicates—after he had discarded his gun.

When the smoke cleared, not a nanogram of  an illegal drug was found.   An investigation that should have been done long before the raid quickly and easily revealed that Mr. Carlson was the prototypical good citizen.  A man who did not speak enough Spanish to order Arroz con Pollo without making it sound like the game played on horseback, no less be a member of a Colombian drug cartel.

Despite the best efforts of the Rambo-rolling, grenade tossing Feds,   Mr. Carlson survived life-threatening wounds to sue the government.  I was retained by his attorney, Jeremiah Coughlin,  as a consultant.   I was ideally qualified for the job having served, during my twenty-five year career in Federal law enforcement, with three of the agencies involved in the incident—DEA, Customs and BATF.   I served sixteen of my seventeen years in DEA in supervisory positions, including two years as an Inspector of Operations, doing for DEA exactly what I would be doing for Mr. Carlson and his attorneys—evaluating the performance of agents during a drug trafficking investigation.

As a consultant I was furnished with several thousand pages of government reports detailing the actions of the agents and prosecutors in their own words.  The reports revealed that for an incredible,  two month period of time leading up to Mr. Carlson’s shooting,  a street-level, criminal informant/conman with little or no money or resources,  a man who spoke little or no Spanish and had a difficult time putting together an intelligible sentence in English, a man whom even the telephone company refused to trust with a telephone—the agents had to lend him one of their cellular phones—had convinced the feds that he was a trusted member of a Colombian drug cartel smuggling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cocaine into the U.S.  each month and that, based on his almost comically unbelievable and uncorroborated story,  the agents had not only gunned down Mr. Carlson, but had implicated dozens of innocent citizens in government files and computers as “drug traffickers” associated with a Colombian drug ring that didn’t even exist.

In my continued review of the government’s own reports I noted numerous indications that the agents and prosecutors had either intentionally disregarded overwhelming evidence that the informant was a liar right from the git-go,  and described him as a “reliable informant” on 5 Federal search warrants, or were so inept,  poorly trained and/or badly supervised (as Congressman Conyers has already pointed out) that they didn’t recognize that evidence.  I noted numerous instances of directly contradictory statements made by agents, police and the prosecutor indicating false official statements—a felony violation of Title 18, Section 1001.   I also noted in excess of one hundred violations of DEA and Customs regulations by the investigating agents, their supervisors and top level Justice and Treasury Department managers,  regulations  the violation of which were tantamount to a reckless disregard of not only Federal law, state law and the Constitution, but a screaming affront to Common Sense.

What was even more damaging—if this is possible—were the numerous indications I found and noted in my reports,   that the subsequent internal affairs investigations were easily recognizable attempts at covering up the misdeeds and crimes committed by these agents and supervisors .

Since this shooting I have been contacted, personally,  by Federal law enforcement officers who feel that the perception of cover-up in this incident and others like it has adversely affected the public’s trust in Federal law enforcement.   In the government’s own reports a San Diego police officer who took part in the investigation was quoted as saying that the Federal agents involved should not be in law enforcement—an assessment I could not agree with more.

My findings were documented in two very detailed reports totaling some 170,000 words in which I recommended—as I would have done had I conducted the review as an Operations Inspector  for the government—that several of the agents and supervisors involved be fired, and that evidence indicating violation of several Federal and state felony laws against specific agents and prosecutors be heard by the appropriate grand juries.     I hoped my reports would be made public during the litigation of Mr. Carlson’s claim.  I also hoped, perhaps,  that this would be the proverbial straw that finally broke the camel’s back,  a beginning of public revelations of wide-spread criminality and disregard of the Constitution in Federal law enforcement that I have been observing for the past two decades and writing and speaking  about for the past five years.   This, however,  will never happen.  Once again the Federal cover-up has begun.

Recently, the newly appointed San Diego, U.S. Attorney, Alan Bersin, recommended that the government pay Mr. Carlson a $2.75 million dollar settlement for damages thereby eliminating a public trial.    He said that the Federal agents and prosecutors involved in this case, were to be lauded for doing their jobs;  that it was “the system” that had failed Mr. Carlson.   All the government reports were to be classified as part of that settlement.  I want to believe that Mr. Bersin acted in good faith without benefit of having seen my reports and/or making a personal review of the government’s reports, but I could not disagree with him more.  I spent most of my adult life working in that system and it works fine, as long as you follow its rules.   Donald Carlson wasn’t the victim of a system, he was victimized by men who don’t obey the very laws they took an oath to uphold.  And I think it is wrong to simply exonerate them without at least making all their actions known to the public that entrusts them with their safety and pays their salaries.

With the Political,  circus side-show atmosphere of the current Waco hearings, I doubt that anyone outside the inner circles of the Federal government will ever know the true facts surrounding the murder of more than 80 human beings and including the incinerating of more than 20 innocent children, nor will we ever know the true circumstances surrounding the shooting of the an unarmed woman and child by and FBI sharpshooter in Ruby Idaho—both acts clearly in contradiction to all the rules of engagement myself and other Federal law enforcement officers have had to abide by for decades— and past experience tells me that those facts will never be heard by a state grand jury of American citizens who reside in the communities where those acts took place.   But I am intimately aware of the events surrounding the Carlson shooting which, I say, have been covered up.    I also know that Congress has shown itself to be increasingly ineffectual in protecting our civil liberties from overzealous, inept and corrupt law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and that their  rush to give these agencies even more powers is like training a Rottweiler to attack before you’ve taught it obedience; it may be the biggest mistake in our history.

If my long career in law enforcement has taught me anything it is that the “perception of cover-up” (already documented in Congressman Conyers’ report)—whether it be for crimes committed by men with guns and badges or politicians hiding behind high office—has done more damage to our Constitution, our way of life and the trust the American people have in their Federal law enforcement agencies,  than any statement the NRA or any talk-show host could possibly make

To the Reader:  This article was first published in 1997, four years prior to 9/11.  Imagine what a difference it might have made if mainstream media had really played its “watchdog” role and forced Congress to demand the best from our first line of defense,  instead of their looking the other way at the kind of ineptitude exposed here…and only here.

Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I think he’s from the CIA

At this moment the next big and terrible secret that our CIA and some of their shills in congress and the media are scrambling to keep under wraps is that for the past eight years, they have been protecting and covering up for yet another world class drug trafficker while he and his family amassed a colossal fortune by flooding American cities with drugs.   Ex- President of Mexico, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, linked to a half billion dollars in suspected drug money is now in hiding,[1] only I’m betting that my own government sources are right when they say that he is in daily contact with his CIA handlers.

Can any of the drug or intelligence experts in the media possibly believe that the President of Mexico, a man viewed as a hero by both the Bush and Clinton administrations for persuading his skeptical countrymen to enter a free trade agreement with the U.S. (NAFTA) could have methodically hidden a half billion dollars in drug money in more than ninety international banks, over an eight year period of time,  without the CIA and our policy makers knowing about  it?

Anyone who witnessed the Federal drug trafficking trial of Mexican Army Colonel, Jorge Carranza, et.al. in San Diego during March, 1988 already knows the answer.  Not only was the CIA and other top level, U.S. government officials aware of Salinas de Gortari’s drug trafficking activities, but they did all they could—in violation of U.S. drug and secrecy laws— to cover up for him and protect him from U.S. law enforcement authorities.

Between September, 1987 and January 1988,  as I described in minute detail in my book Deep Cover, (Delacorte, Mar. 90), I was part of a team of deep cover agents posing as a Mafia family that was promised—on hidden video—a Mexico that would be wide-open for drug traffickers under President Salinas.  The men making that promise were Pablo Giron a member of the then President Elect’s protective detail and Colonel Jorge Carranza, a Mexican Army staff officer and grandson of ex-President of Mexico Venustiano Carranza.  We were ecstatic, a few years earlier Mexican government officials had aided and abetted the torture murderers of an undercover DEA agent, Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, to escape U.S. law enforcement.   Now it was our turn to hit them back hard.  We had just penetrated to the rotting wormy interior of that “Bandido government” as U.S. Commissioner of Customs van Raab called them, and would soon expose them to the world.

Almost immediately I was told by frantic DEA and Customs upper management personnel,  that the CIA was closely monitoring our  team’s every move; that our case had suddenly become the Agency’s “top priority.”  A short while later the operation was sabotaged by top-level suits in Customs, DEA, Department of State and the Justice Department.

In rapid order “mysterious” events started to happen.  Upper management of DEA refused to fund the operation,  ordering that we arrest only those officials we had met and video-taped.  We were stopped cold from setting up undercover meetings with upper echelon Mexican government officials that had been promised us by Giron and Carranza.   An undercover tape-recorded phone that would have captured the voice of a Mexican high command officer whom Carranza was working for was thwarted by the actions of upper management of both DEA and Customs (as described in minute detail in the book).    While undercover agents posing as mafiosi were still meeting with de Gortari’s people in San Diego, making arrangements for the safe transit of 15 tons of cocaine through Mexico into the U.S. with Mexican military protection,  Attorney General Edwin Meese, in violation of U.S. Federal law,  telephoned the then Attorney General of Mexico to warn him about our sting operation.[2] When Meese’s warning came too late to save Carranza and his gang from arrest in San Diego,  U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Max Piliod and DEA’s, then, chief of operations in Mexico,   Ed Heath,  both publicly  sided with the Mexican government’s claim that they were “imposters,” with no connection to the de Gortari government, all of which turned out to be untrue.

During the trial it was learned that only six months before Colonel Carranza sold our “Mafia family” long term Mexican military protection for continued, massive shipments of cocaine into the U.S., under the Salinas de Gortari government,  he had been at a high level,  classified meeting at a restaurant with a Mexican Army general linked to the murderers of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, and Heath himself.    The purpose of this meeting, allegedly, was to discuss U.S. and Mexican cooperation in the war on drugs.  Heath, on the witness stand,  claimed that he had been “snookered” by the Mexican government, a truth that never saw the light of media day. He was never asked how he could possibly have had such a meeting with anyone but bonafide, top level members of the Mexican government.  Ambassador Piliod made no comment, because no one in the media asked him for any, and he was never called as a witness.

The evidence used to document the book, which included video and audio tapes and hundreds of pages of government reports,  was the same evidence used during the Federal trial to convict Giron,  Carranza and four others of Conspiracy to smuggle fifteen tons of cocaine into the U.S. with the aid of the Mexican military.

During the time these events were happening, I could only guess at who in the Mexican government was being protected and why.  Had I known then that President Salinas de Gortari was salting away a half-billion dollars in drug money in ninety foreign banks, (that we know of)  he might have ended up standing trial with his underlings—in spite of those in our government protecting him.  Of course the history of the NAFTA agreement might have ended differently, but then again I was a law enforcement officer, not a spy or a politician–what did I know?

Once again, DEA had done its job too well; we had threatened another of the world’s biggest providers of heroin and cocaine to Americans, who also happened to be protected by CIA and special interests among our elected leaders. Only this guy happened to be the President of Mexico.

And now—unless the mad, behind-the-scenes scrambling by CIA media specialists to keep this information out of the hands of the few remaining independent journalists is successful—America is about to learn that President Salinas de Gortari,was a CIA asset protected from DEA’s Operation Trifecta;[3] that the CIA and some of our elected protectors, as they have been for more than three decades,  were duped into protecting real enemies of America in return for which they received absolutely nothing.

For the last three decades it has been well known by everyone involved in top level international drug trafficking—both cops and criminals—  that any Third World politician who wants to sell drugs to Americans with impunity, and at the same time get away with murdering his opposition only has to  put himself on the CIA’s payroll as an “asset.” and do the secret bidding of American politicians. . . when it’s convenient for them.  In most cases all they have to do is fake it.   Manuel Noriega gave lip service to the CIA and U.S. politicians for two decades in return for which he was protected and paid a salary by the CIA while giving real service to the Medellin Cartel.  The Contras did it.  La Corporación , the drug cartel that overthrew the Bolivian government on July 17, 1980 did it and they are still supplying Americans with more than fifty percent of the crack and cocaine we consume.[4] And now we’ve added the President of Mexico to that long and growing list.

Let’s face it, our leaders and spys are known throughout the world of international crime and drugs as easy marks.  If the drunken, bumbling, Rolex-wearing, Jaguar-driving Aldrich Ames could sell all the Agency’s top secrets to the KGB, for fourteen years, right under the noses of highly acclaimed (by Congress)  suits like, Judge William Webster,  Robert Gates and James Woolsey, with all the finesse of a Jersey City garage sale, imagine what a whole gang of really sharp, world class drug dealers has been doing to them.

It’s been the classic pattern U.S. law enforcement has been forced to observe helplessly and in “patriotic” silence since the Vietnam war when the CIA protected every major heroin dealing faction in Southeast Asia.    DEA and FBI agents who target the top drug dealers in the world find themselves targeted and silenced by their own government.  They don’t have National Security, fawning politicians and shills in the media to hide behind.  Unfortunately, as I write this, the CIA and some of the most inept leaders and policy makers in U.S.history still do.  As ex Director of Central Intelligence William Colby himself explained:   “a misplaced sense of patriotism”  has always kept the media from asking the hard questions.

Conservative estimates of the CIA’s total budget over the past thirty years go well over a trillion dollars, (this year’s budget, alone,  is estimated to be $28 billion).  It’s no longer a secret that the Agency not only failed completely in its, four decade attempt at outsmarting the Russians  but was instead used by the KGB to con our elected leaders into spending an estimated two trillions of unnecessary dollars on defense.  And all the while, going unnoticed by the media,  the world’s top drug dealers conned them and their political protectors into subverting our hundred billion dollar war on drugs and doing more damage to Americans, by any measure,  than all of our conventional wars combined.   Talk about adding insult to injury.  With trillion dollar “protectors” like these guys, who needs enemies?

Perhaps when this latest revelation is finally made public,  at least some of the people who pull the strings in the media will finally realize what federal law enforce­ment has known for decades;  that the real secret the CIA and their shills are at this moment fighting desperately to keep from the American people,  is not that they are badguys or super criminals involved in sinister worldwide conspiracies as many would like to think—an image the CIA itself tries to encourage— but instead are exactly what the facts revealed by the Aldrich Ames case exposed them to be: an unregulated, old-boys’ society of highly educated, comically inept buffoons and that the congressional oversight committee is exactly what CIA agents secretly call them—”the oversight.”

In the meantime,  history and the media’s “patriotic silence”  continues to repeat itself.   In 1976 Senator Frank Church found the CIA to be engaged in all kinds of criminal activity and totally unresponsive to the congress.  He said that, not only had the CIA been “counterproductive,” but that they had “brought shame on our nation.”  He called them “a runaway rogue elephant.”   In 1986 Senator John Kerry, a Democrat,  said that “Our covert agencies have converted themselves to channels for drugs”; that he wasn’t sure if we had the most inept spy agencies in the world or the most criminal.  Senator Alfonse D’amato, a Republican,  said that it was “mind-boggling,” that “while we tax Americans billions to fight drugs,  we’re in bed with [the biggest drug dealers in the world].”  The Pike Committee began its January 1986 report with the line: “If this Committee’s  recent experience is any test, intelligence agencies that are to be controlled by Congressional lawmaking are, today, beyond  the lawmaker’s scrutiny.”

Yet, with all that verbiage no serving CIA agent has ever been charged with any criminal activity other than lying to congress;  no meaningful action has ever been taken to turn the Agency’s four and-a-half decade, three trillion dollar streak of ineptitude and corruption,  except to periodically change the name of its director,  which,  as anyone who’s ever served in law enforcement knows, is as effective as changing the label on a bottle of cheap whiskey.

And now as we  swing into an election year and widely respected journalists write respectful articles about  the “new” CIA’s expanded, multi-billion dollar role in the war on drugs under a new and “highly regarded” director,  and what our “new” drug policy should be,   I,  once again, feel like the kid of the fable standing at the edge of the crowd screaming: “Hey, stop the parade!  The emperor is butt naked!”

[2].  Deep Cover, Michael Levine, Delacorte, March, 1990.  Also- Desperados, by Elaine Shannon.

[3].  UPI news release, “Mexico Fails to Extradite Ruiz Massieu, 12/22/95

[4].  The Big White Lie, Levine and Kavanau (Thunder’s Mouth Press, October, 1993.

by Michael Levine

“Gentlemen, in this business, you’re only
as good as your rats.”—Lecture on the Handling of
Criminal Informants (CIs) from U.S. Treasury Law
Enforcement Academy, August, 1965

“I’m looking for Mike Levine, ex-DEA,” said the man’s voice.

“How’d you get this number?” I said. It was close to midnight and my wife and I were in a San Francisco hotel on business.

“Man, you don’t know what I went through to find you.”

The voice belonged to a well known California defense attorney who said that he’d tracked me through my publisher.

“I’m in the middle of trying a case,” he said. “I need you to testify as an expert witness.  The judge gave me over the weekend to find you and bring you here—”

“Whoa! Whoa!” I said. “Back up.  I’m not a legal consultant—”

“—But you’re a court qualified expert.  I checked you out.  I read your books.”

“You read them?”

“Well, I just got them. . . ”

“When you get around to reading them, you’ll know I don’t work for dopers.   Nothing personal counselor.”

“Don’t give me that,” he said. “I read some interview you did.  Didn’t you call the drug war a fraud?”

“A huge fraud,” I said. “But because I talk about thieves, crooks and dopers inside the government doesn’t mean I’m gonna work for them on the outside.”

Days before this phone call I had turned down a six figure offer to work as a consultant for a Bolivian drug king pin whom I’d spent half my life trying to put in jail. I was a firm believer in if you can’t do  jail, don’t do the sale.

“Look, I’m defending the guy for expenses,” snapped the attorney, annoyed.  “The guy’s been working sixty hours a week for the last three years parking cars—does that sound like a Class One, fucking cocaine dealer to you?”

Class One was DEA’s top rating for  drug dealers.  You had to be the head of a criminal organization and dealing with tens of millions of dollars in drugs each month to qualify as a Class One—Pablo Escobar and the fabled Roberto Suarez were Ones.

He had my curiosity.

“You can prove your guy’s a parking lot attendant?”

“I’ll Fedex you his time sheets.  Better yet, I’ll send you everything— undercover video-tapes and DEA’s own reports.  You tell me if the guy’s a Class one.”

“Why me?” I asked.

“DEA couldn’t get any dope from Miguel (not his true name)—not even a sample.  So they charge the poor bastard with a no-dope Conspiracy—did you ever hear of anything like that?  A parking lot attendant on a no-dope Conspiracy?  Then they bring in a DEA expert from Washington to testify that a true Class One doper doesn’t give samples. You and I both know that’s bullshit, don’t we?”

His words flashed me back to an incident I described  in The Big White Lie .  It was July 4, 1980, and I was in a suite at the Buenos Aires Sheraton, sitting across a table from one of the biggest dopers alive, Hugo Hurtado Candia, as he handed me a one ounce sample of his merchandise—ninety-nine percent pure cocaine—as a prelude to a huge cocaine deal.[2] The man was part of a cartel that was two weeks away from taking over his whole country.

The lawyer was right: it was pure bullshit, but it was the kind of bullshit I had always been aware of.  There’s enormous career pressure on street agents to make as many Class One cases as they can, for a simple reason:  Federal agencies justify their budgets with statistical reports to Congress and Congress loves to see Class Ones.   The agents with the highest percentage of Class Ones are the guys who get money awards and promotions. And over the years the professional rats, who originate more than 95 percent of all drug cases,  had learned that selling a Class One to the government was worth a much bigger “reward” payment.  A lot of them knew the DEA Agents Manual criteria for a One better than a lot of the agents.

Unfortunately in DEA and other Federal agencies—where agents are trained to be duplicitous to begin with and then exposed to deceitful, lying, scumbag politicians and bureaucrats who want results that make them look good and don’t give a damn how you get them as long as you don’t embarrass them by getting caught —there were agents who would bend the facts in their own favor.  They’d write up a mid-level doper, or sometimes a street dealer as a Class One based on “evidence supplied by a previously reliable informant,” without corroborating the rat’s information.  If it got by the reviewing process the worst that happened was that some mid or low level doper was called a Class One.

To me that kind of bullshit was no different than all the Federal prosecutors with an eye on public office who exaggerated the importance of their cases to a media that will swallow just about anything, as long as it sold papers and got ratings,  and downright harmless compared to some drug czar facing 20 million Americans on Larry King Live and saying “We’ve turned the corner on the drug war,” to further his political career.  If you put all the dopers whom the press had reported as “linked to the Medellin or Cali Cartels” hand-in-hand, they’d circle the fucking earth.

But DEA flying an expert witness across country to make a parking lot attendant look like a Class One coke dealer in a Federal trial,  was something I’d never heard of—unless things had changed drastically—and I had good reason to suspect they had.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

“You didn’t answer me.  What do you think I can do for you?”

“When I cross-examined the DEA expert he named your book—Deep Cover—as one of the books he read to qualify as am expert.   Now I want you to testify that he’s full of shit.”

“There’s gotta be something your not telling me.”

“If I’m telling you the truth, will you be here on Monday?”

Just the thought of me going head-to-head against a small elite agency that I’d been a part of for almost a quarter of a century put knots in my stomach.  Outsiders only hear about the blue of wall silence, but no description I’ve ever heard ever really did it justice. To most guys in narcotic enforcement the scummy bottom of life’s barrel is the CI, the criminal informant—the rat.  There’s only one thing lower:  a cop who turns rat on his own.  And to me, going to work for a doper was exactly that.

“How did the thing get started?” I asked.

“A CI approaches DEA with a deal.  He’s wanted in Argentina and Bolivia.  He says, ‘If I get you a Class One arrest here, will you get the charges dropped against me over there?”

“How much did they pay him?”

“Over thirty thousand, fucking dollars.  And they admitted that he’s gonna get more when the trial is over.”

Thirty thousand was not all that much for a Class One, but I wasn’t going to say anything to him.

“And Mr. Car-parker, what kind of rap sheet does he have?”

“Nothing!” shouted the attorney. I held the phone away from my ear.  “This is his first, fucking arrest.”

“What kind of rap sheet does the rat have?”

He laughed. “This guy’s been busted all over South America for every kind of con job in the book. He even tried to sell his wife’s vital organs while she was in a coma dying.”

“Come on, counselor,” I said.

“If I’m telling the truth, will you be here Monday?”

“I listened this far,” I said. “If you want to send me your stuff, I’ll look at it.”

The telephone woke me early the next morning.  It was a retired DEA agent with whom I’d worked the street for two different Federal agencies.

“People called me, Mike” he said. “And I said, ‘No way, not Mike Levine.’  You ain’t gonna testify for some fucking dirtbag.”

“I’m not doing anything yet” I said, marveling at the speed of the Federal grapevine.  “I just agreed to look at the case file.”

“The guy’s a scumbag, piece-of-shit, dope lawyer. He’s like all these guys—every time his mouth moves he’s lying.  The case was righteous, Mike.  Don’t fall for it—not you. ”

When I hung up my sweet wife and partner, Laura, was studying me.  “You’re as pale as a ghost.”

“He’s someone I really respected.  Did I sound as mealy-mouthed as I think?”

“No, just really shaken.”

The FedEx package was delivered to my room on Saturday morning.  I opened it to find a stack of reports, including “Miguel’s” work records, the transcripts of audio-tapes, the rat’s file (much of it blacked out, as I expected) and a video-cassette—DEA’s whole case.

The work records were straight forward.  Miguel worked for a large parking lot chain punching a time clock for an average of sixty-plus hours a week for the past three years, at minimum wage.  He also had a little side business of delivering lunches to workers in the area.  And, as the attorney had claimed, he had no prior criminal record.

The CI, whom I’ll call “Cariculo—Snakeface” on the other hand was wanted in both Bolivia and Argentina for bad checks, petty theft and every kind of con job in the book.  He had a total of seventeen charges outstanding against him.  His favorite scam was selling cars he didn’t own.  His other part-time source of income during the last four years, was selling drug cases to DEA.

Snakeface first comes to Washington,D.C. from Bolivia, bringing with him a wife and a couple of kids whom he promptly abandons and returns to South America.  Things don’t go too well and in a short time he’s back in the U.S. on the lam from police and scam victims in two countries.   Miguel, a family friend and fellow Bolivian, tries to help out by giving Snakeface part of his lunch delivery business.

In the meantime, Snakeface’s wife suffers a cerebral hemorrhage and falls into a coma.  While she lays dying her “grieving” husband—just as the attorney said— tries to sell her vital organs.  When the sale of his dying wife’s heart, lungs and kidneys doesn’t work out,  Snakeface decides to sell Miguel, organs and all, to DEA, as a Class One cocaine dealer.

Snakeface’s first move showed me that he was no novice in playing the Federal rat system. Instead of calling the local Washington, D.C. office of DEA or the FBI—where he and Miguel lived— he called DEA in California.  He described Miguel to the California DEA agents as someone called “Chama,” the “east coast distributor  for a huge South American cartel dealing in shipments of thousands of kilos of cocaine into the U.S.” and “the head of his own criminal organization”—a description that just happened to fit the criteria for a DEA Class One violator.

The reason Snakeface approached a DEA office in Southern California, as far away from Washington, D.C. as he could get,  is a thing of sheer conman beauty.  His experience as professional Federal rat had taught him about the insane competition for headlines, budget and glory between the myriad of American Federal enforcement, spy and military agencies—53 at last count— involved in some form of narcotic enforcement or another.  He knew that the California agents,  afraid that the East Coast agents or some other agency would steal their case, would keep Chama King of Cocaine a secret.

California DEA reacted exactly as Snakeface had predicted. Instead of calling the Washington, D.C. office and asking them to check out the information,  they sent Snakeface airline tickets and money to fly to California from where they could get their first “evidence” —a recorded telephone conversation—locking the case in as a “California case.”

Next Snakeface tells Miguel,  “Look, I’ve got this American Mafiosi in California who is dumber than a guava.  The guy’s so dumb he’s even sent me airplane tickets to fly out there and set up a cocaine deal.  I’ll tell him you’re the capo de tutti frutti of all Bolivian drug dealers.  You tell this boludo that you can deliver all the cocaine he wants.  He’ll give you a couple of hundred thousand dollars out front.  Then you and me take off back to Bolivia rich men and open up a chain of drive-in theaters.”

So Miguel-the-Car-Parker went along with the deal.  He had failed the U.S. government financed test of his honesty, a test that, according to my training, was called Entrapment.

Now we cut to Snakeface in Southern California making his first phone call to “Chama King of Cocaine” with DEA agents listening in and tape-recording the call.  He makes the call to the parking lot where Miguel works and is supposed to be waiting, prepared to play the role of Chama King of Cocaine for some capo di tutti dummo who he knows will be listening in,  only Miguel isn’t there.

“He’s home sick,” says the woman who answers the parking lot phone.

Do the DEA agents stop here and say, What the hell is the east coast distributor of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cocaine, and the head of his own criminal organization  doing parking cars all day long? No.  They call his house and tape-record the call.

Miguel answers.  He’s in a bad way.  He apologizes to Snakeface explaining that he’s home with a terrible hangover. Then he tells this long, confused story about some friend of his getting drunk in his room,  stealing his pants and then wrecking his car.

“Shit,” says Chama King of Cocaine, “in the morning I come out and I didn’t see my car. Man!.  ‘That son-of-a-bitch’ I  said.  ‘Shit! Where’s my car?’ Shit!  I was sad. . . .Shit! It’s like the only one I have to go to work.”

Snakeface, with some effort and doing all the talking finally steered the conversation into some garbled code-talk, that sounded more like Roberto Duran trying to explain the Monroe Doctorine to Mario Cuomo than a drug deal:

Snakeface:  “Yeah, what I’m trying to is, since it’s a matter which is quite serious, big, and from the other things that I’ve seen like this, when we can’t be playing with, with unclear words and. . .that’s why what I, what you did, and I asked you if you’d spoken with him, because I know that he has the financial capacity and after all he’s, he’s a partner of, of, of, [name of major drug cartel leader] and, and in the end anything will yield a profit if we’re hanging on to a big stick that’s on a big branch and, and we won’t have any problems. right?”

Chama King of Cocaine:  “Of course.”

That was about as clear as it ever got. If it was a dope conversation, the fact that he was talking across three thousand miles of telephone wires from his home telephone—something a high-school crack dealer wouldn’t do— didn’t seem to bother Chama or the agents in the least.

At the end of this conversation, did these experienced,  highly trained agents say:  “Hey this guy doesn’t even sound smart enough to be a Washington Heights steerer?, or,  “Hey let’s pull the autopsy report on the rat’s wife?”  Nope!  They opened a Class One investigation targeting Miguel the parking lot attendant, and paid the rat his first thousand dollars.  And there was plenty more to follow.

The packet of reports indicated that the “investigation”  lasted about eight months during which time Snakeface successfully pimped the DEA agents about “Chama King of Cocaine”  and at the same time pimped Miguel about “Tony,”  (a DEA undercover agent), whom he described as the Dumb-and-Dumber of the Mafia.  During that time California DEA did no investigation of Miguel whatsoever.

The record showed:  No telephone investigation to ascertain whether Miguel was making telephone calls to any real drug dealers, no financial investigation to see what he was doing with his drug millions, no surveillance that would have revealed that Chama King of Coke was a working stiff who lived in a one-room apartment.    They did nothing but write down whatever their rat told them as “fact.”

For eight months Snakeface stalled the California agents reporting that Chama was in the process of putting together a major shipment of cocaine, and the agents continued to pay him. In all,he received another $29,000 in “rat fees” plus expenses, which included periodic trips back to California from Washington to be “debriefed” on his “progress.”  For eight months the agents nagged Snakeface into trying to get Miguel to deliver a sample of cocaine, any amount. Just something to prove that he was really in the business.

The sample never came.  Miguel—surprizing for any Bolivian— didn’t know anyone in the business to even buy a small amount.  And even if he did,  he didn’t have the money.  And Snakeface was afraid that if he paid for the sample even these California agents might get wise to him, so he came up with a clever solution: he told the agents, Hey, Class One dealers don’t give samples, only small dealers give samples. When, to his astonishment,  they believed him,  he took it one step further:  Miguel, he said,  was not going to do the deal unless the agents put part of the money out front—$300,000—another sign that he was a “true Class One dealer.”

Snakeface had enough experience selling cases to the Feds to know that they would never front that kind of money.  He also knew that the Fed’s indecision and the slow moving bureaucracy, plus agents who didn’t really know what they were doing,  could give him quite a few  months on salary—which is exactly what happened.

After eight months, the California agents finally decided that,  since “Chama” wouldn’t deliver drugs to them without front money, they ‘d get him on video-tape promising them cocaine and accepting the money—all they’d need to prove him guilty of Conspiracy to possess and distribute cocaine—and bust his ass.   Miguel would face enough charges to make him a guest of the American taxpayers for more years than he had left on this earth.  The no-dope conspiracy arrest would also give them the agents their Class One stat and maybe a headline from the ever gullible press.

By this time Snakeface had not only received $30,000 in “Informant Fees” but all charges against him in South America had been  “disappeared.”

What a country!

Now Snakeface had two final duties to perform for his masters: bring Miguel to California for his arrest and then testify in court.  More money was even promised after his conviction.  How much?  We’ll never know.

Now the stage was set for the final act—the video-taping of the “crime.”  Only there was still one remaining snag. Miguel didn’t have the money to come to California for his own arrest. In a final irony, the California DEA agents had to pay for his trip.

Finally,  dressed up in his best Sears casuals and prepared to play the role of a Class One cocaine dealer for a live audience of Mafia retards. Miguel was on his way to California like a big Bolivian turkey on his way to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner.

It was close to midnight when I keyed the video-tape of the climactic undercover meeting between Chama King of Cocaine and “Tony” capo of the Three Stooges Mafia family.

The screen flickered to life.

A hotel had been rigged with hidden video cameras.  Center screen was “Chama” and “Tony” facing each other across a table.  Between them was a piece of hand luggage containing $300,000 in hundreds and fifties.

There were several problems that were immediately apparent. First, they hardly shared a language in common.  Tony’s Spanish was rudimentary at best and Miguel spoke only a few words of English.  Tony for example kept referring over and over to the “Percento” until Miguel finally figured out he was trying to say “purity”—a word anyone who did drug deals in Spanish should have known in his sleep.

Second, neither man knew his role.  It was like Peewee Herman and Gnewt Gingrich playing dress-up and pretending to do a drug deal.  “Chama” was dressed like the hotel maintenance man,  and “Tony” was dressed like an Elvis impersonator.

Neither knew the mechanics of a real Class One drug deal, or any real drug deal for that matter.    There was no discussion of specific amounts, prices, weights, meeting places, delivery dates, provisions for testing the merchandise before delivery ,  methods of delivery or  prearranged trouble signals. Nothing happened that even resembled a real drug deal, which is typically  paranoid event that is all about specifics.  What the agents had on video wasn’t authentic enough for a Stallone movie.

The only thing clear was that “Tony” was asking Miguel to promise him that, if he was allowed to leave the room with the $300,000 he would, within 20 to 30 days, deliver an unspecific amount of cocaine, to an unspecified location—pretty good for a parking lot attendant.

Miguel eagerly assured his new benefactor that he would make said delivery. He was then allowed to examine the money, which he eagerly did,  after which the undercover DEA agent asked him if he was “happy,” with what he saw.  Miguel, thinking that America truly was a land of gold paved streets guarded by idiots and that his friend Snakeface was a genius to be compared with Einstein, or at least Howard Stern,  assured “Tony”  that he was very happy.

With all the elements to the crime of Conspiracy recorded on video-tape Tony concluded by saying  “…Whew!  Thank you very much and I’ll wait for your call.”

“O.K.,” said Miguel, his eyes bugged out with disbelief as he got to his feet holding the money.

“Hey! Dude,” said Tony,  “I’ll be here a little while.  I have to make a few calls.  Bye.”

Miguel’s look as he started to leave with the money only lacked the line: Feet, don’t fail me now. His feet didn’t have far to go—only about a half dozen steps before he was arrested.

I clicked off the video.  If DEA  stood for the Dumb Enforcement Administration,  then Miguel undoubtedly was a Class One violator—but a drug dealer he was definitely  not.

Had the agents responsible for this case been working for me during the seventeen years I was a supervisory agent, I would have jerked them into my office for a private conference. “There are a million fucking real drug dealers in this country,” I would have told them. “There’s probably a couple of hundred working within a square mile of the office. If you’ve gotta go 3,000 miles  to D.C. and spend a quarter of a million in taxpayer bucks to turn a fucking parking lot attendant into a Class One doper, you oughta be working for the CIA, or  Congress,  or wherever else you can convert bullshit to money.”

I would have put them on probation and moved to fire them if they couldn’t do the job.  I had done it before.  It wouldn’t have been anything new to me.   But was that any of my business now that I was retired?  If Miguel wasn’t a doper he was certainly a thief, wasn’t he?

“What are you going to do?” asked Laura.

“I wish I knew,” I said.  “It’s pure entrapment, but the idiot did his best to sound like a doper.  If I’m gonna go against DEA, I don’t want to lose.”

But there were things happening to me and in the news, that had been on my mind during the days leading up to this phone call that would keep me up for the rest of the night.

The first was the shooting of the wife and son of Randy Weaver by FBI agents during a raid at Ruby Ridge.  The guy was supposed to be a white supremacist and I’m a Jew, but we both had something powerful in common—the unbelievable pain of having our children murdered.

What had my head spinning in disbelief was that the case against Weaver that provoked the raid in the first place—possession of a sawed-off shotgun—had been set up by a professional rat like Snakeface and that Weaver had been found innocent by reason of entrapment.

I kept flashing back to an incident that had happened at the beginning of my career while I was serving with BATF, enforcing the Federal gun laws.

The rat’s name was Ray.  He had a glass eye,  no front teeth and a rap sheet as long as a cheap roll of toilet paper.  He was my first CI and would be the prototype for many hundreds to follow.

“I met this guy who wants to sell a sawed-off shotgun for sixty bucks,” said Ray flashing me his goal post smile. “His name is Angel.  He’s a black Porto-Rican. One a them Young Lords,” he added, naming the Mao-spouting Latino organization that was so popular to arrest.

“How do you know it’s a violation?” I asked.  A shotgun had to have a barrel length of less than 18 inches to be a violation of the National Firearms Act—the law we enforced.

Ray winked his good eye at me.  He knew the law as well as any agent. He made a living selling drug and gun cases to the government.

“When the dude left the room to go to  the john, I measured it.  How much is it worth if I duke you into the guy?”

I explained that if Angel delivered the gun in a car, we would seize it and the “informant fee” would be raised according to the value of the car. Or if Angel was somebody “news worthy” it would be worth a couple of hundred.  But Angel Nobody with one gun was only worth a hundred bucks,  then twice the average weekly income in the U.S.

Ray already knew all this.  Like all professional stools he just wanted the arrangement spelled out beforehand.  If I didn’t take the case,or he didn’t like the deal,  he knew he might still be able to sell it to the FBI or another ATF agent.

“But the dude is a Young Lord, that got to be worth something extra.”

People can say they’re anything.  We’ll see who he is after I bust him.”

Following my instructions, Ray set up a buy/bust meet.  Later that night, covered by a team of about a half dozen undercover agents, I met Angel, a nervous eighteen year old, on Bruckner Boulevard in the South Bronx.  The kid had the gun in a paper bag just the way Ray said he would.  I handed him the sixty bucks, took the gun and busted him.

On the way back to headquarters in lower Manhattan,  something happened that Ray didn’t count  on. When I told Angel that possession and sale of a sawed-off shotgun carried a sentence of 25 years in Federal prison he blinked a few times and turned rat himself.

Angel claimed that he had a “partner” on the deal—a guy named Ray he’d met on an unemployment line a few days earlier.

“The guy tol’ me he knew a sucker who’d pay sixty bucks for an old shotgun that he could get for ten in the pawn shop.  Alls we got to do is cut the barrel.  He say if I cut it and make the delivery, he puts up the ten for the gun and we split the profit. He was right there when I cut it.  He even marked it.”

What Angel had described, without realizing it, was a crime that never would have happened if it hadn’t been provoked by a paid government rat—entrapment.  In those years the rule was that simple: if the crime wouldn’t have happened without a CI or an undercover agent planting the idea, there was no crime.  The Justice Department wouldn’t prosecute it.  In fact, an agent could get himself into serious trouble bringing an entrapment case to the U.S. Attorneys office.

How things have changed.

It took me two days to corroborate Angel’s version of events and get all charges dropped against the kid. The Federal prosecutor thanked me and told me that I had just learned the most important lesson I would ever learn as a Fed: “Never trust a criminal informant, Mike,” he said.   Over the next twenty-five years I would hear those words repeated thousands of times, by agents, cops, training instructors and prosecutors, yet I never heard a prosecutor say them to a jury.

Everyone who’s ever carried a Federal badge knew how easy it was to convict someone who’d been entrapped on little more than an informant’s testimony, as long as the informant was clever enough to hide his tracks, the victim gullible enough to fall for the trap and the agents and prosecutors ambitious and immoral enough to go for the headlines, statistics and win at any price.

Until recent years I had believed that most of us in Federal law enforcement were people whose pride and consciences would not allow that to happen.

I was no longer so sure.

After the Ray-Angel case, I continued on with BATF for three more years before transferring into narcotic enforcement.  During those years I never saw another sawed-off shotgun case involving a CI,  accepted for prosecution by the two Federal courts in New York City.  There was just too much possibility of Informant Entrapment.

Yet, in the Randy Weaver case, the question,  How the hell was a CI entrapment, sawed-off shotgun case ever allowed to become a military invasion of an American citizen’s home? was not even being asked—either by our political leaders or the media. The question in my mind was, What happened to the people of conscience in the Weaver case?  You can’t just blame it on the rat—a professional rat can’t entrap anyone unless a government rat with more ambition than conscience is willing to look the other way.

The other thing going on in my life that would affect my decision was that—as a result of my books—I’d been receiving  letters from  Federal prisoners who claimed that they had been “set up” by lying criminal informants working for the various, competing Federal agencies enforcing the drug and money laundering statutes.  Guys like Lon Lundy, a once successful businessman, husband and father from Mobile Alabama, a man with no criminal record who was set up by a CI in a no-dope Conspiracy case and received a Life-with-no-parole sentence,  or Harry Kauffman from Cleveland, a once successful used car dealer, husband and father, who was conned by a CI into accepting cash, alleged to be drug money, for some cars and charged with Money Laundering, and many others.  And many others.

They were men of every race, religion and national origin in the Federal prison system.  Most had no previous criminal records, most had had their homes, businesses and financial assets seized by the Federal government leaving their families destitute, all had received more than twenty year prison sentences. In many cases the rats ended up with a percentage of the assets seized as a “reward” for their “work.”  These were men whose lives and families had been destroyed.  Their letters to me were desperate cries, that affected me deeply.

My twenty-five years in the justice system had taught me that there were plenty of  bureaucrats and politicians whom, if they didn’t like the way you exercised your rights as a citizen, or if they thought they could make headlines,  political hay or a promotion by your arrest and prosecution,  would not think twice about targeting you with the government’s legions of paid belly-crawlers. Few people have the money of a John DeLorean to adequately defend themselves against a slick rat.

The only thing, in my experience,  that stopped these rats with badges and rats in public office, were people of conscience in positions of authority and a knowledgeable and watchful media. For several years I had been seeing no evidence of either.  And as publicly outspoken as I had been about the phony drug war bureaucrats and politicians, I found this all personally threatening.

Finally, the most painful issue of all was the murder of my son Keith by a man who had two prior murder convictions in New York State; a man who was on the street—according to our political leaders—because there is just not enough money to put everyone in jail that belonged there, yet I was looking at a file in front of me that spoke of Federal law enforcement spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars to arrest and convict a parking lot attendant as a Class One drug dealer.

“I’ll do it,” I heard myself say the next morning.  “I went over all your stuff.  You’ve got a better entrapment defense here than John DeLorean had.”

There was a long silence on the phone.  “I didn’t claim entrapment  as my defense theory,” said the attorney.

I started to ask him why and stopped myself. It no longer mattered.  The attorney’s opening statement claimed Miguel was innocent of all charges—not that he had been entraped by a government rat working on commission, into committing the crime. Miguel, on camera, had done his best to play the role of Chama King of Cocaine; he had promised to deliver drugs and accepted money on camera—all the government needed to prove Conspiracy.  If a judge didn’t explain to a jury what entrapment was,  not even Johnnie Cochran could get him off.  And once the trial had begun no judge would allow a change in the defense theory—it was a simple matter of law.

But Miguel’s guilt or innocence no longer mattered to me.  I had somehow committed myself mentally and emotionally to go to war.  I wanted to try and make the growing power of rats—those with and without badges—as public as I could.  They weren’t only hurting people who had failed an honesty test—they were spending billions in taxpayer dollars for nothing but phony show trials, and filling the jails with people who were, at worst, non-violent dupes,  while our nation’s streets ran with the blood of innocents.

My testimony as a defense expert witness, lasted all day Monday and into Tuesday morning.  A couple of guys whom I used to work with sat with the prosecution watching me with looks of disbelief.  During a break one of them came up to me, stared at me for a long moment and said:  “It’s a shame you had to go that way.”

I said nothing.  There was nothing I could say.  I had known the guy for more than twenty-five years.  We had served together in two Federal agencies.  He, I was sure, was not capable of bringing a mess like Miguel Car-parker into Federal court, but he would not violate the blue wall of silence, he felt the need to protect people whom I thought didn’t deserve it.  When you become a Fed you take two oaths, one to protect the bureaucracy and the other to protect the Constitution and the people who pay your salaries.  No Federal agent can live up to both.

We would never speak again.

During my testimony I pointed out the dozens of places in the tapes that both Miguel and Tony spoke and acted in ways that indicated that neither knew what a real drug deal was like, and that in my opinion the crime never would have happened if it were not for the CI’s actions and the agents’ failure to control him and properly investigate his allegations.  I even got to testify to my opinion that “if the Federal government is going to use suitcases full of taxpayer dollars to test the honesty of American citizens, instead of working the parking lots of America, they ought to be running their tests in the halls of Congress where it might do us some good.”

As soon as I got off the witness stand I headed back to New York.  The whole thing had been a traumatic, shitty experience for me.  The attorney said he’d call to let me know the verdict.  The judge had refused to instruct the jury that they could find the defendant innocent by reason of entrapment, but the attorney was still hopeful.

In New York a message was waiting for me from another California attorney that would quickly take my mind off, what I had begun calling “The Beavis and Butthead case.”

The attorney represented a forty-five year old executive for a Fortune 500 computer company named Donald Carlson.  A Federal task force of  Customs, DEA, BATF and Border Patrol agents, just graduated from a paramilitary assault school the week before, wearing black ninja outfits, helmets and flack vests,  using flash-bang grenades and automatic weapons had invaded Mr. Carlson’s upscale, suburban,  San Diego home, shooting the corporate executive three times and leaving him in critical condition. They were executing a search warrant based on the uncorroborated, uninvestigated word of a professional rat.

Miraculously, despite the best efforts of the this newly formed, suburban assault squad—one of the invading feds did a Rambo-roll, firing fifteen rounds from his submachine-gun hitting everything in Mr. Carlson’s foyer, but Mr. Carlson—Mr. Carlson was going to survive and wanted to sue the government.

“We’d like to retain you as our consultant,” said the attorney, a soft-spoken, thoughtful man with an impeccable reputation for integrity.

” How did this happen?” I said.

“That’s what we’d like you to tell us.  It seems that this task force had a search warrant seeking for 5000 pounds of cocaine and four armed and dangerous Colombians in Mr. Carlson’s garage.  The warrant was apparently based on the word of a criminal informant.”

I immediately started pouring over the reports and statements.  Dawn had begun to light the sky before I realized that I had read the whole night through.  It was one of the most frightening examples of an out-of-control, almost comically inept Federal law enforcement that I had ever seen or heard of in my twenty-five year career —if it weren’t for the fact that these guys carried real guns and badges.

In short, a low-level professional rat/petty thief/druggie who’d been selling street-level dope cases to a local south Florida police department,  convinced a team of California Federal agents representing four Federal agencies, that he had become a trusted member of a major South American drug cartel.

They overlooked the fact that the rat spoke no Spanish and seemed to have a hard time putting together an intelligible sentence in English;  that most of the people he was implicating as “members” of this Colombian drug ring weren’t even Spanish speakers;  that the rat’s credit was so bad that the phone company refused to furnish him with a telephone (the agents had to give him a cellular phone, which they took back when he started making unauthorized phone calls); that a local cop had called the rat a liar.  Even the rat’s story,  that he was doing pushups in a California park when he was first approached by a stranger to join one of the notoriously paranoid,  Colombian Cartels, would have been dissed at a UFO abduction convention.

But none of this bothered these feds.

For three months the agents put the CI on the payroll, accepted everything he said as “fact,” implicated dozens of innocent people in government files and computers as “drug traffickers,” belonging to a drug trafficking organization that didn’t even exist, and even obtained four search warrants—including the Carlson warrant— on nothing more than the rat’s uncorroborated words.  And then, ignoring the words of a San Diego cop who called the rat a liar,  they “Ramboed” the suburban home of a computer company executive like it was Desert Storm, only to find that the Colombian Cartel didn’t even exist.

Holy shit! I thought. What is going on here?

The Federal grapevine must have been buzzing.  I was contacted by cops and agents who wanted to see some of these guys go to jail. A San Diego cop who had taken part in the investigation—but not the raid— was quoted as saying that the feds shouldn’t be carrying guns and badges. A lot of feds felt the same way, but they weren’t going to break the blue wall of silence.  One did, however, send me a copy of Congressional Report of hearings chaired by Congressman John Conyers Jr. that he thought “might be helpful.”

The title of the report tells its story: Serious Mismanagement and Misconduct in the Treasury Department, Customs Service and Other Federal Agencies and the Adequacy of Efforts to Hold Agency Officials Accountable.

The hearings not only found evidence of all of the above, they also found there was “a perception of cover-up” in these Federal agencies for all their misdeeds.  In spite of this report being issued within months of the Carlson shooting, the killings at Ruby Ridge and the massacre at Waco, Texas, it went virtually ignored by the media.

I had served part of my career as an Operations Inspector and began doing what I used to do for the government—documenting violations of rules, regulations and Federal law on the part of agents.  I began what would become two reports (160,000 words) noting hundreds of instances where these feds violated their own rules, dozens of indications of federal felonies—false statements, perjury, illegal tampering with evidence and coercion of witnesses— and violations of the U.S. Constitution.  I also found and noted in my reports—just as Congressman Conyer’s report noted—powerful indications of cover-up going right to top level management of DEA, Customs and the Justice Department.  Powerful people wanted the Carlson incident to “disappear.”  I was not going to let that happen.

Or so I thought.

A couple of days into my work on the Carlson case I got a call from Miguel’s attorney.  The jury had found him guilty of “attempted possession of cocaine.”   The charge carried a mandatory minimum of twenty years in Federal prison.

“The jury said they weren’t very impressed with either your testimony or the government’s” he said.  ”They voted on what they thought was the law.  Miguel promised he’d deliver the coke for the money, so he’s guilty.”

The attorney said he was appealing the conviction.  The CI, in the meantime, was paid whatever he’d been promised and was probably off selling more cases.  I mean, even I had to admit, it was a good living.  I hung up feeling like shit.

Weeks later, after I had submitted the Carlson shooting report, recommending that the agents and prosecutors involved in the case be fired and prosecuted. I was full of hope.  A rat cannot be king unless the people who are supposed to control him become as immoral and corrupt as he is and I was going for their throats.   The Carlson case would be the example that all Americans should see of what was going wrong all across this country.

I looked forward to the civil trial and testifying publicly to my reports.   It wouldn’t be a congressional hearing, where facts the facts testified to are usually the ones the politicians want to hear, so that they could comfortably reach the “conclusion” they’d already agreed upon long before the hearings began.   I was even going to call Court T.V.

I was at war.

Miguel’s attorney called me again.  “The judge reversed himself.  He’s granted a new trial on the basis that Miguel should have had an entrapment defense. Will you be available to testify?”

“Sure,” I said.”I’d love to.”

It would be months before I learned that the attorney and the Federal prosecutor had worked out a plea bargaining deal.  I’m not sure what Miguel pled guilty to, but he ended up with a ten year prison sentence. I suppose it could have been a lot worse.

It would be more than a year before I would learn that the U.S. government in the person of San Diego U.S. Attorney Allan Bersin,  had decided to settle with Mr. Carlson, avoiding a trial and the public revelations of my reports.   Mr. Carlson’s attorney made a public statement that by settling without a trial the misdeeds of the government were being covered up.  The government paid Mr. Carlson 2.75 million.  Part of the final agreement was that the government’s reports of its own actions,  be classified.

The U.S. Attorney of San Diego, made a public statement exonerating the agents and prosecutors of all wrongdoing. He said that “the system” failed Mr. Carlson, but that the agents and prosecutors were to be commended for having done their jobs.

Within weeks the government would also settle with Randy Weaver, paying him $3.1 million.  Once again the legality and morality of the government’s actions in entrapping Weaver in the first place were never even questioned.

This was also the year that Quibillah Shabazz, Malcolm X’s daughter would be charged with conspiracy to murder Louis Farrakhan, the man who was alleged to be behind the murder of her father.  The young woman, according to the press, had been set up by her fiance, who also happened to be a long time professional rat for the FBI and who was reportedly paid $25,000  for his “services.”

It seems though that once the prosecutor and the FBI got their headlines they lost all stomach for their case against Ms Shabazz and agreed to a plea bargaining deal that freed her.  My long experience told me that  allowing a woman whom they had publicly charged, with great media fanfare,  with conspiracy to murder and spent an enormous amount of taxpayer dollars to bring to “justice,”  to simply  go free without a trial  was not out of any pity for her—they were protecting their own butts and covering up perhaps one of the ugliest cases of rat entrapment on record.

I flashed on another professional rat I knew in DEA who had turned every friend and relative he’d ever had into government cash as if they were deposit bottles.  One day he came crying to me, actually bawling big wet tears,  that he’d met a woman and for the first time in his life was in love.  She lived in California and he was broke.  He needed enough money to get him there.  “I’m a piece of shit he said. Please don’t deny me a chance to turn my life around, Levine.”  I bought him a one-way ticket.  He was there a week when I got a call from a Los Angeles DEA agent checking on the guy’s record.  The rat was trying to broker a deal on his fiancé.

I watched the Senate hearings into the Federal government’s actions in both Waco and Ruby Ridge and heard, for the first time in my life, liberal Democrats and the liberal press, who for decades were criticizing the tactics of Federal law enforcement suddenly referring to them, as “our Federal agents,” and defending their actions.  It was clear that their real interest was to protect the President and Attorney General for their actions in two of the worst screw-ups in law enforcement history.  At the same time the conservatives and Republicans, who for decades had defended Federal law enforcement, no matter what they did, were now attacking the Feds as racists and “jackbooted stormtroopers.”

And somewhere in the middle of this political shit-storm the truth was lost and, as usual, all the rats—those with badges, those in appointed and political office—came out smelling like roses, while the walking around, taxpaying, hard-working American and his Constitution took it up the ass.

The other day I read an interview of Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, who, in  payment for turning rat against his lifelong partners in crime,  was “forgiven” for the murders of nineteen human beings (that we know about) and an uncountable number of felonies.  He was allowed to keep the millions he had earned as a murdering thug plus a pile of taxpayer dollars for “expenses,” and received a taxpayer-paid ride in the Federal Witness Protection program for life.  Gravano, speaking from what he described as a “nice little apartment complex”  said he was enjoying his new life as a bachelor millionaire.

“There’s a pool, racquetball  courts, gym, tennis courts and a lot of single women who don’t have the slightest idea who I am,” he said. “It’s nice.  I sit down and relax under some trees.”

God bless America, I thought.  The land where the rat is king.

[2]The incident was written about in The Big White Lie (Thunder’s Mouth Press)

“Any day is a good day to die”—Arab proverb

On Saturday, June 8, 1968, I witnessed violent death. It wasn’t the first time, it wouldn’t be the last. Yet the images of that day festered in my memory for three decades. It wasn’t until recently that I understood why.

It is a hot day and I’m leaning out  from between two cars of a southbound train trying to catch a breeze.  Throngs of people line the tracks as far as the eye can see,  gawking at us.   Here and there an American flag hangs limp in the dank heat. The body of the Senator Robert F. Kennedy in a flag draped coffin is in the rear compartment.  More than a million people line the tracks between New York and Washington DC where he will be buried.  My train is packed with (literally) the year’s hottest celebrities— the air-conditioner, unimpressed, has quit.

Ahead, some of the crowd push onto the tracks for a closer look.   A northbound train suddenly speeds around a curve heading right at them.   I wave and shout.   Most scatter to safety.  But a few freeze in their tracks like frightened deer an instant before the  mass of steel grinds them into road kill.   I’m thinking, “I didn’t see that.”  There is an explosion of sound.   Shrieks of horror over screeching steel.  A blur of dirty brown metal.  The indescribable smell of death.

Our train picks up speed.  I turn away, dizzy, grab a wall for balance.  Jimmy Breslin the columnist,  who 23 years later will eulogize my son Keith, a New York City cop killed in the line of duty, stands drink in hand rocking with the train’s motion. He stares at me curiously. “People just got killed,” I mumble.

I turn to face a compartment  full of passengers I’ve been assigned to protect.  Shirley Maclaine deep in teary-eyed conversation with her seat-mate Roosevelt Grier the football player who had helped rip the gun from Sirhan Sirhan’s hand stops speaking. The two watch me.  Behind her is Coretta Scott King dressed in widow’s black and lost in her own pain. Only minutes earlier we had received a message that her husband Martin Luther King’s killer   was captured in England.  She had not been told yet.   Robert S. McNamara, Rafer Johnson, Everett Dirksen, John Lindsay, Charles Evers and about fifty  others in command of everything from the Vietnam war and Congress to New York City and the NAACP—a Blue Book of public service of the dying 60s— stop talking and eye me curiously.   I  struggle for words.  I am one of ten federal agents assigned to the “Kennedy Funeral Train”  on  Secret Service Detail—a glorified security guard. “Interaction with the  protectees” was strictly forbidden.

At that moment,  Fifteen year old Joseph Kennedy III followed by a half dozen family members enters the compartment. He shakes every hand, mine included,  and with direct eyes that glisten wetly says,  “Thank you for coming.”  Now the Secret Service agent-in-charge is beside me, tight jawed,  chewing me out for “waving at the crowd.”  He grips my arm and leads me forward through the train.  He has a special assignment.  Richard Cardinal Cushing a close friend of the Kennedy family is sick.  I am to sit beside him until we arrive in DC,  then rush him to a waiting car.

When we reach the Cardinal’s seat he is bent over in pain.  I take the seat beside him.  I don’t think he hears my name, but in a moment he straightens, looks at me with a twinkle in his eyes and says,   “Levine, you want to hear something funny—my brother-in-law is Jewish.”  For the next five hours between bouts of intense pain the Holy Father of all Catholic Americans and the Jewish undercover agent chat like old friends, about family, politics and the growing divisions in America which seems to trouble him.  The fresh images of death surge with every silence,   but I say nothing.  Within months he dies of cancer.

The capture of James Earl Ray, the escalation of fighting in Viet Nam, student demonstrations and ghetto riots headlined the evening news— the train deaths are briefly mentioned.    Unlike my undercover life, memorialized by recordings, film and reports, the only reminder  I had of the “Kennedy Funeral Train”  were travel orders. The experience seemed unreal, bigger than life,  yet the images and gut sick feeling remained frequent visitors during the years that followed.

Then, a few days ago,  the inexplicable happened.   I was browsing a used book warehouse in upstate New York when I felt drawn to a remote, dusty corner of the building.  It was as if an old book that I’d never heard of was waiting for me—Assassination, Robert F. Kennedy 1925-1968.

I had to get on hands and knees to find it on a bottom shelf.   I cracked it directly to a page of photos and felt my legs give out.  I slumped down onto my butt staring at a photo of me at the moment that had etched itself in my memory.  Suddenly it was as if the scores of tragedies that I had watched with equal helplessness during my career as a federal narcotic agent bolted through my brain and became one with that photo.

And I cried the way I should have 31 years ago.   For all of us.

Mike Levine (right) watching helplessly as the train plows through a crowd.

We Americans have no idea how the image of our great country has suffered throughout the world as a result of our leader’s so-called war on drugs.  I just returned from an international drug symposium under the auspices of the OGD (  ), where I spent a week listening to representatives—members of police agencies, college professors, bureaucrats, elected officials and journalists—of virtually every nation in the world affected by drug problems, all of whom seemed to have one point of view in common: that the U.S. war on drugs was both a failure and a fraud.

The fact that it is a failure is readily evident on the streets of our country where it is proven in blood every day.  The indications that it is a fraud, however, are much more public knowledge around the world than they are right here, where our media has lost its courage to confront political power and continue to be the kind of watchdog over our Constitution that it started to be during the Watergate years.

In Paris when I tried to claim that during much of my career as a DEA agent I believed in what my leaders told me; that our war on drugs really was our number one priority.  My international collegues were hard pressed to believe that a twenty-five year, veteran undercover agent for the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration),  could be so ignorant of the facts, so naive.  They would stand for no excuses.  You took an oath, they said, to bring all those who may have violated your nations drug laws to justice, then why don’t you begin by arresting those in your own government who are accused of conspiring with and protecting the biggest drug dealers on the face of the earth?

I was left with no choice.  I had to defend my honor along with that of the many DEA agents who have dedicated their lives to this so-called war, in good faith.

I volunteered to kidnap Ollie North.

Now for those of you who are unaware of the allegations of crimes against and bizarre actions of your leaders, all done under the banner of War On Drugs, this may seem a rash, impudent and even—yes I’ll say it—irrational thing to do.  But I doubt that you’ll feel that way once you’re aware of the “devil” that made me do it: the facts.

Two years ago a maverick group of DEA agents (Drug Enforcement Administration),  feeling enraged, frustrated and betrayed decided to take the law into their own hands.  The U.S. government, including high ranking DEA officials, had joined the Mexican government in trying to sweep the “bothersome” matter of the torture death of Enrique “Kiki” Camarena—one of their fellow agents murdered by Mexican police working for drug traffickers—under a rug of political and bureaucratic maneuvering, where it would not disturb oil, trade, banking and secret political agreements.  Even the C.I.A. was implicated in protecting Camarena’s murderers, which was no surprise to the DEA agents.[1] 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 gunpoint in Guadalajara Mexico and brought to Los Angeles to stand trial. [2]

On June 16, 1992, the United States Supreme Court ruled the actions of those agents “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 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 few hundred innocents to capture Manny Noriega—but I was once part of a group of undercover agents posing as a travelling 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.” [3] I think I like the honesty of kidnapping a little better.

And now, since the democratic and staunchly anti-drug nation of Costa Rica has publicly accused Oliver North and some other high-level U.S. officials, of running drugs from their sovereignty to the United States, and appears close to officially charging them with the crime, I find myself, duty-bound to make the following offer to Costa Rica,  or any other nation that might have need of my services:[4]

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 kidnaping 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.

Before I pack my horse feed-bags and chains, of course, my offer is based on the fulfillment of  two additional requirements.  First,  an examination of that country’s evidence to determine—utilizing my quarter century of court-recognized expertise, my almost perfect record of convictions in more than 3,000 cases and the expertise of some of my angry, disenchanted, frustrated, albeit frightened-for-their-jobs, fellow agents whom share my feelings— that there  would be a high likelihood of conviction, should Oliver North be brought to trial in the U.S..  Second, that it appear unlikely that U.S. authorities would ever conduct a proper narcotic conspiracy investigation—as opposed to a Senate hearing, which is like comparing a toothpick to a pneumatic drill—into the mountain of evidence indicating the systematic and massive violations of U.S. drug laws by Colonel Ollie and other high ranking U.S. government officials whom, as the evidence seems to indicate,  aided, abetted and empowered him,  and then covered up for him.

Now unless you’re a dedicated drug war fan whose been following this three decade,  hundred-billion dollar fiasco closely,  you’ve got to be wondering what kind of evidence there could possibly be that this “American hero” who hid in a motel john to write his memoirs, violated United States drug laws? [5]

It will surprise many to know—since the mainstream media gave this important event very little coverage—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 [U.S. supported] contra factions 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 José Fernandez, by Executive order, from ever entering Costa Rica— for their roles in utilizing Costa Rican territory for cocaine trafficking. [6]

Costa Rica is not some third-world banana republic; it’s considered one of the most enlightened, educated and truly democratic societies in the Americas—a nation without an army, secret police or a C.I.A..  And the really ironic part of their accusations against North and the others is that all of the many tons of cocaine involved were destined to the United States.

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.

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.  If the Costa Rican charges, along with the growing mountain of evidence right here in the U.S.A. are ever fully investigated, I’m afraid we’ll have a new jail overcrowding problem.

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 specific, facts, circumstances and evidence that would give any “reasonable thinking person” grounds to believe, that anyone— U.S. government officials included—had violated the federal narcotic laws.  Any U.S. government law enforcement officer or elected official who fails to take appropriate action when Probable Cause exists, is in violation of his oath as well as federal law; and under that law it takes surprisingly little evidence to show enough Probable Cause for an arrest and conviction.

As an example, early in my career (1971), 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 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 inform for me)— turned the heroin over to the financier of the operation.   Poor John Clements, a friend of both men, just happened to be there.   There were no recorded incriminating conversations of Clements’ voice; he wrote no prof notes; he didn’t shred any documents; he did not lie to anyone; there were no millions in unaccounted funds at his disposal.  He only had about $3 and change in his pocket.   In fact,  we couldn’t prove that John Clements earned a nickel from the deal.  He was just there.  Yet under the law I had more than enough Probable Cause to arrest him—which I did.

Poor, young Mr. Clements couldn’t claim “national security,” or that he was under “political attack;” nor did he have elected officials clamoring for me to drop my investigation so that he could get on with the “more important” business of trying to govern his foundering life.  And so it was, after a full jury trial—which is my ultimate goal for Colonel Ollie and his gang—the federal judge in Gainesville, Florida,  sentenced him to thirty years in prison,  where he remains to this day,  for Possession and Conspiracy.  Clements was present during the transaction therefore, it was presumed, that he had to have knowledge,  and that was enough to prove Possession and Conspiracy to a jury of American citizens.[7]

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,”[8] are only accepted as valid defences by Congressmen and Senators with difficulties balancing check books—not American jurors trying drug cases.

But before we can get to a trial there must first be an investigation.   And if the American people demand and finally get that investigation—which would make my kidnapping mission unnecessary— it must have as its goal the answer to some very specific questions, of which the following are only a small sampling:

My first question to Colonel North—under oath—would be: Why did you campaign to obtain the release of Honduran army general, José Bueso-Rosa from a federal prison, after his arrest for smuggling 763 pounds of cocaine and murder?[9] Bueso-Rosa’s partner in the venture was international arms dealer Felix Latchinian, who in turn was an ex-business partner of C.I.A. agent Felix Rodriguez, who, in turn, was in charge of the contra’s supply network in El Salvador.  If this sounds complicated just remember that all this drug trafficking activity was paid for by U.S. taxpayer dollars.

In North’s efforts to spring the drug dealing general, whose case the Justice Department described as “the worst case of narco-trafficking in history,”  he asked for President Reagan’s support,  and got it —I would want to know, why?[10]

North, when he wasn’t shredding was not too good at covering his tracks. He wrote several damning prof notes to National Security Advisor, Admiral John Poindexter that wound up in the hands of Senate investigators.   In one such note he wrote that if Bueso-Rosa was not made happy he could “sing songs that nobody wants to hear.” [11] North’s actions and the notes prompted former Ambassador to Costa Rica, Francis McNeil to state, “What were those songs? Were they about narcotics or possibly something else? ” [12] If this were my drug case I’d begin a real narcotic conspiracy investigation that wouldn’t end until I knew every note and every verse of every song Bueso-Rosa had to sing.

Colonel North appeared on a radio show—Michael Jackson KABC, Los Angeles California, 11/11/91— to promote his book. I was telephoned at home in New York City and asked to participate in the discussion.  I listened while Colonel Ollie lied on the air by claiming General Bueso-Rosa had been arrested for “some political reasons.” When I confronted him and asked him about those “songs” he referred to, and Ambassador McNeil’s comments, he indicated that the answer to my question would be a violation of national security.[13]

How in God’s name in a nation with a drug-related homicide rate comparable to war-time casualty statistics, can the protection of any drug dealer be in the interests of national security?  I have worked undercover all over the world, from Bangkok to Buenos Aires, on the highest level drug trafficking cases, and for the life of me have never seen the validity of such a claim.

Since there is no way that it can be proved that the ounces and grams of cocaine that DEA agents and police officers like Everett Hatcher, Eddie Byrnes and Chris Hoban died trying to take off the streets, was not part of the 763 pounds that North’s friend, Bueso-Rosa, smuggled into the country or the many tons North’s contras bombarded us with, I would insist that North, President Reagan and all those U.S. officials who feared that Bueso-Rosa might sing his “songs,” explain—in a court of law—how the release of this drug smuggler was necessary for our national security.  President Nixon tried to hide behind “national security” and we know what happened to him.

And what of Colonel North’s 500 handwritten pages of personal notes devoted to drug trafficking, including mention of specific drug transactions and references to known, major drug traffickers like Carlos Escobar and Manuel Noriega, whom North was known to work closely with in the resupply of the contras?  Why has not, every single page and notation been thoroughly investigated as would be done in any drug trafficking case?   These hand-written notes also document North’s numerous contact with high-level DEA officials throughout the time period covered in his memoirs, yet the only mention of drugs in his entire, allegedly factual, book, is a page-and-a-half disclaimer stating that the Special Prosecutor spent “tens of thousands of dollars” investigating the drug-smuggling allegations against him and the contras and that if any of it was true “it surely would have come out.” [14] If only books were written under oath, I wouldn’t have to kidnap Ollie.

Potentially the most damning physical evidence against North—his five-hundred pages of diary notes referencing drugs—were never even received by the Iran-contra investigators.[15] What kind of an investigation could they have possibly conducted?  If poor John Clements had the Kerry committee investigating him, he’d be playing his guitar in some bar now, instead of serving his twenty-second year in prison.

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.”[16]

To any DEA agent with experience working high-level, international investigations that threaten”special interest” operations, even the half-baked ones like Colonel North’s,  all this has a familiar stench to it—the rot of high-level cover-up of official crimes and misconduct. A stench too many of us have had to live with in fear and silence throughout our careers.   Senator John Kerry put the situation quite succinctly when he said that, as he saw it,  the covert network [set up by North and aided by the C.I.A.] “became a further exploitation of the American people by violation of the narcotic laws, and it became a channel for the perversion of our own judicial process and enforcement process.”[17]

During the Iran/Contra hearings, virtually all testimony implicating U.S. officials in drug trafficking was given in secret session, prompting senior investigator Jack Blum to state, “I am sick to death of the truths I cannot tell.” [18] A sample of the kind of testimony heard in private was that of C.I.A. station chief in Costa Rica, José Fernandez who testified that as part of his C.I.A. duties he had to protect drug dealers.[19] Felix Milian Rodriguez, Medellin Cartel accountant and money-launderer—and C.I.A. asset—testified in a closed-door session, from which the public and press were barred, about the cartel’s $180,000 contribution to the Reagan Presidential campaign.  He also testified about  a $10 million “contribution” the drug cartel made to the contras — at the C.I.A.’s request.[20]

Yet, with all the official rhetoric not a single United States indictment charging any U.S. official with narcotic law violations has been forthcoming.   How ironic that the only official accusation would come from Costa Rica.

During my long career as an agent, I never lost a drug case anywhere in the world, (including far-flung places like Bangkok, Frankfort and Buenos Aires).   My employer, the Drug Enforcement Administration, in fact,  called me one of their top experts—a record and reputation I used to be proud of.[21] I would relish my own country giving me the opportunity to conduct a real conspiracy investigation into these allegations.  But if they don’t, to kidnap Ollie North for Costa Rica seems like the least I can do for the American people.

Now, you might ask, since there is so much evidence and information indicating wide-spread and high-level, “official” U.S. government involvement in drug trafficking, why focus on Ollie North?

I’ve been extremely successful throughout my career,  picking out the weakest link of a conspiracy chain, the link in the most damaging position,  the one most likely collapse and testify against the whole chain.  I used to teach and lecture on Informant Development and Handling as part of my duties for DEA.  A good sign of which criminal will make the most promising informant is often what I call the Stool Pigeon Profile.  The best “stools” are usually morally weak, not-too-bright and given to petty thievery.  They are cowardly people whom—when it comes to saving their own skin—are capable of unlimited treachery.

Most top-level criminals, for example, don’t make good informants; they are oddly “moral” people who tend to adhere closely to their own criminal code—preferring to do time in jail to “turning rat.”  The biggest drug dealers place a high value on their word and reputation; they will do multi-million dollar drug deals on nothing more than a handshake or a phone call. They usually have a powerful aversion to petty thievery recognizing that those associates who show themselves to be petty thieves are the least likely to be “stand up guys” if arrested—the most likely to turn rat.

Colonel North clearly comes under the category of Petty Thief.  His conviction for illegally accepting a $10,000 security system, considering the the many millions of unaccounted dollars that went through his hands, amounted to nothing more than the pettiest of thievery.  The conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court for technical reasons, not for reasons of fact.  And there were other petty theft allegations for which he was never tried.  His safe, for instance,  usually contained thousands of dollars in traveler’s checks he claimed were “given” him by contra leader, Adolfo Calero; checks that he used for groceries, clothing (Park Lane Hosiery) and snow tires—a misuse of funds that would have gotten a DEA or FBI agent, fired from his job and indicted for Larceny.[22]

Add to this how easily Colonel North turned on the man who called him “an American hero,” when he blew the whistle on President Reagan, while he was conveniently not under oath and on a book tour, making headlines with his “opinion” that the President “probably knew” of all his activities; and the fact that many of North’s personal notes referencing drugs are coincidental with notations indicating phone calls to Cap Weinberger and Claire George (already under indictment for lying to Congress and Perjury) and  Dewey Claridge (already convicted of perjury and lying to Congress).   Retired Major General John Singlaub, himself deeply implicated in the Iran/contra scandal said of North:  “To people all over the world, Ollie North was a hero.  But I knew better.   There was a wide gap between the media image …. and the sordid reality of his true character and performance…..Ollie, like other cowards, had faced a hard choice and made his decision.”[23]

Colonel North also clearly comes under the “not-too-bright” category of potential informants.  I mean it boggles my narc’s imagination that after he was allowed to spend countless hours at the shredding machine he left all those incriminating pages untouched.  This is precisely the kind of presence of mind I look for in a stool pigeon.

With the heat of a mandatory jail sentence under North I doubt that it will take much convincing before tells an American Grand Jury the words to those “songs.”  His personal notes might then corroborate hundreds of overt acts—the best possible evidence you could have for a conspiracy investigation.   North’s diary might then be compared to the already incriminating diaries of Cap Weinberger and Claire George.[24] Who knows where it will all end.

Potentially Colonel “Shredder” North could be the greatest snitch in Organized Government Crime since Deep Throat of Watergate infamy; the weakest and most corroded link in a chain linking together the Titanic of criminal Government Conspiracies.    It would be the kind of investigation to make the mouth of a professional narcotic conspiracy investigators water; easier than locking up a high school marijuana ring—if the politicians let us do our job.

There is little chance that this evidence and information will ever be investigated in this country, since the very people who would be implicated as North’s co-conspirators are the foxes who run this well-pillaged hen house; the critters who have already displayed their propensity to lie and destroy evidence and their power to hide behind “national security.”  Apparently the only chance I’ll get to fulfill my oath to the American people will be if Costa Rica does the job for us.  Unfortunately the Costa Rican authorities have found that the biggest enemy in their drug war are the American politicians and bureaucrats who are desperate to look the other way.

In fact, when Costa Rica began its investigation into the drug trafficking allegations against North and his smarmy little group, 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 resupply 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.[25] 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. [26]

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 aversely affect our relations.” [27]

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.” [28]

He didn’t know the half of it.

Costa Rica petitioned the United States for Hull’s extradition.  At present, Costa Rican public prosecutor, Jorge Chavarria has expressed his desire, “at minimum” to question North as a “materiel witness.”[29] Evidence and testimony has been presented to the Kerry Committee about North’s direct supervision of John Hull, including the fact that throughout the period Hull is charged with his crimes, North was paying him $10,000 a month.  Therefore, it is a foregone conclusion by all of us with experience in the techniques of international narcotic prosecutions, that if Hull is extradited and convicted in Costa Rica, North and the rest of his crew will logically follow. [30]

Unfortunately the State Department has since rejected the Costa Rican petition for Hull’s extradition, sending it back, for reasons of form  (technical deficiencies) effectively delaying it.  The newly elected President of Costa Rica—President Calderon, a known supporter of Colonel Ollie’s contras—is not too anxious to re-file the extradition request—at least not while President Bush is in power.  In fact, as my sources have told me, the Costa Rican government has already been threatened with losing U.S. aid if the charges against Hall don’t “disappear.”[31]

In all likelihood,  it will be a cold day in hell before those U.S. authorities, willing to make our nation the most hypocritical on the face of the earth by invading other countries, murdering innocent civilians and violating international law, allegedly to capture drug dealers, will adhere to Costa Rica’s extradition request for accused drug trafficker John Hull.  Why?  Because Hull is another man who fits squarely into the Stool Pigeon Profile. If he gets heavy jail time—not Community Service, the sentence given to most of the already-convicted Iran-contra crooks—and “flips,” he is liable to sing the same kinds of “songs” we might have heard from General Bueso-Rosa; songs about all those he was working for—North?  Poindexter?  Reagan? Bush?  God only knows where the songs will end once we get people singing.  No, there’s no way in hell that the the powers-that-be—without a federal judge of the caliber of a John Sirica or a House of Representatives with the courage and integrity to challenge them—are ever going to allow that to happen.

But as a retired narcotic agent who cannot distinguish between the ounces and grams of white powder found on almost any street corner of every inner city in our nation—killing innocent children and the law enforcement officers trying to stop the madness—from the many tons of the stuff that Colonel North and his cohorts are accused of spilling onto our streets, I say “If they’re guilty, they gotta go! They’ve all gotta go to jail, no matter who they are!”   If they don’t, I’ll have a hard time living with myself and the memory of the thousands I’ve put in cages for the same crimes they’re getting away with.

So if my government refuses to cooperate with another country who is willing to put these alleged drug traffickers on trial;  and all that’s needed is a little kidnapping; I’ve got the horse feed-bags and handcuffs ready, and I’m willing to travel.

I volunteer.

[2]Associated Press news report 8/ll/90, LINDA DEUTSCH Associated Press Writer

[3]. I took part in what was euphemistically called an “expulsion” in 1974, and was sued for kidnapping.  U.S. v Yolanda Sarmiento, Francoise Chiappi and Miguel Russo, among other incidents.  I have the documentation of the events, which will be treated in detail in a forthcoming book The Big White Lie.

[4] I am in possession of original investigative documents of Costa Rican Congressional investigators.  The accusation is also covered in Unreliable Sources by Martin Lee, Lyle Stewart Publications.

[5]See Under Fire by Oliver North.

[6] I am in possession of copies of original Costa Rican investigative documents.  The incident is also covered in  Unreliable Sources, Martin Lee,  Lyle Stewart Publications, whose source was Robert Parry, an Associated Press reporter who first covered the story and The San Juan Star (Puerto Rico), the newspaper that first printed it.

[7]This case is covered in Undercover by Donald Goddard, Times Books, October, 1989.

[8] Oliver North, Iran-contra hearings.

[9] Ibid, and Cocaine Politics, by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, University of California Press, 1991.

[10] Cocaine Politics, by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, University of California Press, 1991.

[11] Vanity Fair, March, 1990, “Hidden Agendas, by Mort Rosenblum

[12] Kerry Hearings, III, 48; also, Cocaine Politics by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, University of California Press, 1991.

[13]Michael Jackson Show, KABC, Los Angeles, November ll, 1991

[14] North’s 2600 pages of notes are in the possession of the National Security Archives, Washington, D.C., where Kate Doyle is copying and cataloguing the approximately 500 pages devoted to drug trafficking. I am in possession of some 100 pages covering one year of North’s involvement with drugs.   Some of the specific notes describing drug transactions were also written about in Out of Control by Leslie Cockburn.

[15]Vanity Fair, March, 1990, “Hidden Agendas, by Mort Rosenblum

[16] Out of Control, Leslie Cockburn, Atlantic Monthly Press

[17] Iran-contra hearings.

[18]Drug Wars, by Jonathan Marshall, Cohan & Cohen Publishers, 1991

[19] Iran-contra hearings.

[20] Ibid, P 154-155

[21]New York Times, “Acting on a Deadly Stage,” by Peter Kerr, June 16, 1986; also Undercover, by Donald Goddard, Random House/Times Books, 1989

[22]Out of Control, Leslie Cockburn, Atlantic Monthly Press

[23]The Unclassified, newsletter, published by the National Security Alumni-Vol.3, No.6; December-January 1992, page 23.

[24] Village Voice, “Dear Diaries,” by Frank Snepp, August 11, 1992.

[25] Boston Globe, “A Call To Justice,” by Jerry Meldon, May 6, 1991

[26] I have documentation of DEA’s role in Hull’s bail-jumping, through two independent, confidential sources.

[27] Boston Globe, “A Call To Justice,” by Jerry Meldon, May 6, 1991

[28] Ibid

[29] I am in possession of full documentation, including testimony of investigators who have spoken to Chavarria.

[30] Out of Control, Leslie Cockburn,  Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987

[31] I am in possession of a signed statement from one of the staff of Costa Rican investigators, attesting to the details of this threat.

During the political storm that erupted in early 2006 over the Bush administration’s plans to turn over port security to a United Arab Emirates-based company, the president was quoted on Fox News saying the following on March 12 of that year:

“People don’t need to worry about security. This deal wouldn’t go forward if we were concerned about the security for the United States of America.”

Apparently, if we are willing to heed the story of a former West Wing lead mailroom assistant, Laura C. Jones, the president’s gaff underscores another truth: that his staff isn’t concerned about White House security either. ”

(From the Bill Conroy Narconews Article)

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Ms. Jones, and her counsel Mike McCray of the No Fear Coalition about this amazing story.

More info on related topics:
Read Bill Conroy’s article on the Laura Jones story

A sensational, epic true story of a modern Mafia dynasty, by an author with incredible inside access to both the Mob and the FBI.

The Scarpas were a Mafia dynasty led by Greg Scarpa Sr., a man addicted to murder. His son, Gregory Jr., a promising athlete, worshipped his ruthless father, and was slowly drawn into his dark world. What only father and son knew was that for thirty years Scarpa Sr. was an FBI informant. For decades, his connection to the FBI granted him a virtual license to kill. But when facing arrest in the late 1980′s, Scarpa asked his son to leave his wife and children, and take the rap for his father.

After years in prison, in 1995, Gregory Jr, imprisoned alongside Ramzi Yousef, architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, agreed to extract information from Yousef in exchange for leniency, furnishing the FBI with detailed intelligence on what would result in 9/11. Incredibly, Greg’s desperate warnings were unheeded, and he was sentenced to forty-years-to-life at the notorious ADMAX. There he would supply the FBI with intelligence on Oklahoma City bomber and fellow prisoner, Terry Nichols. Again his contribution was ignored, and Gregory Jr. remains at ADMAX, where he believes he will one day be murdered.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with author Sandra Harmon about this amazing story.

About the guest:

Sandra Harmon, author of “MAFIA SON, the Scarpa Mob Family, The FBI, And A Story of Betrayal”, has had an extraordinary career as a best-selling author, journalist, television writer, producer and film maker. .

She wrote and produced the television movie, “Fast Friends” for NBC, which was based on her own experiences as a writer on “The Dick Cavett Show”. The film starred Dick Shawn as a popular talk show host who goes berserk on stage and is replaced by a young, unknown comedian, played by David Letterman. At the time, Letterman was himself an unknown comedian until Sandra discovered him and cast him in her film.

Sandra also produced the highly acclaimed “Promises to Keep” a CBS television movie starring Claire Bloom and Robert Mitchum, Mitchum’s real son, Chris Mitchum and his grandson, Bentley Mitchum. “Promises To Keep” tells the story of a family in crisis who finally come together when the grandfather makes amends, and in a case of reality imitating art, the shooting of the movie brought together the Mitchum family, who had been estranged for many years.

Sandra’s popular first novel, the critically acclaimed, “A Girl Like Me”, was published by Dutton Books in hardcover and Bantam Books in paperback. Norman Mailer wrote, “So let us welcome Sandra Harmon to the novelists. She begins with two splendid qualities. She is beautiful, and so we may depend on her to have much original material, and she is honest – the eye from which she writes is the eye to which it happened.”

Sandra is also the co-author of the internationally known, runaway best-seller, “Elvis and Me” – (the story of Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley – written with Priscilla Presley ) – which sold nearly one million copies in hard cover and three million in paperback and was, according to The Wall Street Journal, the tenth largest seller of the l980′s, occupying the #l spot on the New York Times Best seller listfor more than fifty weeks in both hard and soft cover.

Adapted for television by ABC,TV, “Elvis and Me” was then turned into one of the network’s highest-rated four hour miniseries of all times, putting the paperback of “Elvis and Me” back on the best-seller list.

Sandra next wrote the best-seller, “Getting To I Do”, in which she taught women everywhere, how to find the “right man”, begin a healthy sexual relationship, and get engaged, by the end of the first year.

This was followed by the sequel; “Staying Married and Loving It!” which teaches couples how to maintain a loving, erotic, successful long term relationship.

Links:

Mafia Son Website

Sandra Harmon’s Website

As we’ve previously talked about on the show, after 9/11 the NYPD stopped relying on Federal agencies for intelligence, and started gathering their own.

Well, Christopher Dickey has written an amazing book on the topic. Here, from the publisher’s website:

The NYPD is the best and most ambitious antiterror operation in the world. Its seat-of-the-pants intelligence is the gold standard for all others.

Christopher Dickey, who has reported on international terrorism for more than twenty-five years, takes readers into the secret command center of the New York City Police Department’s counterterrorism division, then onto the streets with cops ready for the toughest urban combat the twenty-first century can throw at them. But behind the tactical shows of force staged by the police, there lies a much more ambitious and controversial strategy: to go anywhere and use almost any means to keep the city from becoming, once again, Ground Zero. This is the story of the coming war in America’s cities and New York’s shadow war, waged around the globe to stop it before it begins.

Drawing on unparalleled access to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and other top officials, Dickey explores the most ambitious intelligence operation ever organized by a metropolitan police department. Headed by David Cohen, who ran the CIA’s operations inside the United States in the 1980s and its global spying in the 1990s, the NYPD’s counterterrorism division had uptotheminute details of new attacks set in motion to target Manhattan in 2002 and 2003.

New York’s finest are now seen by other police chiefs in the United States as the gold standard for counterterrorism operations and a model for even the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Yet as New Yorkers have come to feel safer, they’ve also grown worried about the NYPD’s methods: sending its undercover agents to spy on Americans in other cities, rounding up hundreds of protesters preemptively before the 2004 Republican convention, and using confidential informants who may be more adept at plotting terror than the people they finger.

Securing the City is a superb investigative reporter’s stunning look inside the real world of cops who are ready to take on the world and at the ambiguous price we pay for the safety they provide.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Chris Dickey about this great book, and the story behind it.

About the guest:

Award-winning author Christopher Dickey is the Paris Bureau Chief and Middle East Regional Editor for Newsweek Magazine. Previously he worked for The Washington Post as Cairo Bureau Chief and Central America Bureau Chief. Chris’s Shadowland column, about counter-terrorism, espionage and the Middle East, appears weekly on Newsweek Online. For links to recent columns and articles, visit the Shadowland archive. Chris’s nonfiction books include “Securing the City,” to be published in February 2009, as well as “With the Contras,” “Expats,” and “Summer of Deliverance.” He has also written two acclaimed thrillers: “Innocent Blood” and “The Sleeper.”

Links:

Christopher Dickey’s Blog

Christopher Dickey’s Website

Founded on March 16, 2002, LEAP is made up of current and former members of the law enforcement and criminal justice communities who are speaking out about the failures of our existing drug policies. Those policies have failed, and continue to fail, to effectively address the problems of drug abuse, especially the problems of juvenile drug use, the problems of addiction, and the problems of crime caused by the existence of a criminal black market in drugs.

Although those who speak publicly for LEAP are people from the law enforcement and criminal justice communities, a large number of their supporting members do not have such experience.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak to Terry Nelson – law enforfcement veteran and Leap spokesperson – about LEAP’s efforts, and the failed war on drugs.

About the Guest:

Terry Nelson’s law-enforcement career spanned three decades. It included service in the US Border Patrol, the US Customs Service, and the Department of Homeland Security, taking him beyond US borders into Mexico, Central America, and South America. In various capacities he acquired first-hand knowledge of the “War on Drugs,” being directly involved in counter-narcotics missions. He labored with distinction, even receiving special Congressional recognition for his work. “But,” he says, “as the ‘War on Drugs’ went on and on I never saw any visible progress – and only limited discussion about the lack of progress. Something was wrong with this picture.”

Terry came to understand drug prohibition was doing more harm than good and that the United States needed a major policy change.” For many years he had thought a lot about decriminalizing drugs but had not wanted to go so far as to legalize them. But the obvious lack of progress toward winning the war and the continued congratulatory backslapping unrelated to even incremental successes have made him conclude that enough is enough. Perpetuating the “War on Drugs” myth is dangerous to the well-being of the planet and lethal to future generations. Terry has decided the only solution is a policy of legalized regulation of all drugs. That decision led to his joining LEAP – the first group he has ever joined! “We must remove the criminal element from the drug trade, because it is destroying our society and crippling governments to the south of us. We must change the rules to win the real war.”

Terry retired in 2005 as a GS-14 Air/Marine Group Supervisor. He is a veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard, having served as a communications specialist in Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. He served 9 years in the U.S. Border Patrol including a stint as Instructor and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, 3 years in marine operations in the Florida Keys, 1 year a Customs Inspector at DFW Airport, 7 years as an Air Interdiction Officer/Criminal Investigator, 2 years as Staff Officer to Director of Foreign Operations and 5 years on the staff of Field Director (SSB East) Surveillance Support Branch East. During this period SSBE team participated in the seizure of over 230,000 pounds of Cocaine and received the United States Interdiction Committee award for interdictions. “But to what avail – today drugs are cheaper, more potent, and far easier for our children to get than at the beginning of the war.”

Links:

The LEAP website

“To get the most out of life, we should know as much as we can about the universe and the rules by which it operates. The more we invest the mind with diverse knowledge, the more strategies we have for living in the world well. Cultivating and exercising curiosity provides us with the means for conceiving our relationship with and our place in the world.

Everyday Survival is a book of changes. A book that will take you into the bowels of the earth and to the depths of the oceans in search of the origins of life and to the edge of the universe to discover where it all began. Everyday Survival demonstrates how our origins as humans shape our behavior today and it delves into the natural human systems that can often trip us up.”

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Laurence Gonzales about this fascinating book, the world we inhabit, and how we inhabit it.

About the guest:

Laurence Gonzales won the 2001 and 2002 National Magazine Awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors for National Geographic Adventure Magazine. Since 1970, his essays have appeared in such periodicals as Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Smithsonian Air and Space, Chicago Magazine, San Francisco Magazine, and many others.

He has published a dozen books, including two award–winning collections of essays, three novels, and the book–length essay, One Zero Charlie published by Simon & Schuster.

His latest book, Everyday Survival, published by W.W. Norton & Company, is available at book sellers now.

His previous book, Deep Survival, is now out in paperback.

Laurence Gonzales’s first book was the novel Jambeaux (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), which Rolling Stone called “the best rock-and-roll novel since Harlan Ellison’s Spider’s Kiss, which is to say it’s the best in almost twenty years.” His second and third novels, The Last Deal (1981) and El Vago (1983), were published by Atheneum.

By then he had turned his attention to writing nonfiction, and his book of essays, The Still Point, was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1989. It won the Carl Sandburg Literary Arts Award. One of the essays was a finalist for the National Magazine Award. In an unsolicited comment, Kurt Vonnegut responded to The Still Point by praising, “the excellence of Laurence Gonzales’s writing and the depth of his reporting.” The book-length essay, One Zero Charlie (Simon and Schuster, 1992) won the 1993 Chicago Book of the Year Award and remains a classic of aviation literature. One of the essays in his next book, The Hero’s Apprentice (University of Arkansas Press, 1994), was also a finalist for the National Magazine Award.

His 2003 book, Deep Survival (W.W. Norton) has become a bestseller and is available in six languages. His latest book, Everyday Survival, was just published by W.W. Norton.

Laurence Gonzales has also written plays, screenplays, poetry, and a book of short stories titled Artificial Horizon (University of Missouri, 1986). He has been Managing Editor of the journal Tri-Quarterly, Contributing Editor for Paris Review, Articles Editor for Playboy, Artist in Residence at the University of Missouri, Contributing Editor for Men’s Journal, Adjunct Professor at Northwestern University, and is now Contributing Editor for National Geographic Adventure Magazine, where he writes a monthly column.

He has lectured before diverse groups ranging from the Santa Fe Institute to Legg Mason Capital Management and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Links:

Laurence Gonzales website

Everyday Survival website

Bugliosi sets forth the legal architecture and incontrovertible evidence that President Bush took this nation to war in Iraq under false pretenses—a war that has not only caused the deaths of American soldiers but also over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women, and children; cost the United States over one trillion dollars thus far with no end in sight; and alienated many American allies in the Western world.

Tonight, on the Expert Witness Radio Show, Mike and Mark speak with Vincent Bugliosi about the eventual prosecution of George W. Bush, and how he intends to actually carry it out. More so than any other show we’ve ever done – you don’t want to miss this one…. especially because in this case, there’s something you can DO about it.

About the guest:

Vincent Bugliosi received his law degree in 1964. In his career at the L.A. County District Attorney’s office, he successfully prosecuted 105 out of 106 felony jury trials, including 21 murder convictions without a single loss. His most famous trial, the Charles Manson case, became the basis of his classic, Helter Skelter, the biggest selling true-crime book in publishing history. Two of Bugliosi’s other books—And the Sea Will Tell and Outrage—also reached #1 on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list. No other American true-crime writer has ever had more than one book that achieved this ranking.

His latest book, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, has been heralded as “epic” and “a book for the ages.” Bugliosi has uncommonly attained success in two separate and distinct fields, as an author and a lawyer. His excellence as a trial lawyer is best captured in the judgment of his peers. “Bugliosi is as good a prosecutor as there ever was,” Alan Dershowitz says. F. Lee Bailey calls Bugliosi “the quintessential prosecutor.” “There is only one Vince Bugliosi. He’s the best,” says Robert Tanenbaum, for years the top homicide prosecutor in the Manhattan D.A.’s office. Most telling is the comment by Gerry Spence, who squared off against Bugliosi in a twenty-one-hour televised, scriptless “docu-trial” of Lee Harvey Oswald, in which the original key witnesses to the Kennedy assassination testified and were cross-examined. After the Dallas jury returned a guilty verdict in Bugliosi’s favor, Spence said, “No other lawyer in America could have done what Vince did in this case.” Bugliosi lives with his wife, Gail, in Los Angeles.

Then, a fascinating story about UFO’s.

About the guest:

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It’s also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth.’

Links:

Consortium News

Edgar Mitchell Radio Interview

The Disclosure Project Video

Tonight, we speak with Retired Army Colonel Ann Wright about this simply disgusting story. From her April story on CommonDreams:

“The Department of Defense statistics are alarming — one in three women who join the US military will be sexually assaulted or raped by men in the military… But, now, even more alarming, are deaths of women soldiers in Iraq, and in the United States, following rape. The military has characterized each of the deaths of women who were first sexually assaulted as deaths from “non-combat related injuries,” and then added “suicide.” Yet, the families of the women whom the military has declared to have committed suicide, strongly dispute the findings and are calling for further investigations into the deaths of their daughters. Specific US Army units and certain US military bases in Iraq have an inordinate number of women soldiers who have died of “non-combat related injuries, with several identified as “suicides.”

If there were EVER a story that cried out for your outrage, this is it. See below for what YOU can do.

About the Guest:

Ann Wright grew up in Bentonville, Arkansas, and attended the University of Arkansas, where she received a master’s and a law degree. She also has a master’s degree in national security affairs from the U.S. Naval War College. After college, she spent thirteen years in the U.S. Army and sixteen additional years in the Army Reserves, retiring as a Colonel. She is airborne-qualified.

In 1987, Col.Wright joined the Foreign Service and served as U.S. Deputy Ambassador in Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan, and Mongolia. She received the State Department’s Award for Heroism for her actions during the evacuation of 2,500 people from the civil war in Sierra Leone, the largest evacuation since Saigon. She was on the first State Department team to go to Afghanistan and helped reopen the Embassy there in December 2001. Her other overseas assignments include Somalia, Kyrgyzstan, Grenada, Micronesia, and Nicaragua.

On March 19, 2003, the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Ann Wright cabled a letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin Powell, stating that without the authorization of the UN Security Council, the invasion and occupation of a Muslim, Arab, oil-rich country would be a disaster. Since then, she has been writing and speaking out for peace. She fasted for a month, picketed at Guantánamo, served as a juror in impeachment hearings, and has been arrested numerous times for peaceful, nonviolent protest of Bush’s policies, particularly the war on Iraq. She lives in Honolulu.

She is also the co-author, along with Susan Dixon, of DISSENT: Voices of Conscience – Government insiders speak out against the war in Iraq

Find out about it at http://www.voicesofconscience.com

Links

Ann Wright’s latest report – Sexual Assault in the Military: A DoD Cover-Up? – Just released Friday

What YOU can DO

The following Congresspeople have indicated their willingness to pursue hearings into these horrific incidents, and the system that allows them to happen. Please contact them, and let them know how strongly you feel about the issue:

Diane Watson

Elijah E. Cummings

Donald M. Payne

Lacy Clay

Susan Davis

Tonight, we speak with Elliot D. Cohen about his startling book, why people aren’t seeing what’s going on, and how the country is being damaged by it.

About the Guest:

Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D. is an ethicist, media critic, and political analyst. He is the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Applied Philosophy, ethics editor for Free Inquiry magazine, and the author or editor of many books in journalism, professional ethics, and philosophical counseling, including News Incorporated: Corporate Media Ownership and Its Threat to Democracy, Journalistic Ethics (with Deni Elliot), Philosophical Issues in Journalism, The New Rational Therapy: Thinking Your Way to Serenity, Success, and Profound Happiness, and What Would Aristotle Do? Self-Control through the Power of Reason. Dr Cohen has been a guest on such national venues as Ring of Fire, Majority Report, the Mike Malloy Show, and the Thom Hartmann Show, among others. He was the first prize recipient of the 2007 Project Censored Award for his investigative reporting on the corporate takeover of the Internet.

Find him at ElliotDCohen.com

Links

The FRONTLINE documentary Mark referenced in this episode.

We’ve all heard of Eisenhower’s famous warning about the military industrial complex (video below). Tonight, Mike and Mark speak wtih Robert Scheer about his devastating book on the subject of militarization, and its’ effect on society.

About the Guest:

Robert Scheer has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist. His columns appear in newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines. He conducted the famous Playboy magazine interview in which Jimmy Carter confessed to the lust in his heart and he went on to do many interviews for the Los Angeles Times with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and many other prominent political and cultural figures.

Between 1964 and 1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. From 1976 to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, writing on diverse topics such as the Soviet Union, arms control, national politics and the military. In 1993 he launched a nationally syndicated column based at the Los Angeles Times, where he was named a contributing editor. That column ran weekly for the next 12 years and is now based at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Scheer can be heard on the political radio program “Left, Right and Center” on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica, Calif. He has written seven books, including “Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power”; “With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War” and “America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals;” with his son Christopher and Lakshmi Chaudhry, “The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us about Iraq.” Most recently, he wrote “Playing President: “My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I and Clinton–and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush.”

Scheer was raised in the Bronx, where he attended public schools and graduated from City College of New York. He studied as a Maxwell fellow at Syracuse University and was a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley, where he did graduate work in economics. Scheer is a contributing editor for The Nation as well as a Nation Fellow. He has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford.

Links:

truthdig.com

Eisenhower on the Military Industrial
Complex: