America's Mexican Border Wars

[David Guyatt]

Further extract from the Narco News story:

The FBI charged Vega in 2000 with obstruction of justice, alleging that he used an illegal scheme of promising Colombian narco-traffickers lenient sentences in exchange for money and their cooperation with the U.S. government. Those charges were dropped, however, because prosecutors were later forced to concede that Vega’s so-called “corruption scheme” was actually a government-sanctioned cover story. In fact, Vega claims the FBI authorized the cover story.

But the government still found a way to stick it to Vega by hitting him with a misdemeanor tax charge. Vega says he served 52 days in jail after being convicted in 2004 of that taxing transgression. Ironically, one of the allegedly corrupt Colombian law enforcers who Vega claims was part of the Bogotá Connection, Col. Danilo Gonzalez of the Colombian National Police, was assassinated in Bogotá on the very day Vega was sentenced in the tax case.

Vega, in a recent lawsuit filed in federal court, claims the FBI and DEA both used him between 1997 and 2000 to help broker plea deals with Colombian narco-traffickers and that, in the end, the U.S. government stiffed him out of $28.5 million in promised payments for his work.

It was during that work for the FBI and DEA that Vega ran across Greg Smith, whom Vega claims was brought in by the FBI to pilot some 25 to 30 flights that involved couriering federal agents, Colombian narco-traffickers and lawyers back and forth between the United States and Latin America as part of the naroc-trafficker “recruiting” efforts.

Vega also says that the CIA was very involved in this effort, assisting with assuring the safe transport of the narco-traffickers to the airports in Latin America.

“We did have the full cooperation of the CIA…,” he told Narco News.

And

In addition, one of the files leaked out of the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá to a narco-trafficker was a CIA file, according to Vega. The file provided to that narco-trafficker, Vega alleges, was a record of all the intelligence gathered by the CIA in Colombia on some 200 narco-traffickers.

So it appears the CIA’s fingerprints are all over the Bogotá Connection.

And now, given Mr. Smith’s possible link to the Gulfstream II jet — an aircraft reportedly linked to past CIA operations — Vega says he cannot rule out that Smith might be an asset of not only the FBI, but the CIA as well. He stresses, though, that it is only a “suspicion.”