"War on Drugs": CIA- Recruited Mercenaries and Drug-Traffickers

[Peter Lemkin]

America's "War on Drugs": CIA- Recruited Mercenaries and Drug-Traffickers

by Michael Levine

Global Research, January 13, 2011

When Nixon first declared war on drugs in 1971, there were fewer than 500,000 hard-core addicts in the nation, most of whom were addicted to heroin. Three decades later, despite the expenditure of $1 trillion in tax dollars, the number of hard-core addicts is shortly expected to exceed five million. Our nation has become the supermarket of the drug world, with a wider variety and bigger supply of drugs at cheaper prices than ever before. The problem now not only affects every town on the map, but it is difficult to find a family anywhere that is not somehow affected. (pp. 158, 159)

The Chang Mai factory the CIA prevented me from destroying was the source of massive amounts of heroin being smuggled into the US in the bodies and body bags of GIs killed in Vietnam. (p. 165)

My unit, the Hard Narcotics Smuggling Squad, was charged with investigating all heroin and cocaine smuggling through the Port of New York. My unit became involved in investigating every major smuggling operation known to law enforcement. We could not avoid witnessing the CIA protecting major drug dealers. Not a single important source in Southeast Asia was ever indicted by US law enforcement. This was no accident. Case after case was killed by CIA and State Department intervention and there wasn't a damned thing we could do about it. CIA-owned airlines like Air America were being used to ferry drugs throughout Southeast Asia, allegedly to support our "allies." CIA banking operations were used to launder drug money. (pp. 165, 166)

In 1972, I was assigned to assist in a major international drug case involving top Panamanian government officials who were using diplomatic passports to smuggle large quantities of heroin and other drugs into the US. The name Manuel Noriega surfaced prominently in the investigation. Surfacing right behind Noriega was the CIA to protect him from US law enforcement. As head of the CIA, Bush authorized a salary for Manuel Noriega as a CIA asset, while the dictator was listed in as many as 40 DEA computer files as a drug dealer. (pp. 166, 167)

The CIA and the Department of State were protecting more and more politically powerful drug traffickers around the world: the Mujihadeen in Afghanistan, the Bolivian cocaine cartels, the top levels of Mexican government, Nicaraguan Contras, Colombian drug dealers and politicians, and others. Media's duties, as I experienced firsthand, were twofold: first, to keep quiet about the gush of drugs that was allowed to flow unimpeded into the US; second, to divert the public's attention by shilling them into believing the drug war was legitimate by falsely presenting the few trickles we were permitted to indict as though they were major "victories," when in fact we were doing nothing more than getting rid of the inefficient competitors of CIA assets. (pp. 166, 167)

On July 17, 1980, drug traffickers actually took control of a nation. Bolivia at the time [was] the source of virtually 100% of the cocaine entering the US. CIA-recruited mercenaries and drug traffickers unseated Bolivia's democratically elected president, a leftist whom the US government didn't want in power. Immediately after the coup, cocaine production increased massively, until it soon outstripped supply. This was the true beginning of the crack "plague." (pp. 167, 168)

The CIA along with the State and Justice Departments had to combine forces to protect their drug-dealing assets by destroying a DEA investigation. How do I know? I was the inside source. I sat down at my desk in the American embassy and wrote the kind of letter that I never myself imagined ever writing. I detailed three pages typewritten on official US embassy stationaryenough evidence of my charges to feed a wolf pack of investigative journalists. I also expressed my willingness to be a quotable source. I addressed it directly to Strasser and Rohter, care of Newsweek. 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 to having sex with a married female DEA agent. The investigation would wreak havoc with my life for the next four years. (pp. 168-171)

In one glaring case, an associate of mine was sent into Honduras to open a DEA office in Tegucigalpa. Within months he had documented as much as 50 tons of cocaine being smuggled into the US by Honduran military people who were supporting the Contras. This was enough cocaine to fill a third of US demand. What was the DEA response? They closed the office. (p. 175)

Sometime in 1990, US Customs intercepted a ton of cocaine being smuggled through Miami International Airport. A Customs and DEA investigation 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. The CIA soon admitted that this was true. If the CIA is good at anything, it is the complete control of American mass media. So secure are they in their ability to manipulate the mass media that they even brag about it in their own in-house memos. The New York Times 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. The highlight of the 60 Minutes piece is when the administrator of the DEA, 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 [author's emphasis]." (pp. 188, 189)

The fact is and you can read it yourself in the federal court records that seven months before the attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, the FBI had a paid informant, Emad Salem, who had 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. (p. 191)

Michael Levine is a 25-year veteran of the DEA turned best-selling author and journalist. His articles and interviews on the drug war have been published in numerous national newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and Esquire.

Learn about Mr. Levine's books and radio show at http://www.expertwitnessradio.org.

[Peter Lemkin]

The American Justice System Where the Rat is King.

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 carsdoes 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 OnePablo 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 Conspiracydid 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 merchandiseninety-nine percent pure cocaineas 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 agencieswhere 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 ofunless things had changed drasticallyand 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 bookDeep Coveras 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 informantthe 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 guysevery time his mouth moves he's lying. The case was righteous, Mike. Don't fall for itnot 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-cassetteDEA'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 "CariculoSnakeface" 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" husbandjust 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 FBIwhere 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 agencies53 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 conversationlocking 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 telephonesomething 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. Miguelsurprizing 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$300,000another 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 salarywhich 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 moneyall they'd need to prove him guilty of Conspiracy to possess and distribute cocaineand 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 actthe 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 locationpretty 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 goonly 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 violatorbut 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 commonthe 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 placepossession of a sawed-off shotgunhad 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 Actthe 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 deala 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 ratentrapment. 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 askedeither 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 rata 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 thatas a result of my booksI'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 streetaccording to our political leadersbecause 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 chargesnot 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 cameraall 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 theoryit 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 ratsthose with and without badgesas public as I could. They weren't only hurting people who had failed an honesty testthey 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 squadone of the invading feds did a Rambo-roll, firing fifteen rounds from his submachine-gun hitting everything in Mr. Carlson's foyer, but Mr. CarlsonMr. 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 warrantsincluding 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 investigationbut 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 governmentdocumenting 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 feloniesfalse statements, perjury, illegal tampering with evidence and coercion of witnesses and violations of the U.S. Constitution. I also found and noted in my reportsjust as Congressman Conyer's report notedpowerful 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 herthey 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 ratsthose with badges, those in appointed and political officecame 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.

[Peter Lemkin]

Mainstream Media: The Drug War Shills
by Michael Levine

Everything you need to know about mainstream media's vital role in perpetuating our nation's threedecade, 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 thatthanks to excellent shillingmost 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 lawsthe 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 erawould 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 thatother than the Vietnam Warthe 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 minirecorder. 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 andmore important embassy approvals for the operation to proceed. Andmost 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 firmI was not going to Chiang Mai and that was it. CIA had made the decision for usa 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 Handlercombat 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 actionone 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 Drugsa 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 CorporacionThe Corporationin 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 7th, 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 investigationUS 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 mediawith 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 plotalthough 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 Montybogus 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 sayingno more than a couple of phone calls to the agencies involvedyet 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 effortthe 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 Contrasthose "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-offsboth 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 Applethe 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 televisionas 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 jobsnot 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 TrifectaDeep 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 paymentfive 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 audiotapes, 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 hopingnaivelythat 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 eventsfrom the Vietnam War and Cointelpro to the entire War on Drugshad 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 articlean 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 c

[Dawn Meredith]

If the people in this country would just read these truths.

The problems really feel insurmountable at times.

Our world is evil. Pure and simple. The rulers of the world are whores

who make hookers look like salesgirls. And at least with hookers it is an honest exchange.

Our media is owned by an out of control drug dealing CIA.

God bless guys like Levine. And Gary Webb, rest his soul.

But they are so few.

Depressing really.

Dawn