Since Aldrich Ames has been in the news recently, I think this is apropos. (the suggestion has been made that the CIA failed to uncover his activities because they ascribed his fabulous wealth to the coke business -- not that they would ever admit _that_, of course) From: ww@blythe.org (Workers World Service) Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit CIA IS UP TO ITS EYEBALLS IN COCAINE DEALS Which banks laundered the money? By Deirdre Griswold No element of the state apparatus is more shielded from public scrutiny than the Central Intelligence Agency--the U.S. secret police whose operations span the globe. What do they really do? How much of the public treasury is diverted into their coffers? How many of the vicious wars now tearing apart poor countries were hatched in their inner sanctums? It seems that one thing they do is ship millions of dollars' worth of cocaine into the United States. That's according to an official of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, Annabelle Grimm, who was interviewed by the program "60 Minutes." The New York Times of Nov. 20 first broke the story. "I really take great exception to the fact that 1,000 kilos came in, funded by U.S. taxpayer money," said Grimm. A thousand kilos is over a ton of pure cocaine. CIA, COCAINE AND DEATH SQUADS The 1990 shipment was arranged by Mark McFarlin of the CIA and Gen. Ram"n Guilln Davis of the Venezuelan National Guard, said the Times story. What possible reason could the CIA give for arranging to ship a ton of cocaine into the U.S., where it was then sold on the streets? It was done to "gain the confidence" of Colombian drug traffickers, explained the agency. McFarlin's history includes a stint in El Salvador, where he worked with "anti-guerrilla forces" in the early 1980s. This is a euphemism for the government death squads that, together with the Salvadoran army, were responsible for the deaths of 70,000 people in the dirty war there. The guerrilla movement represented the workers and peasants. The U.S.-funded killers did the bidding of the landed oligarchy and the multinational corporations that have sucked El Salvador dry. What is the connection between drug trafficking and a rightwing political police agency like the CIA? Plenty. Recently, the CIA was implicated in covert support for the right-wing military in Haiti, which has deposed the popularly elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. At the same time, the State Department was grabbing headlines with its loud but ineffectual negotiations supposedly meant to return Aristide to his country. The Haitian military are known to be deeply involved in the highly lucrative drug trade--a compelling reason why they refuse to relinquish direct control over the government. During the Vietnam war, the CIA used its fleet of secret planes to ferry opium and heroin out of Southeast Asia--at the same time that its agents were assassinating Vietnamese villagers in the notorious Phoenix program. Drugs became a major social problem in the U.S. at this time. (See "The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia," Alfred W. McCoy, Harper & Row, 1972) LINKS TO BANKS The biggest question, however, is the tie between covert government agencies like the CIA and the giant banks that launder hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money. It is public knowledge that the CIA deposits large amounts of money in the name of dummy companies. At the highest levels, bank officials obstruct public scrutiny of dubious transactions, including those involving large amounts of cash. When they are working with the CIA, all this can be passed off as necessary in the interests of "national security." In January 1985, Bank of America was fined $4.75 million in a civil penalty for failing to report more than 17,000 large cash transactions. Other huge banks paid lesser fines in this mild crackdown on widespread money laundering. No criminal charges were pursued. In 1989, after Treasury officials estimated that as much as $110 billion was being laundered by U.S. banks each year, the Bush administration announced it would regulate international money transfers by U.S. banks, and would set up a large computer center in Arlington, Va., to monitor information on money laundering. And there it has sat. No big indictments, or even civil fines, have been forthcoming against the big capitalist bankers. Repression and police corruption Instead, all the muscle has gone into sending U.S. paramilitary units into impoverished South American nations like Bolivia and Peru to interdict cocaine supplies--with no results--and beefed-up SWAT teams into oppressed communities in the U.S., where their racism and brutality are notorious. Repression against drug dealers on the street level is worse than futile. As the recent Mollen Commission hearings in New York showed, it is often linked to massive corruption among the police themselves. This latest revelation about the CIA and cocaine shows once again that drug trafficking can only be rooted out through a mass struggle aimed at the vital institutions of capitalist society. They are in it up to their eyeballs. -30- (Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more information contact Workers World, 55 West 17 St., New York, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@blythe.org.)