John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the agency and go public. He ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA's secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit before he resigned.
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Now, obviously i'm not going to stand in front of you and say that the CIA might be involved in drug trafficking, am I? READ THE BOOK. Read The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. For 20 years the CIA was helping the Kuomantang to finance itself and then to get rich smuggling heroin. When we took over from the French in 1954 their intelligence service had been financing itself by smuggling the heroin out of Laos. We replaced them - we put Air America, the CIA subsidiary - it would fly in with crates marked humanitarian aid, which were arms, and it would fly back out with heroin. And the first target, market, of this heroin was the U.S. GI's in Vietnam.
If anybody in Nicaragua is smuggling drugs, it's the contras. Now i've been saying that since the state department started waving this red herring around a couple of years ago, and the other day you notice President Reagan said that the Nicaraguans, the Sandinistas, were smuggling drugs, and the DEA said, `it ain't true, the contras are smuggling drugs'.
"I have put thousands of Americans away for tens of thousands of years for less evidence for conspiracy with less evidence than is available against Ollie North and CIA people. . . . I personally was involved in a deep-cover case that went to the top of the drug world in three countries. The CIA killed it."
Former DEA Agent Michael Levine
CNBC-TV, October 8, 1996
THE UNITED STATES INVADED BY THE CONTRAS
DARK ALLIANCE
The sale of rock cocaine in American ghettos can be traced back to Juan Norwin Meneses Cantarero and Oscar Danilo Blandon, both active drug traffickers in Central America. Meneses was one of the top drug dealers in Nicaragua where he was known as “El Rey del Drogas” (“the king of the drugs”). In the 1970s Meneses ran drugs in Nicaragua with the permission of the right wing Somoza government which received a cut of the profits. The Blandon-Meneses connection began in the early 1980s when they met with Contra leader Bermudez who recruited them to raise money and supplies for the Contras. Blandon left the meeting with $100,000 to buy drugs. The profits from the sale of these drugs were used to buy supplies for the contras. Blandon told how he ran into trouble at the airport in Honduras when he was caught with the $100,000, but intervention by Contra leaders secured his release.
In a June 11, 1986 CIA cable from the Los Angeles division station, contra leader Fernando Chamorro was asked by Meneses in 1984 to help “move drugs to the United States.” A second June 1986 CIA cable reported that “Meneses was involved in the transporting of drugs.” A CIA cable dated October 31, 1986 contained two admissions. First, it detailed a CIA cable dated December 5, 1984 reporting that “Norwin Meneses was apparently well known as the Nicaraguan mafia, dealing in drugs, weapons and smuggling and laundering of counterfeit money.” Second, it quoted a CIA cable, dated March 25, 1985, which “described a Norwin (Meneses) Cantatero as the kingpin of narcotics traffickers in Nicaragua prior to the fall of Somoza.”
Meneses drug operations also included Tuto Munkel and Sebastian Gonzalez Medieta. Sebastian Gonzalez was a key CIA operant who was in charge of logistics for the supply of arms supplied by Noriega. The CIA knew that Gonzalez also was involved in drug trafficking with Meneses in 1984.
“Dark Alliance,” described the role of Blandon and Meneses in the circulating crack cocaine in the neighborhoods of Los Angeles and New York City. In August 1996 Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News ran a series of stories which alleged that the Contras provided millions of dollars in crack cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles. In turn millions of dollars in drug profits were funneled back to the Contra army in Central America.
