CIA/Contra Drugs, Intelligence Reform, and Oliver North
Our Hidden History
Ian Masters: Welcome to Background Briefing. I am Ian Masters today we'll deal with one subject and that is the recently conducted hearings before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, chaired by Senator Arlen Specter, co-chaired by Bob Kerrey. The lead off witness in that hearing, which was prompted by the series of articles in The San Jose Mercury News alleging Contra-cocaine connection into South Central Los Angeles involving the Central Intelligence Agency, was Jack Blum and we're privileged to have Jack Blum with us today. Jack Blum was special counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for some time and he was Chief Investigator for the Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and International Operations chaired by Senator John Kerry. These hearings took place in 1988. Where you looked at the Contra-drug connection and just to begin with Jack Blum, I'm astounded first of all in the press coverage of the hearings, you're the lead off witness, you're followed by Mr. Hitz, the CIA's Inspector General and then Mr. Bromwich of the Justice Department, but there was no mention of your testimony, which I found fascinating, in both the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. What is it? Did they think that somehow this is an old story?
Jack Blum: I'm not really sure as to why there was no coverage. I don't know whether it was reportorial laziness or whether they simply felt there was nothing new that was added, but I can tell you even where there was coverage, what you thought happened at that hearing depended on what city you were in.
Ian Masters: Well it is strange that people would see this as an old story in the sense that, I mean, none of this has been resolved has it? I mean, a great deal of reportorial effort has been put into analyzing and debunking the San Jose Mercury's news story, but absolutely no effort has been put into looking at the evidence that's extant and that's been hanging since the mid-80s.
I think we should be doing a full review of the entire history of intelligence operations and how they connected with both drug trafficking and organized crime.
Jack Blum: I think the place to begin is to talk about the complete failure of congress and the administration to deal intelligently with intelligence reform. The Cold War is over, the demands on the intelligence community have changed radically. The time has really come for a serious public review of what we mean by intelligence and what is appropriate for the government to be doing in a world where we don't face the threats that people saw before in international communism. Now, that kind of review simply hasn't occurred. In fact, the CIA budget is up, the intelligence community budget is up, even as we're cutting the budget of the State Department and other agencies involved in foreign policy and I think we should be doing a full review of the entire history of intelligence operations and how they connected with both drug trafficking and organized crime.
Ian Masters: In the sense that we'd gone through this tremendous geopolitical transformation since the Cold War where, out 50 years we're focused on national security and national defense and we're suddenly in a world in which there are no nation states effectively threatening each other, but the threats come from sub-national disintegration of borders and cultures and religious differences and the trans national phenomenon which I'd like to talk about today, which is drugs and crime and that is clearly on the rise and indeed the former country of the Soviet Union, now Russia is a country completely beset by sub-national and trans-national security threats.
the Bosnian war was financed by drug dealing. The people in Europe know the former Yugoslavia became a center for drug trafficking as this war went on because people had the opportunity in the war zone to smuggle and deal in narcotics coming out of South Asia.
Jack Blum: Well the interesting thing is that drugs have shown up in one civil war after another and one major security problem area after another. So, if you look at Bosnia, the problems in Bosnia, many people may not understand that among other things, the Bosnian war was financed by drug dealing. The people in Europe know the former Yugoslavia became a center for drug trafficking as this war went on because people had the opportunity in the war zone to smuggle and deal in narcotics coming out of South Asia.
Ian Masters: Well we could all-
Jack Blum: Back to Beirut, which was destroyed in an incredible civil war that went on for years, virtually everyone of the groups in that civil war was involved in heroin trafficking.
Ian Masters: Indeed the Bekka Valley is the jewel in the crown of the drug trade in Lebanon.
And in Afghanistan, where the war never ended, the backbone of support for that war is heroin.
Jack Blum: And in Afghanistan, where the war never ended, the backbone of support for that war is heroin. The people who are the refugees and the people who continue to fight are funding their existence and their continued ability to fight by growing and distributing opium poppy and then transforming it into heroin and shipping it elsewhere. So there is a tremendous correlation between the problem of narcotics and the problem of war and insurrection.
Ian Masters: Well, that would lead us then into the subject of the hearings and here in Los Angeles, Jack Blum, there's been an enormous and extremely incendiary reaction to the allegations that came forth in the series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News and clearly, I mean at least we can agree on the surface, that it seems to me that in that period of the 80s we were, in order to prosecute an unpopular war that wasn't entirely authorized by the Congress against the Sandinistas. Whether there was a direct link or not, from that period forth this country has been beset with the scourge of cocaine, and particularly crack cocaine. So, damage has been done to the United States.
Jack Blum: There's no question about it and I think the problem in discussing this is to separate the issues. In Los Angeles, at the moment, "Freeway" Ricky Ross is trying to say that his main supplier of cocaine was CIA connected, and that he was a kind of major purveyor of crack cocaine in South Central and therefore he and the CIA had a very important role in inundating Los Angeles with cocaine during that period. There are several things that are wrong with his story, and several things wrong with making the argument that this was some sort of plot on the part of the government. "Freeway" Ricky was responsible for only a tiny, tiny fraction of the cocaine that came into Los Angeles and one should be reminded it was pouring in from Mexico, it was coming in from a variety of sources. It was available not only in South Central, but certainly in the entertainment areas of the city there were stories about cocaine being sold at the NBC commissary. There were all kinds of stories about movie stars and rock stars who were going into various treatment centers and not to mention the athletes. I don't think they were all being supplied by "Freeway" Ricky.
Ian Masters: Now indeed it was, for a while it was a fad in Hollywood, but it had a peculiar trickle down effect Jack Blum. It started with the rich and famous and the yuppies and then they sort of tired of it after a while it seems.
...our government systematically kept quiet about, helped and avoided confronting a variety of people who were responsible, truly responsible, for flooding the entire country with cocaine.
Jack Blum: Cocaine does have that natural history, but to go back to the core of the problem, if you focus only on the "Freeway" Ricky story, it's very easy for people to deny that the intelligence world was responsible for a huge problem. If you, on the other hand, go back to the hearings we had and go back to the period, what you very quickly find out is that our government systematically kept quiet about, helped and avoided confronting a variety of people who were responsible, truly responsible, for flooding the entire country with cocaine.
I being there with General Noriega, who was by his admission, by various other public statements, on the CIA payroll. Clearly involved in cocaine trafficking and we looked the other way because he was supporting us and that is all documented in Ollie North's diaries. You have the case of Honduras, where the generals in Honduras were involved in the cocaine trade, where we knew they were involved and we knew that they were protecting a major player, a man named Ramon Matta-Ballesteros and instead of doing anything about it, we actually closed the DEA office because we needed those Honduran generals, we needed the bases in Honduras.
Ian Masters: For the Contra-war.
Jack Blum: For the Contra-war, the Contras were in fact in operation in Honduras. That same pattern was followed in Haiti. It colored the way we responded to Mexico, it was the problems in Mexico surrounding the [Kiki] Camarena murder became apparent and it is a major piece of why the drug cartels were able to entrench themselves and get the kind of power and position they did.
Ian Masters: So either consciously or unconsciously at a high policy level during that period, the conditions were created for this holocaust to happen.
Jack Blum: Yes.
Ian Masters: That's what I find so extraordinary. The press is treating this like an old story, but the Holocaust is an old story, but there are still Nazi war criminals on trial. There's one in Rome as we speak.
Jack Blum: The problem has been finding a tool for getting accountability, for getting a public discussion on what has hitherto been secret policy and secret decisions. I think it is incredibly important to the democracy that when decisions taken that have this kind of consequence, people fully understand them and debate them. I would argue that even if you have to make decisions in secret, ultimately when decisions are taken, the consequences have been badly thought through or not debated, the people who are responsible for not understanding what the consequences of their actions were, at the very least be dismissed and taken out of the game and if it's bad enough, probably in some way, disciplined or punished.
The thing that the intelligence community has been incredibly weak at doing is just that, which is owning up to mistakes and cleaning the mistakes out. Look at the problems they have with the Aldrich Ames case. It's very tempting in a situation like that to continue applying rules of secrecy beyond all reason because what those rules of secrecy do is they protect monumental stupidity. We've got to break through that and I think everyone in America should have the opportunity to understand how the decisions were taken and who was saying what to whom.
Ian Masters: Well, indeed, justice delayed is justice denied and it's extraordinary that nobody wants to touch this and you tried in your 1988 hearings to investigate the entire arena that we're talking about and I understand that back then you were thwarted at every turn.
Jack Blum: Yes, indeed. The investigation we ran was one we had to work at through what I would call the obvious back door. Because the government people would not give us access to their documents, or when they did, the documents were highly classified, we had to do the other thing, which is go out into the field and talk to the people who knew what was going on. As I said in the hearing, what is considered a grave secret in Washington is frequently very obvious when you get out in the field and you talk to people. What we found in the field was lots of people understood that the war had both created the conditions for drug trafficking and that there were drug traffickers who were flying the airplanes and running the supplies and doing all kinds of other things in the Contra-support operation.
We had, at one point, testimony from a pilot who, at different times in his career, was flying drugs for himself, flying supplies for the Contras, flying supplies for the humanitarian relief organization and working as an undercover for the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Customs Service. The way we came upon him was, it was a photographer at the Miami International Airport how became interested in old junk airplanes and he saw this one airplane, a DC-4 that was being repainted almost every week. He would take photographs as one panel would be number would be painted out and another one painted on. He gave us the complete set of photographs it turned out this was the one airplane, and every time it flew a mission for different agency or for a different whatever, they changed its look and they changed it's tail number. The guy who was the pilot figured, well I'm doing all this work for different parts of the government, I can do a little bit for myself on the side. That kind of idiocy was rampant during that period.
Ian Masters: In a sense, if we go back to that period and put the context of President Reagan being elected, wanting to draw a line in the sand, the sense that the Sandinistas were surrogates of the Cubans and that there was a sort of in effect a rebirth of the Cold War, it ended up being the last gasp of the Cold War, but at the time there was a great deal of, it was fair to say that the line in the sand was drawn, right Jack Blum?
Jack Blum: Yes. There's no doubt that that's what they were doing, but now let's consider what had gone on inside the intelligence community. Serious analysts of the CIA in the late 70s had reported that the Russian economy was a state of collapse and they could not ever hope to continue the sustained level of spending needed to keep pace in the Cold War. When those people reported to their superiors, they were told that their reports were unacceptable and [Robert] Gates who was then in charge of the intelligence analysis product, sacked these people and appointed a so called Team B that came back and said that the Soviet threat was even worse than anybody had thought.
...there was a completely ideologically driven analysis of reality. In my judgment, that ideologically driven analysis of reality cost the American tax payers about a trillion dollars in weaponry that we probably didn't need to build.
At the beginning of the Reagan administration, there was actually a general who was assigned to the White House who was suggesting that the threat was so dire, we probably ought to do a preemptive strike. Thank goodness he was sacked because even those people realized how extreme he was. The point here is that there was a completely ideologically driven analysis of reality. In my judgment, that ideologically driven analysis of reality cost the American tax payers about a trillion dollars in weaponry that we probably didn't need to build.
I would also argue, and I think it's correct to say, that it lead to a complete wrong analysis of what the threat to the United States was during the period.
Ian Masters: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Blum: Because any rational man who looked at what was going on in America, looked at the tons of drugs coming into the city, looked at the kinds of gang warfare we had, we actually had a shoot out in Miami which was called in the history of the drug war, the Dadeland Massacre, where a group of drug traffickers actually drove a war wagon into the mall at Dadeland in South Miami and the place was shot up. This was the kind of stuff that was happening on the streets of America. My argument was, when you have that kind of warfare on the streets of America, that's a real security threat. Especially, when the threat is in fact coming from outside the United States. At the same time, I would tell you with certainty that there were no Sandinistas running around Miami shooting people.
Ian Masters: Indeed, since the early 80s, the problem has exponentially gotten worse and as the big enemy has gone away, the appearance and the reality of the extent to which we have a national security problem within our own country should become more and more clear surely.
In our zeal to promote the war in Afghanistan, we turned a blind eye to the extremism and the extremism of the people who ... are now busily planting bombs all over the world and how have become an enormous problem for every organized society.
Jack Blum: Sure. Another part to this, which I think is worth considering, is that many of the threats that we now recognize and we're now turning around to deal with are threats that come out of the earlier blindness. In our zeal to promote the war in Afghanistan, we turned a blind eye to the extremism and the extremism of the people who were doing the training in Afghanistan and what they were saying and what they were doing. As a consequence, there are alumni of those training camps who are now busily planting bombs all over the world and how have become an enormous problem for every organized society.
Ian Masters: Jack, let's just go back to the early 80s, I understand that there's still war in the sense that this was the genesis of this problem that is besetting the inner cities of this country and has turned South Central Los Angeles into a war zone and the price we're paying is exponentially getting greater as the crack babies have to be taken through schools et cetera, there's a myriad of evidence of how heinous it all is, but going back to the 80s, initially Congress only appropriated I think about $19 million for the war to support the contras in a surrogate war against the Sandinistas. Then in the mid-80s the funding was cut off and that's pretty much when Oliver North comes into the picture, right?
Jack Blum: Yes, but you have to understand that if you had done as I did, a kind of discussion with Contras on the ground, that is the people who were going into Nicaragua to fight, they would tell you that the levels of funding and who got money from where were largely irrelevant to their lives because almost none of that money actually trickled down to people who were trying to fight the war. It got siphoned off at different levels. To arms dealers, to their own leadership which maintained houses in multiple cities and lived very, very high. I met with those people in Miami in 1986 and again in 1989. I'll never forget a meeting with three Contra veterans, seriously wounded during the war, one of them blind, another one had lost a limb. They're explaining to me if we have to fight a revolution, we don't want to be part of anything run by your government because we never saw any of the money, we never saw any of the support. What that war became was an enormous business and profit opportunity.
Before the Contra War was over, we had managed to have what was a mom and pop industry where small growers dealt with small refiners who dealt with small traffickers, transformed into a major multi-national business organization...
So the idea that the money was generated by drug trafficking to support a war effort was wrong. What happened was the war and what happened in and around it gave everybody the excuse for having a field day and gave them an enormous profit opportunity and they took full advantage of it. So you had traffickers who had airstrips, who had access to the United States. You had government officials who knew that nobody would confront them with their accepting bribes and of their dealings simply because we needed them too badly, so they took advantage of it. Before it was over, we had managed to have what was a mom and pop industry where small growers dealt with small refiners who dealt with small traffickers, transformed into a major multi-national business organization, vertically integrated with tremendous financial resources.
By the time the war was over, we were now no longer dealing with a small smuggling operation here and a small farmer there, we were dealing with very large, very well equipped, very well armed organizations that had the capacity to steal countries.
Ian Masters: Of course, the key to drug trafficking, surely, is to get it across the United States border and didn't this war and these conditions that were created make this a lot easier in the sense.
Jack Blum: There were two ways it made it easier. One of them was that virtually everyone who was in the smuggling game tried to pretend like he, one way or another, was part and parcel of the resources the United States was using in the war. Virtually every time an arrest was made in Miami or an arrest was made in some small airplane, the guy would say, "Hey, I'm working for" fill in the blank and they would be one agency or another in support of the Contras, flying supplies to the Contras. Whatever the excuse was, these people were always there, ready to say they were working for the government. It became a refrain during the period.
There were times when in fact inspections were relaxed. We knew that, there would be orders that came over saying "Don't look at this shipment" inbound, outbound or whatever. It was never clear to me that that was properly controlled and properly supervised. It's quite possible that some of the shipments that weren't inspected contained drugs. All of this created an environment were people were able to move aircraft and quantities of cocaine that really we couldn't do very much about.
Ian Masters: It seems to me where the San Jose Mercury news article got slammed in both, there was a three day series of articles in the LA Times going through point by point and basically suggesting he got most of it wrong, first of all do you think that the focus that the CIA were dealing drugs was the wrong focus inasmuch as in your testimony recently before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence you pointed out that there was culpability at the level of policy makers?
...it's time to do a real history of the period and a real look back in the context of the serious consideration of where we ought to go in intelligence reform.
Jack Blum: Right, I think that it is a mistake to say first that there was any kind of plot to do African Americans in South Central. Second, I'm certain nobody on an US government payroll actually said, "Hey, let's sell some cocaine to these people to raise money for something that Congress won't appropriate money for." I'm certain that that never happened. I'm equally certain that people who they used as contractors had side businesses and among the side businesses was dealing cocaine. I know that they knew that those contractors had side businesses and I know that they said, "Hey, that's not our problem, that is the problem of law enforcement people, we're just gonna close our eyes to what they're doing". Now, that's substantially different than the charge made in the San Jose Mercury. What Gary Webb has done for us is given us the opportunity to say, it's time to do a real history of the period and a real look back in the context of the serious consideration of where we ought to go in intelligence reform. That discussion has not been had.
Ian Masters: Well I could-
Jack Blum: Nobody has tried to really put on the table all of the facts of all of these different things that have gone on to say, "We really have to rethink the way we go about this business and make sure that it doesn't happen this way in the future."
Ian Masters: Well Jack Blum, I think one could also add to that call and suggest that since the major newspaper, particularly our local paper here, the Los Angeles Times have gone to such lengths to try disprove a connection between the CIA and crack cocaine in South Central, it's as though while we've disproved that now, let's walk away and forget it. What about the holocaust itself? Surely this is an opportunity for the whole country to focus on the incredible damage done to the fabric of this society and to the lives of these people in America.
If you are an African American living in the inner-city, your view of the United States of America is, this is a police state which will ultimately imprison me somewhere along the line.
Jack Blum: Now you've touched on another area that is off the table for debate in the United States, but really ought to be a very central concern for every citizen in the country. If you are an African American living in the inner-city, your view of the United States of America is, this is a police state which will ultimately imprison me somewhere along the line. The percentage of young black males who go through the criminal justice system is absolutely shocking. What we've done is, we've created a situation where once in prison, those young back males are stripped of all of their rights for all time. Right to vote, lose the right or ability to collect a welfare payment under the new legislation. They lose all kinds of rights. They will note and correctly observe that in the prisons that they're sent to, they'll be asked to do prison labor. From their perspective, what this is, is grossly unfair because when you have a white person, for example, a recent example of a star on an NBC sitcom has a cocaine blow-up, he goes off to Betty Ford and they come up with some fill in episodes and he'll be right back on the job as soon as he's dried out. Change the color of the skin and the context and the guy is gonna be in the tank and he's gonna be deprived of his rights.
We have a very serious perception problem which is backed by reality, which is the focus of drug law enforcement, has been the African American minority community and it has been extraordinarily punitive and that has been matched by the use of the code words in American politics of "drugs", "inner city" and "crime" as a substitute for talking raw race. We've got to acknowledge that and we've got to look at it. We've got to understand how it looks to people who are in the inner city and we've got to understand the damage it's doing to the perception of equality justice in the United States. I think that this reaction within the community really underscores how seriously different the perceptions are depending on where one lives and the color of one's skin. That's a very dangerous proposition for a democratic society.
Ian Masters: Let me just remind the audience again if I may, that I'm speaking with Jack Blum who is a special counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations committee for a number of years, I think what, about 15, 20 years Jack?
Jack Blum: I actually worked for the Senate for a total of 14 years on and off. So it wasn't continuous service.
Ian Masters: And you were the Chief Investigator for the Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and International Operations in 1988 that was chaired by Senator John Kerry that looked into the activities of the Contras and the cocaine shipping that went on there. We're talking about this in the context of hearings that you had about a week and a half ago before Senator Specter and Bob Kerrey, the co-chairs of the Senate Select Intelligence committee. You gave testimony of we're going into that.
Going back to the idea of reform in terms of the CIA, first of all how can you reform the situation when as far as I can see, one of the problems is, if we go back to Oliver North and the Reagan White House, one of the problems is and I believe there's a lot of resistance in the CIA to do some of the stuff that North and Casey were up to from the old-timers. Isn't it true that the CIA and other government agencies are, for all intents and purposes, toys of the Executive branch? They're the ones that get blamed for the misdeeds, but the orders come from the policy people, from the White House?
The oldest single problem is politics since the beginning of time, has been lies that have been told by people in power to give them the freedom to do whatever they want.
Jack Blum: There's no question about that and I think it's one of the points I tried to make in the testimony, it's easy for people to either say the CIA did it or the CIA didn't do it, whatever they did or didn't do, somebody at a political level had a hand in it. It's at the political level that the real kind of judgment has to take place, but we also have to know what happened at the political level as citizens to be able to make that judgment. There's a rule here, a rule of thumb that one oughta understand. The oldest single problem is politics since the beginning of time, has been lies that have been told by people in power to give them the freedom to do whatever they want. Probably the oldest recorded lie in the history of politics was Pharaoh who said, "I'm God". We have some others coming down the line to Louis XIV who said "God made me king".
Those lies became the basis for getting the ruler or the person in authority the power to do whatever he wanted. If you couple a large lie with a whole lot of secrecy, really you do have agencies that are the toy of the executive. It becomes a very attractive and easy thing to do. Our entire democratic government here in the United States, our constitution, is built around the proposition that we don't let people do that kind of thing. I worked for a wonderful man, Senator Philip Hart of Michigan, when he was retiring was asked by a reporter, "Well Senator, what can you say looking back over your career? Because after all, many of things you really wanted to do, you didn't accomplish." Senator Hart looked at him, he said, "You really don't understand the constitution. It was written so I couldn't. It was written so no one man can ride in on a white horse and do what he feels like doing." This is a government of checks and balances, or supervision and criticism and everything you do has to be seen by other people and other people have to sign off on it. That's what makes the country strong.
Ian Masters: But Jack, if you don't know what's going on, you don't have a hope.
Jack Blum: That's my point precisely. I believe that if any of these things had been discussed publicly, they never would have occurred. If anybody had said, "Gee we have this drug problem with a fellow name Noriega, should he be on the payroll?" It wouldn't have survived 10 seconds. Now maybe you can't say all of that quite publicly, but god, if there'd been even real political understanding of what was going on, by policy makers who maybe didn't talk to the constituents, someone would have said, "Wait a minute, this is bloody stupid." Instead, it was all swept under the rug and even as it began to emerge, what you got out of the administration instead of acknowledging the problem, was one denial after another and one attempt after another to cover it up. I think that that is where democratic institutions really took a hit.
Ian Masters: Your subcommittee that you were the Chief Investigator for, convened in '88 in Narcotics, Terrorism and International Operations, you really did do a lot of work trying to find out what went on in this period and who was culpable. I take it that every step of the way, as you went up the chain, particularly in the Justice Department, you were thwarted?
Jack Blum: We had terrible problems at the Justice Department. We had problems with the State Department, the administration as a whole simply turned off and said, we really don't want to help you do what you're trying to do here. We want to keep this all secret and we don't want it discussed publicly. It went on beyond simply not giving us access to where we were able to find witnesses and have public hearings, calling the newspapers the day of the hearing to say "don't believe these witnesses, they're full of it, they're liars, here's what they said some other time and place" and really trying to trash the work we were doing as we were doing it.
The strength of what they said, they were taken at face value and many editors deliberately played down both the hearings and the report because the administration had so tarnished what we were trying to do. I think the report stands up. I think the work we did stands up. Time and again, I've run into people who have said, "You people were really way ahead of your time." Because many of the things you talked about then have now become obvious and apparent and we should have paid more attention.
Ian Masters: Indeed many of what you talked about then and investigated then have resurfaced because of these articles in the San Jose Mercury News, but there's been this peculiar backlash where the watch dogs, the press, seem to be really anxious to suggest that there's some details wrong, but totally unwilling to look at the historical record, which as you've pointed out just reeks of complicity of government turning the blind eye, of creating these kinds of conditions. Isn't this when this problem started?
Jack Blum: I think that looking at long historical patterns is the way you come to understand what the trouble is in the intelligence world, or has been. I want to here separate, so that the audience fully understands what I'm talking about. There are a lot of people who work in intelligence, most of those people are information gatherers and they're very, very good. They go about their business very quietly as they should. They bring the information back, filter it, sift this and help the government make decisions.
But there is the other world and that's really the world we're talking about which is the covert operations world where people say "we're gonna change the way some government is operating or we're gonna change the government" ... It's that world that we're really talking about that needs the scrutiny and the reform.
But there is the other world and that's really the world we're talking about which is the covert operations world where people say "we're gonna change the way some government is operating or we're gonna change the government". In that world there is a kind of subset not of a real covert operation, but where in preparation or with a view to the possibility that there might be covert operation, people in the intelligence community maintain liaison with people who are likely to be helpful in a difficult situation in the future. It's that world that we're really talking about that needs the scrutiny and the reform.
Ian Masters: There's a history to that world itself, isn't there?
Jack Blum: Long history.
Ian Masters: Let's just start with two incidents where Jim Schlesinger fired a whole bunch of people from the operations and then later Stansfield Turner fired, I think about 1200 people, from the Operations Division. This is the so called "dirty tricks" covert activities division or the "black" part of the CIA. Were they not all re-hired? Or a lot of these people were re-hired by Bill Casey and what you've mentioned many times, that at the heart of this Contra drug problem, we're the contractors.
Jack Blum: There were real problems with contractors and people who were brought in and people doing things were delegated and proxies where we encouraged certain other foreign governments to do things that really went far beyond the pale. Our dealings with the military people in Argentina, I think were most extraordinary and really quite reprehensible. There are other examples of it and I think that again is part of the issue of supervision and reform. Of public discussion and accountability. There's another point that I think is very important, for a long period of time, people mentally were separating the problems of the inner city and the problems of the social fabric in America from foreign policy problems. On one level people would say, "Hey, if we're engaged in a war on communism, that's a foreign policy issue and that's to be discussed by the gurus who know about foreign policy and by people in that establishment and that's that problem. Then they come to a different compartment called the problems if the inner cities and that's domestic policy and that's a whole different cast of people. Turned out that those problems were intimately connected.
The connection was completely missed largely because of complacency on the part of people who dealt with domestic problems and the failure on their part to recognize the connection. The foreign policy people were able to sell ideas and policies and allow their work to carry on well beyond a time when there should have been political protest.
Ian Masters: You know Jack, I've spoken with former Secretary of State Al Haig and he had a very difficult time and if it wasn't for Weinberger at the Pentagon and others, the Falklands War may have been a totally different situation. You'd think that anybody in the highest levels of the White House would understand the obvious that in foreign policy, America's biggest foreign policy and security arrangement is NATO, particularly back then when the cold war was on and America's biggest partner in NATO was Britain.
Jack Blum: Right.
Ian Masters: But there was this cabal led by Bill Casey and Jeane Kirkpatrick who were protecting the Contras, which was their secret operation. That had been contracted out to the Argentinians and the Argentinians thought that they had Bill Casey and Jeane Kirkpatrick on their side.
The Argentine generals were as bad a bunch as we've seen in the hemisphere in a long time ... that they would be supporting a whole kind of anti-communist battalion through drug trafficking, is quite extraordinary. That we encouraged them to do it is beyond extraordinary.
Jack Blum: And they made a phenomenal mistake. They didn't understand that in the crunch, Casey and Kirkpatrick could not carry the day and the consequences for the Argentine generals was, in the end, I think fortunately catastrophic. They were as bad a bunch as we've seen in the hemisphere in a long time. That we would do business with them, that we would use them as a proxy, they would be the original trainers of the Contras and then that they would be supporting a whole kind of anti-communist battalion through drug trafficking, is quite extraordinary. That we encouraged them to do it is beyond extraordinary.
Ian Masters: Before the CIA took them on to train the Contras in Honduras, this same group were responsible for the cocaine coup in.
Jack Blum: Bolivia.
Ian Masters: In Bolivia were they not?
Jack Blum: I think one has to correct you. You said the CIA took them on. It's not, it's the government.
Ian Masters: Sure, sure.
Jack Blum: The question is who in government and at what policy level. These are questions which we have yet to see the answer to, which I think the American public is entitled the answers to. Yes it may be historical, but it's absolutely crucial to understanding how the machinery works so that that machinery in the post-cold war environment can be reformed. We don't need the secrecy and the kind of institutional arrangements we had during the cold war in the current environment. We need a completely different approach to thinking about these issues.
Ian Masters: How do we, I mean obviously at the heart of this whole story are these characters that they have loosely called "the cowboys", the contractors.
Jack Blum: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ian Masters: I'm just trying to get a handle on this Jack Blum, if, I mean it's as though the CIA is saying "We're just the piano player in the whore house." They have insulation. Who actually hires these people?
Jack Blum: I think the logic of how it happens I think is obvious and straightforward. People are sent to wherever they're sent and they're told, "You have a job to do. You have to find people who will do it." If you're trying to find people to do that kind of job, you're gonna look around for someone who is willing to do something that's illegal, because after all flying weapons to a covert war is not legal. Someone who's willing to take tremendous risks for money. Someone who is able to get around the rules and regulations of where they're playing. The man you've just sent out to do this is maybe risking his life for his country, and doing something he thinks is his patriotic assignment, the guy he's gonna reach out for for the help is likely gonna be someone connected with the criminal world or the underworld.
You cannot expect that when you're dealing with those people you'll get them to only do what you want them to do. Any police officer who's ever run an informant can tell you how difficult it is to keep the informant from committing crimes while he's working for the police. That's a terrible problem that covert operations confront. It requires very good management. It requires very close supervision. If it should be done at all, ever. In this case, there was no management, no supervision, and it got totally and completely out of control.
Ian Masters: In effect though didn't the Reagan White House particularly, or Colonel North particularly during the Boland Amendment period, we say the whole testimony in the Iran Contra hearing, they talked about having this off the shelf, independent, The Enterprise.
The idea that you could take what is already a dubious proposition, which is having our government people running [the Contra War] and then turn it over to a combination of amateurs and has beens and private contractors and expect that the whole thing not turn totally catastrophic is a folly.
Jack Blum: The Enterprise was run and managed by a group of people who were at best incompetent and at worst incredibly dangerous to themselves and to the American national interest. The idea that you could take what is already a dubious proposition, which is having our government people running it and then turn it over to a combination of amateurs and has beens and private contractors and expect that the whole thing not turn totally catastrophic is a folly.
Ian Masters: One of the reasons, there was, I mean North and, I can't remember their names now, Secord, Hakim I think his name was, they were boasting in front of the United States Senate that the professionals, the CIA were just too conservative and that what the country really need was this sort of swashbuckling buccaneers.
Jack Blum: The problem here is that if you have a swashbuckling buccaneer who has it in his head what the idea of a national interest is and he goes off and swashes and buckles if you will, what you've done is you've given up on democracy. The whole idea of the way our government works is no individual may ever go off into the night and say, "I feel like doing this, I'm gonna do it." Everybody from the President up and down is sworn to uphold the law, after all that's why we call it an administration, and they are subject to political checks and balances. What we had here were a group of people who said, "We're not interested in that, we really don't care about the constitution. We figured out what the national interest in and by god if there's nobody else with the courage to go out and do it our way, we're gonna do it and the devil take them." That's just not the constitution of the United States. I think that they have to be brought up short. We do have a very, very good form of government and many of us have on occasion sworn to give our lives to defend it. I think that it merits that kind of defense. I think the people who went off as cowboys did us an enormous disservice.
Ian Masters: But the cowboys to some extent, at least one group of them, were organized by Oliver North and in your testimony you made the extraordinary point that still to this day nobody in the Senate Select Intelligence Committee still has these original diaries, nobody's looked at the original diaries. He was given extraordinary privilege of being able to censor them himself.
North's lawyers cut an arrangement with the Iran-Contra committee that the only parts of the notebooks they would turn over to the Iran-Contra committee were those which were "relevant". The people who determined the relevance were North's lawyers.
Jack Blum: Here's the history of those diaries, which I think most people don't know about. Oliver North, day by day, kept spiral bound notebooks in which he kept a detailed records of his meetings, his telephone conversations and what he was doing. This is as good a contemporaneous record of everything the man was into as you'll ever find. When he was fired, finally fired, he collected all of these spiral bound notebooks and hauled them out of the White House with him. Those notebooks were, when the investigators became aware of their existence, were immediately classified at the highest levels of US security classification, the so called code-word compartmented, secret compartmented information. Yet, North and his lawyers were permitted to keep the notebooks. Moreover, the lawyers cut an arrangement with the Iran-Contra committee that the only parts of the notebooks they would turn over to the Iran-Contra committee were those which were "relevant". The people who determined the relevance were North's lawyers.
The counsel for the Iran-Contra committee and some staff looked at the originals for a brief period and signed off on the fact that they would only receive the parts that had been disclosed by the lawyers. The problem was you couldn't possibly know what you were looking at until you had studied it in detail. It took me two days to get used to his handwriting to the point where I could read them coherently. So, the Senate counsel and the House counsel of the Iran-Contra committee never really understood what it was they were giving up when they said, "We'll take an edited version."
When we got into the investigation, we subpoenaed North for the originals. His lawyers fought the Foreign Relations Committee tooth and nail. There were members of the Foreign Relations Committee who said, "Well, we shouldn't push it." The government could never answer for the benefit of the committee why they permitted this top secret information done on government time with government money, government notebooks, to wind up in private hands outside of the reach of the Senate committee. I think that North's notebooks should be obtained, should be examined and should be completely declassified. I think that it would be a great service to the understanding of what should never again occur in foreign policy to have that record absolutely open and absolutely public.
Ian Masters: Aren't there are huge number of references to drug trafficking?
Jack Blum: There are quite a number of references to drug trafficking in the notebooks. There are times when the references are most extraordinary. For example, conversations with Noriega, the allusions to drug problems on the southern front, and there are times when there are references or there were memorandum or prof notes relating to drug problems that were cooked essentially to destroy people who were in the way. People who were, North or others, wanted out of the picture because they were a threat or who they were supplying weapons at a competitive price or they were doing something that North didn't like. The drug problem became a two-edged sword. Sometimes he took advantage of it, sometimes he tarred people with improperly.
Ian Masters: At no time did he report it and indeed there was hearings that say Congressman Hughes of the House Judiciary Committee held into the fact that North leaked information - photographs of Barry Seal who was an undercover parlay.
Jack Blum: When you say that North never reported it, remember that North was working at the National Security Counsel and he did report it to the National Security Advisor to the President.
Ian Masters: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Blum: The question one is compelled to ask is how much higher do you have to report it and what exactly does it take for somebody to say, "The governments knew." If North knew and he told Poindexter, that is as close to the top of the pyramid of the American government as anybody can possibly get. I think it's disingenuous to say the government didn't know, because they in fact were the government.
Ian Masters: Well, then how do you feel though in terms of North's culpability? I mean, in the best of all possible worlds, it seems to me that he was never really tried. He was given tremendous privileges.
Jack Blum: Not only was he allowed to skate, but the people at the very top who should have known had their convictions and their prosecutions overturned. You do remember that our Secretary of Defense was pardoned by the President as he was about to be indicted, which was a most extraordinary situation. That got very little attention. I think people were not focused on how bad a mess that was and I really blame the Democratic Party for not making enough of an issue of it and for not focusing it enough. It was a real reluctance on the part of people and I don't understand why, to take the issue on and really expose the degree to which the government had gone aconstitutional, had forgotten about the procedures and methods laid out in law and simply done what it felt like. I think the Weinberger problem, is illustrative of how far off the rails we got.
Ian Masters: Jack, just in the last few minutes, you in your testimony and little over a week ago before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, where you recounted your efforts in 1988 and 1989, to uncover the activities of drug trafficking in the Contra movement on the Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and International Operations, you also mentioned that just every time you would find out about some nefarious character that was operating, either semi-officially, officially or just sort of hitching a ride in this climate that we've talked about that was created down there, that you kept being blocked by the head of the criminal division at the Justice Department, William Weld, who incidentally is running in a very tight race against John Kerry who was the chair of the committee that you were investigating in.
...an assistant United States attorney that reported to Senator Kerry that he had overheard a conversation in which a US attorney was being instructed to, in effect, kill a case because the case might interfere with the Contra operation.
Jack Blum: We ran into situations like this. It was an assistant United States attorney that reported to Senator Kerry that he had overheard a conversation in which a US attorney was being instructed to, in effect, kill a case because the case might interfere with the Contra operation. That assistant US attorney was disciplined and his career was ruined. There were other situations where I was told that there were assistants who were working on cases and the cases had been shut down in effect, because of the connections with the Contra war. When we tried to get those people to talk, they said they'd been told flat out that if they told us anything in an on the record way, that their careers at the Justice Department and after would be ruined. It's that kind of stuff that turned up again and again and again. It was how do we prevent Congress from finding out.
I said to Senator Specter that in fact, if you ask me the question can I say for sure that certain kinds of covert operations were sanctioned and that the government knew, the answer is no, I didn't see the government's files. But on the other hand, can I say that there were plenty of people who told me what was going on and so many and it came from so many different directions, I was pretty sure that I was right, that's a different matter. I was pretty sure that I was right.
The difficulty of course is that truth becomes whatever someone arguing one side of the case or the other would like it to be. So the standard that was set by the people who were trying to cover everything up was, "tell us what's in our secret files, tell us that without your ever being allowed to have access to them, and by the way, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that everybody that you've talked to is telling the truth". Against that standard you really have one very difficult time. I would turn around and say, "Excuse me gentlemen, why don't you just open your eyes and look around?" Here are the things we can look at and know based on the absolutely obvious. Drug trafficker living openly in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Generals are protecting him, he's renting a home to the US ambassador, everybody knows he's there, and our government mysteriously decides to close the DEA office in Honduras. Now as far as I'm concerned, I don't have to read the secret papers. I have a pretty good idea why that office was closed.
Later on we talked to the DEA agent and he said, "I couldn't understand it. All I knew was that the problem was in Honduras, it wasn't in Guatemala where they sent me." I was arguing there were plenty of ways to see this and it was just a matter of looking at the obvious.
Ian Masters: Well, Jack Blum, I thank you very much for joining us. This is extraordinarily subject and say justice is long delayed and still denied and I don't know if you're as frustrated as I am in the sense that I just wish that people would go back to the source and deal with these problems and work their way up the problem and deal with it in general because, as you pointed out in the beginning, this is the real national security threat of the present and the future.
Jack Blum: I think that what we have to do is get people to realize that foreign and domestic policy increasingly are the same thing. The way we deal with foreign policy colors the way we deal with domestic issues and that it's time to put a lot more of this in the open and on the table and to talk about it, make it part of our overall political debate. I think the time for the level of secrecy we had in the cold war period is over, the kind of operations we had in the cold war period is over and we need to create a new climate in which this takes place and that requires very major rethinking of the way we go about our business and to date I haven't seen it. I'd very much like to see it and I'd like to see the debate joined. It shouldn't be my voice alone. There are plenty of people who have other ideas, people who disagree with me, I think the debate would be very, very healthy.
Ian Masters: I thank you for joining us in Los Angeles, Jack Blum.
Jack Blum: Thank you.
Ian Masters: Bye bye.
Jack Blum: Bye.
Ian Masters: Hello again, I'm Ian Masters. I was just speaking with Jack Blum who for 14 years was the Special Counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations committee and he was the Chief investigator for the Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism, and International Operations in 1988. We were talking about his recent testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about a week and a half ago where he testified and laid out broader canvas. These hearings of course were held in response to the articles by Gary Webb and the San Jose Mercury News, which have been largely panned by the mainstream press, but as I say, Jack Blum's experience and scope and understanding of the genesis of the problem and the broader canvas remains undiscussed and the broader issues that he talked about have yet to be debated.
I thank Madeline Schwab for the board operating. This program is heard live every Sunday at 11 and rebroadcast on Monday at 2 p.m. I'll be back next Sunday at 11, have a very pleasant week. Bye.