Not surprisingly the DEA seems to be more than a drug enforcement agency.
It seems to be part of the vast U.S. military-intelligence complex.  Not a
surprise.  These documents are low level classified documents.  I expect if
we ever got a Pentagon Papers document on this, something more highly
classified, we'd see a strategy of using the DEA as an arm of U.S. empire
policy.  A way to get into countries where we cannot get in other ways.
Kevin Zeese
--
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/world/26wikidrugs.html?_r=1&hp

Cables Portray Expanded Reach of Drug Agency
By GINGER THOMPSON and SCOTT SHANE
Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting.
The New York Times
December 25, 2010

WASHINGTON - The Drug Enforcement Administration
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/d/drug_enforcement_administration/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach
that
extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it
has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their
political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables.
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/statessecrets.html?ref=world>

Articles in this series examine American diplomatic cables as a window on
relations with the rest of the world in an age of war and terrorism.

Related Documents
- A Well-Connected Drug Trafficker in Guinea
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/28/world/20101128-cables-viewer.html#report/drugs-08CONAKRY163>
- Faked Incineration of Seized Drugs Alleged in Guinea
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/28/world/20101128-cables-viewer.html#report/drugs-08CONAKRY184>
- In Sierra Leone, a Successful Narcotics Case
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/28/world/20101128-cables-viewer.html#report/drugs-09FREETOWN152>
- A Bribe to Sabotage a Drug Prosecution
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/28/world/20101128-cables-viewer.html#report/drugs-09FREETOWN85>
- Mexican Military Welcomes U.S. Help
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/28/world/20101128-cables-viewer.html#report/drugs-09MEXICO3077>
- Panama Wants U.S. to Wiretap Opponents
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/28/world/20101128-cables-viewer.html#report/drugs-09PANAMA639>
- Pressure to Misuse D.E.A. Wiretaps in Panama
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/28/world/20101128-cables-viewer.html#report/drugs-09PANAMA905>
- Grenade Attacks by Mexican Drug Cartel
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/28/world/20101128-cables-viewer.html#report/drugs-10MONTERREY66>
- Paraguay Presses for D.E.A. Eavesdropping
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/28/world/20101128-cables-viewer.html#report/drugs-10ASUNCION97>
- All Related Documents
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/28/world/20101128-cables-viewer.html#report/drugs-08CONAKRY163>

In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache
obtained by WikiLeaks
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/w/wikileaks/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
and made available to some news organizations, offer glimpses of drug agents
balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be hard to
tell the politicians from the traffickers, and where drug rings are
themselves mini-states whose wealth and violence permit them to run
roughshod over struggling governments.

Diplomats recorded unforgettable vignettes from the largely unseen war on
drugs:

¶In Panama, an urgent BlackBerry message from the president to the American
ambassador demanded that the D.E.A. go after his political enemies: "I need
help with tapping phones."

¶In Sierra Leone, a major cocaine-trafficking prosecution was almost upended
by the attorney general's attempt to solicit $2.5 million in bribes.

¶In Guinea, the country's biggest narcotics kingpin turned out to be the
president's son, and diplomats discovered that before the police destroyed a
huge narcotics seizure, the drugs had been replaced by flour.

¶Leaders of Mexico's beleaguered military issued private pleas for closer
collaboration with the drug agency, confessing that they had little faith in
their own country's police forces.

¶Cables from Myanmar, the target of strict United States sanctions, describe
the drug agency informants' reporting both on how the military junta
enriches itself with drug money and on the political activities of the
junta's opponents.

Officials of the D.E.A. and the State Department declined to discuss what
they said was information that should never have been made public.

Like many of the cables made public in recent weeks, those describing the
drug war
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/afghanistan/drug_trafficking/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
do not offer large disclosures. Rather, it is the details that add up to a
clearer picture of the corrupting influence of big traffickers, the tricky
game of figuring out which foreign officials are actually controlled by drug
lords, and the story of how an entrepreneurial agency operating in the
shadows of the F.B.I.
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/federal_bureau_of_investigation/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
has become something more than a drug agency.
The D.E.A. now has 87 offices in 63 countries and close partnerships with
governments that keep the Central Intelligence Agency
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/central_intelligence_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
at arm's length.

Because of the ubiquity of the drug scourge, today's D.E.A. has access to
foreign governments, including those, like Nicaragua's and Venezuela's, that
have strained diplomatic relations with the United States. Many are eager to
take advantage of the agency's drug detection and wiretapping technologies.

In some countries, the collaboration appears to work well, with the drug
agency providing intelligence that has helped bring down traffickers, and
even entire cartels. But the victories can come at a high price, according
to the cables, which describe scores of D.E.A. informants and a handful of
agents who have been killed in Mexico and Afghanistan.

In Venezuela, the local intelligence service turned the tables on the
D.E.A., infiltrating its operations, sabotaging equipment and hiring a
computer hacker to intercept American Embassy e-mails, the cables report.

And as the drug agency has expanded its eavesdropping operations to keep up
with cartels, it has faced repeated pressure to redirect its
counternarcotics surveillance to local concerns, provoking tensions with
some of Washington's closest allies.

*Sticky Situations*

Cables written in February by American diplomats in Paraguay, for example,
described the D.E.A.'s pushing back against requests from that country's
government to help spy on an insurgent group, known as the Paraguayan
People's Army, or the EPP, the initials of its name in Spanish. The leftist
group, suspected of having ties to the Colombian rebel
groupFARC
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/revolutionary_armed_forces_of_colombia/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
had conducted several high-profile kidnappings and was making a small
fortune in ransoms.

When American diplomats refused to give Paraguay access to the drug agency's
wiretapping system, Interior Minister Rafael Filizzola threatened to shut it
down, saying: "Counternarcotics are important, but won't topple our
government. The EPP could."

The D.E.A. faced even more intense pressure last year from Panama, whose
right-leaning president, Ricardo Martinelli
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/ricardo_martinelli/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
demanded that the agency allow him to use its wiretapping program - known as
Matador - to spy on leftist political enemies he believed were plotting to
kill him.

The United States, according to the cables, worried that Mr. Martinelli, a
supermarket magnate, "made no distinction between legitimate security
targets and political enemies," refused, igniting tensions that went on for
months.

Mr. Martinelli, who the cables said possessed a "penchant for bullying and
blackmail," retaliated by proposing a law that would have ended the D.E.A.'s
work with specially vetted police units. Then he tried to subvert the drug
agency's control over the program by assigning nonvetted officers to the
counternarcotics unit.

And when the United States pushed back against those attempts - moving the
Matador system into the offices of the politically independent attorney
general - Mr. Martinelli threatened to expel the drug agency from the
country altogether, saying other countries, like Israel, would be happy to
comply with his intelligence requests.

Eventually, according to the cables, American diplomats began wondering
about Mr. Martinelli's motivations. Did he really want the D.E.A. to disrupt
plots by his adversaries, or was he trying to keep the agency from learning
about corruption among his relatives and friends?

One cable asserted that Mr. Martinelli's cousin helped smuggle tens of
millions of dollars in drug proceeds through Panama's main airport every
month. Another noted, "There is no reason to believe there will be fewer
acts of corruption in this government than in any past government."

As the standoff continued, the cables indicate that the United States
proposed suspending the Matador program, rather than submitting to Mr.
Martinelli's demands. (American officials say the program was suspended, but
the British took over the wiretapping program and have shared the
intelligence with the United States.)

In a statement on Saturday, the government of Panama said that it regretted
"the bad interpretation by United States authorities of a request for help
made to directly confront crime and drug trafficking." It said that Panama
would continue its efforts to stop organized crime and emphasized that
Panama continued to have "excellent relations with the United States."

Meanwhile in Paraguay, according to the cables, the United States
acquiesced, agreeing to allow the authorities there to use D.E.A. wiretaps
for antikidnapping investigations, as long as they were approved by
Paraguay's Supreme Court.

"We have carefully navigated this very sensitive and politically sticky
situation," one cable said. "It appears that we have no other viable
choice."

*A Larger Mandate*

Created in 1973, the D.E.A. has steadily built its international turf, an
expansion primarily driven by the multinational nature of the drug trade,
but also by forces within the agency seeking a larger mandate. Since the
2001 terrorist attacks, the agency's leaders have cited what they describe
as an expanding nexus between drugs and terrorism in further building its
overseas presence.

In Afghanistan, for example, "DEA officials have become convinced that 'no
daylight' exists between drug traffickers at the highest level and Taliban
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/taliban/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
insurgents," Karen Tandy, then the agency's administrator, told European
Union
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/e/european_union/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
officials in a 2007 briefing, according to a cable from Brussels.

Ms. Tandy described an agency informant's recording of a meeting in
Nangarhar Province between 9 Taliban members and 11 drug traffickers to
coordinate their financial support for the insurgency, and she said the
agency was trying to put a "security belt" around Afghanistan to block the
import of chemicals for heroin processing. The agency was embedding its
officers in military units around Afghanistan, she said. In 2007 alone, the
D.E.A. opened new bureaus in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Dubai, United Arab
Emirates, as well as in three Mexican cities.

Cables describe lengthy negotiations over the extradition to the United
States of the two notorious arms dealers wanted by the D.E.A. as it reached
beyond pure counternarcotics cases: Monzer al-Kassar, a Syrian arrested in
Spain, and Viktor Bout
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/victor_bout/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
a Russian arrested in Thailand. Both men were charged with agreeing to
illegal arms sales to informants posing as weapons buyers for Colombian
rebels. Notably, neither man was charged with violating narcotics laws.

Late last year in a D.E.A. case, three men from Mali accused of plotting to
transport tons of cocaine across northwest Africa were charged under a
narco-terrorism statute added to the law in 2006, and they were linked to
both Al Qaeda
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/al_qaeda/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
and its North African affiliate, called Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

The men themselves had claimed the terrorism link, according to the D.E.A.,
though officials told The New York Times that they had no independent
corroboration of the Qaeda connections. Experts on the desert regions of
North Africa, long a route for smuggling between Africa and Europe, are
divided about whether Al Qaeda operatives play a significant role in the
drug trade, and some skeptics note that adding "terrorism" to any case can
draw additional investigative resources and impress a jury.

*New Routes for Graft*

Most times, however, the agency's expansion seems driven more by external
forces than internal ones, with traffickers opening new routes to
accommodate new markets. As Mexican cartels take control of drug shipments
from South America to the United States, Colombian cartels have begun moving
cocaine through West Africa to Europe.

The cables offer a portrait of the staggering effect on Mali, whose deserts
have been littered with abandoned airplanes - including at least one Boeing
727 - and Ghana, where traffickers easily smuggle drugs through an airport's
"VVIP (Very Very Important Person) lounge."

Top-to-bottom corruption in many West African countries made it hard for
diplomats to know whom to trust. In one 2008 case in Sierra Leone,
President Ernest Bai Koroma
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/ernest_bai_koroma/index.html?inline=nyt-per>moved
to prosecute and extradite three South American traffickers seized with
about 1,500 pounds of cocaine, while his attorney general was accused of
offering to release them for $2.5 million in bribes.

In Nigeria, the D.E.A. reported a couple of years earlier that diplomats at
the Liberian Embassy were using official vehicles to transport drugs across
the border because they were not getting paid by their war-torn government
and "had to fend for themselves."

A May 2008 cable from Guinea described a kind of heart-to-heart conversation
about the drug trade between the American ambassador, Phillip Carter III,
and Guinea's prime minister, Lansana Kouyaté. At one point, the cable said,
Mr. Kouyaté "visibly slumped in his chair" and acknowledged that Guinea's
most powerful drug trafficker was Ousmane Conté, the son of Lansana Conté,
then the president. (After the death of his father, Mr. Conté went to
prison.)

A few days later, diplomats reported evidence that the corruption ran much
deeper inside the Guinean government than the president's son. In a
colorfully written cable - with chapters titled "Excuses, Excuses, Excuses"
and "Theatrical Production" - diplomats described attending what was billed
as a drug bonfire that had been staged by the Guinean government to
demonstrate its commitment to combating the drug trade.

Senior Guinean officials, including the country's drug czar, the chief of
police and the justice minister, watched as officers set fire to what the
government claimed was about 350 pounds of marijuana
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/m/marijuana/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
and 860 pounds of cocaine, valued at $6.5 million.

In reality, American diplomats wrote, the whole incineration was a sham.
Informants had previously told the embassy that Guinean authorities replaced
the cocaine with manioc flour, proving, the diplomats wrote, "that
narco-corruption has contaminated" the government of Guinea "at the highest
levels."

And it did not take the D.E.A.'s sophisticated intelligence techniques to
figure out the truth. The cable reported that even the ambassador's driver
sniffed out a hoax.

"I know the smell of burning marijuana," the driver said. "And I didn't
smell anything."
--