U.S. Offered to OK Drug Dealing to Get Contra Aid, Smuggler Says

International drug trafficker Carlos Lehder testified Thursday that U.S. authorities offered him a “green light” to smuggle cocaine into the United States if he let them use his island in the Bahamas to run guns to the Nicaraguan Contras.

Lehder, a witness in the federal trial of former Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega, said that the U.S. vice consul in Cali, Colombia, made the offer in 1982. Accompanying the official was a man presented as his superior. Lehder said he did not know their names.

“They would give me a green light to come to the United States with drugs,” Lehder said.

Lehder already was under indictment in the United States for using the island of Norman’s Cay to smuggle drugs. He said he became suspicious of the offer.

“I came to the conclusion that this was a U.S. government sting to have me arrested, so I cut all relationships with them,” he said.

State Department spokesman Doug Gray said he had not heard about the Thursday testimony and could not comment. He refused to identify the vice consul at the Cali consulate in 1982.

Lehder said he was introduced to the U.S. official by his brother, Fred Lehder. He said he met the official twice.

At the time, the Contras were battling Nicaragua’s Sandinista government with the support of the United States.

Lehder testified earlier Thursday that he still has $8 million in assets bought with drug money and has no intention of forfeiting them under U.S. law.

The defense charged that Lehder had dropped a $92-million damage suit against former U.S. Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III and the Drug Enforcement Administration as part of his deal to testify against the ousted Panamanian ruler.

The lawsuit accused them of kidnaping him in Colombia in 1987. In a magazine interview, Lehder had called the lawsuit an “incentive” for the United States to reach a deal with him.

Lehder--once portrayed by federal prosecutors as a violent, neo-Nazi drug trafficker who openly vowed to flood the United States with cocaine--insisted under cross-examination Thursday that he has changed.

He acknowledged that he is still appealing his 1988 drug-trafficking conviction and has no intention of paying $98 million in back taxes he has been billed by the Internal Revenue Service.

“I am obliged only to pay taxes to the Colombian government,” Lehder said. Paying anything to the United States “would be breaking Colombian law,” he insisted.