U.S. Played Key Role in Arrest of Drug Lord, Sources Say : Law enforcement: CIA, DEA provided Colombian officials intelligence on Rodriguez’s whereabouts.

U.S. intelligence officials played a hidden but crucial role in Friday’s spectacular arrest of the most powerful drug lord in Colombia, sources said Monday.

The CIA and the Drug Enforcement Administration worked jointly to provide up-to-the-minute information to Colombian officials about the status and location of Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela--leading to his capture in Cali by Colombian police, intelligence officials said Monday.

Officials refused to provide detailed accounts of the role of the CIA and DEA in tracking and locating Rodriguez, largely because Myles Frechette, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, fears upstaging the Colombian government and its police force, sources said.

Publicly, DEA Administrator Thomas Constantine would say only that “the United States and Colombia have worked closely to target and capture Cali leaders.”

For years, the United States has been pressuring the Colombians to mount a more aggressive law enforcement campaign against the Cali cartel, and U.S. officials are now hoping that Rodriguez’s arrest signals a change in Colombian policy toward the Cali leadership.

The CIA’s primary role in the case was to give Colombian officials current information about Rodriguez’s precise movements, sources said. He was snared by an elite police force Friday as he tried to hide in a closet at his mansion.

The arrest offered a rare bit of good news for an agency under siege. The CIA has been pilloried on Capitol Hill over the past year for ignoring signs that indicated one of its employees, Aldrich H. Ames, was providing secrets to the Russians and for having ties to a Guatemalan army officer involved in the killing of a U.S. citizen.

It also has been hit by a class-action lawsuit from female CIA officers charging sexual harassment and discrimination and has been criticized for failing to provide adequate and timely intelligence information to the U.S. military in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The Rodriguez case underscores a shift in the CIA’s intelligence focus from a Cold War emphasis on the Soviet Union to new threats such as terrorism and global narcotics trafficking.

The CIA has established counterterrorism and counter-narcotics centers at its Langley, Va., headquarters, where FBI and DEA agents work with CIA officers on international law enforcement matters. Indeed, the CIA also apparently played a role in the capture of Pablo Escobar, the notorious leader of the Medellin cartel later killed by Colombian police in December, 1993.

Yet the agency’s involvement in the Cali case also comes at a time when Congress, the Clinton Administration and the CIA leadership are all debating the agency’s involvement in police-like jobs around the world.

The House and Senate intelligence committees have raised questions about whether the CIA’s counterespionage and counterterrorism functions should be transferred to the FBI, and the CIA’s role in drug interdiction overseas has repeatedly caused turf problems with the DEA.

Traditionally, the CIA has handled counterespionage and counterterrorism matters outside the United States, while the FBI handled them inside the country. But those distinctions have been blurred as the FBI’s role overseas has expanded in recent years. The DEA has offices inside and out of the States, while the CIA only gets involved in drug cases overseas.

Rodriguez, along with his younger brother, Miguel, controls the most powerful branch of the Cali drug mafia, which U.S. law enforcement officials now say is the “most powerful and sophisticated drug-trafficking organization in history,” handling 80% to 90% of the world’s cocaine.

The Cali cartel has assumed the dominant role in the Colombian drug trade once held by more infamous drug lords like Escobar based in Medellin.

In 1989, Rodriguez was indicted in New Orleans in absentia in a drug-trafficking case and was indicted again last week in Miami, charged with importing more than 200,000 kilograms of cocaine into the United States over the last decade.