Alleged CIA Involvement in Drug Traffic

* Joseph Finder, in “Hiring Bad Guys: Who Else Does Covert Work?” (Opinion, Sept. 22), tries to dismiss the articles in the San Jose Mercury News about crack cocaine being sold to L.A. street gangs to fund the Contras. He states, “What’s most interesting about the series . . . is its implicit notion that intelligence agencies shouldn’t have any truck with the world’s bad guys.”

It’s not news that the CIA has to deal with bad guys to get information. That wasn’t the point of the Mercury News’ allegations, however. The bad guys in this case were not giving the CIA information about a drug ring, but were a drug ring, itself, selling drugs to fund a covert operation. If that isn’t shameful, why doesn’t our government just sell drugs to solve some of its own problems, for instance, to decrease the national debt?

MIKE REIZMAN

Pasadena

* Finder has given us 21 thoughtful paragraphs about the wrong thing. The matter is not the moral character of the people we employ in covert actions but what those actions are. The issue is not how nice the people were but that they did great damage to the community of South-Central L.A. by their deeds. Is it acceptable policy that the people of American cities are to be exploited, injured and terrorized simply to provide a national bureaucracy with the funding that it failed to get from Congress?

The “intelligence community” is funded by Congress yearly, in keeping with the doctrine of the power of the purse. Far darker deeds than the Contras’ have been paid for by our elected representatives. When they do not fund such work, it is the choice of the American people, through their system, not to do so. To circumvent lawful controls is immoral and borders on the betrayal of the trust of the American people. To injure them in the course of that circumvention is an absolute betrayal.

DOUG WICHERT

Los Angeles

* Finder’s column about the CIA’s involvement with bad guys is a wonderful example of the spook agency’s “modified limited hang-out” approach to deflecting criticism. It admits to hiring crooks and thugs and being involved in human rights violations--the limited hang-out--but then modifies its horrendous transgressions by quoting a “rare public report on the matter” that says its most serious offense was failing “to notify Congress properly” because it was “just trying to protect its sources.”

Thus the CIA’s involvement in murder, political assassination, drugs and underworld connections receives but a slap on the hand by media opinion-makers.

BURT WILSON

Simi Valley