Amid Doubters, CIA Begins Crack Probe

In a warren of windowless offices deep inside CIA headquarters, a dozen deliberately anonymous researchers have begun combing through more than 10,000 aging documents, the secret records of Nicaragua’s covert war of the 1980s.

Their task is to look for something that they candidly hope they will not find: evidence of connections between the CIA, the agency’s rebel Contra army in Nicaragua and Latin American cocaine dealers.

And underlying that job is a real-life mission impossible: to convince a skeptical public that the CIA can investigate itself unsparingly, even on a question as explosive as this.

The agency’s chief internal watchdog, Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz, is staking his credibility on the inquiry. “We intend to do our best to tell the whole story of what happened,” he said. “If there are points on which we don’t find information, we’ll point that out too.”

But because he wants to be thorough, Hitz said, it will take a long time to produce results. “It’s going to take most of 1997,” he predicted.

The agency’s critics are openly skeptical of the CIA’s intentions. “Of course we’re all suspicious,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) said. “We are going to be monitoring this process and keeping the pressure on.”

Even the agency’s own investigators acknowledge the dilemma. “I know, ‘Trust us,’ doesn’t go very far these days,” a CIA official said. “All we can do is offer up our record and our work.”

Spurred by a public outcry over charges that the CIA actively supported and protected drug traffickers who flooded Los Angeles and other cities with cheap crack cocaine in the 1980s, the agency, the Justice Department and Congress’ two intelligence committees are looking into decade-old questions:

* Did the CIA encourage, condone or ignore connections between its favorite Contra leaders and drug traffickers in Honduras? A 1987 congressional investigation led by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) found that two of the Contras’ main air cargo contractors were owned or operated by known drug traffickers who reportedly used the planes for smuggling.

* Did the CIA turn a blind eye to connections between cocaine smugglers and leaders of the Contras’ Nicaraguan “southern front” (who were not being funded by the CIA at the time)? Alan D. Fiers, then chief of CIA operations in Central America, told Congress in 1987 that many southern-front figures were “involved in cocaine.”

“It is not a couple of people,” he testified. “It is a lot of people.” But it is not clear whether the agency passed its information on to law enforcement officials.

* Did the CIA know anything about alleged payoffs by Colombia’s Cali cocaine cartel to Contra leaders? Several witnesses told the Kerry subcommittee that investigated the charges that the Cali traffickers gave about $10 million to the Contras, perhaps in hope of using rebel airfields for cocaine flights. But the allegation has never been proved.

* Did the CIA or the Contras have any connection with a California-based ring of Nicaraguan cocaine traffickers that supplied crack to Ricky Donnell Ross, who helped flood South-Central Los Angeles with the drug by undercutting his competitors’ prices?

The San Jose Mercury News revived the CIA-cocaine issue last summer with a series of articles charging that the California ring, operating with CIA protection, deliberately introduced crack to black neighborhoods in Los Angeles and sent millions of dollars to the Contras. Other newspapers, including The Times, investigated the same allegations and came to different conclusions. The Times reported that, although the Nicaraguan traffickers did send some money to the Contras, the only donations that could be substantiated came to about $50,000.

CIA officials said they already have some initial findings.

They said they have found no direct link between the CIA and the California-based cocaine ring, which was the focus of the Mercury News report. The agency said it knew as early as 1984 that the leader of the ring, Juan Norvin Meneses, was a drug trafficker, but it did not know of any link between Meneses and the Contras.

They said they have confirmed that CIA officials knew southern-front leaders were taking money from drug traffickers--and reported the problem to headquarters. At the time, however, the agency had stopped funding those Contras.

And they said they plan to pursue a question that many investigators believe could turn up results embarrassing to the agency: whether CIA officers deliberately turned a blind eye to Contra connections with cocaine smugglers and failed to report what they knew.

But that avenue of inquiry faces a Catch-22: Investigators are looking for information that was never reported.

Moreover, many of the people involved are no longer CIA employees. At the peak of the Contra war, the agency had as many as 400 people in the field, but many of them were former military officers on short-term contracts.

The investigators said they have no power to compel current or former agency officers to testify. “We can’t know what nobody will tell us about,” one investigator said.

Added a former CIA officer who participated in the Contra war (and said he knew of no agency complicity in drug smuggling): “If you had failed to report something like that, would you confess it? I wouldn’t.”

*

Nevertheless, the investigators said they will ask “everyone of any interest” to talk about what they know.

“I have no indication that anybody has refused or will refuse” to talk, a senior CIA official said. The agency’s investigators do not have the power to subpoena witnesses but they can notify Congress or the Justice Department if important figures refuse to cooperate, and those bodies can issue subpoenas.

The investigators began in September by issuing a letter to every current employee of the CIA, asking them to come forward with “any information . . . relating to possible drug trafficking and related activities by the Nicaraguan Contras or persons associated with that organization directed toward or conducted within the United States, as well as what action CIA took in response.”

Merely reading and digesting the documents in the CIA’s electronic archive from the 1980s--now being printed out and organized in binders and boxes--will take until spring, officials said.

After that, the investigators plan at least 200 interviews with former Contras, former CIA officials and other knowledgeable figures.

A “rough outline” of a report should take shape during the summer. But finishing it, shepherding it through CIA internal reviews and then producing an unclassified version for the public will take months more.

“There’s no practical way we could suppress anything even if we wanted to,” asserted one official involved in the inquiry. “The [congressional] committees are looking over our shoulders. . . . And they have access to every piece of information we do.”

*

Members of Congress give Hitz and his office generally high marks for the quality of their investigations. The CIA inspector general operates under a 1989 law that seeks to protect his independence; the law guarantees the inspector general access to all agency records, requires him to report major problems directly to Congress and provides that he can be fired only by the president.

Waters and other congressional watchdogs said they will watch the investigation closely.

“We’re going to monitor what they’re doing,” she said. “Those of us close to this process are learning enough to help keep it going. We will have our own list of people who we feel should be subpoenaed.”

The Los Angeles congresswoman already has conducted a series of town meetings in several cities around the country that stoked outrage among African Americans and others over the charges against the CIA, and she plans a new series of teach-ins in 1997, beginning at California State University campuses at Northridge, Fullerton and Long Beach. John M. Deutch, who is leaving his post as CIA director, spoke Nov. 15 at a town meeting in South-Central Los Angeles.

One reason for the teach-ins, she said, is that the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), is a former CIA operations officer who has fiercely defended the agency’s honor.

“I’m skeptical about Goss,” she said. “He’s a CIA man. I’m under no illusion that he would eagerly and aggressively pursue this.”

Goss returns the compliment in kind.

“Ms. Waters will attempt to sensationalize these matters, but that’s her business and that’s her agenda,” he said. “It’s not my agenda.”

In the thankless position of mediator is Rep. Julian C. Dixon (D-Los Angeles), one of the intelligence committee’s senior Democrats.

Both the House and Senate intelligence committees have begun their own investigations and already have sent aides to interview witnesses in California--including Ross, the convicted cocaine dealer, who has said he only learned of a connection to the CIA from a reporter for the Mercury News.

The congressional committees plan hearings next year but none have been scheduled yet.

“Nobody’s ever going to be satisfied on an issue like this,” one congressional investigator said with a sigh. “It’s like the [John F.] Kennedy assassination. You can never put the thing to rest.”