The following article was printed in the Friday, September 20, 1996 issue of *The Christia

The following article was printed in the Friday, September 20, 1996 issue
of *The Christian Science Monitor* on page 3:

  CIA UNDER PRESSURE TO DIVULGE INFO ON CONTRAS

  By Warren Richey

  An expose by a California newspaper is raising questions about
whether American intelligence officials in the 1980s permitted the
"contra" rebels to sell drugs in US cities to help fund guerrilla
warfare against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
   Mid- and late-1980s news reports and congressional
investigations did in fact establish that certain people associated
with the CIA-backed rebel group did engage in drug trafficking as a
means to support the contras.
   But what remains unclear is the extent to which US intelligence
and law-enforcement officials may have been aware of specific
illegal activities by pro-contra Nicaraguans operating in the US.
Also, did the CIA allow those activities to continue, rather than
risk identifying secret sources and operatives engaged in the fight
against communism in Central America?
   Yesterday, CIA director John Deutch addressed the matter before
the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. He said that an initial
CIA review found no evidence to support the allegations, but that
he was ordering a "thorough and independent" inquiry into the
allegations.
   CIA critics see the recent news accounts as evidence of what
they say is a familiar pattern, with the spy agency once again
rubbing elbows with drug traffickers and other criminals for the
sake of defeating communists.
   They point to CIA operatives in Southeast Asia, who were
actively involved in opium smuggling, and to US-backed mujahideen
rebels in Aghanistan, some of whom sold opium to help finance the
battle against Soviet forces occupying that country in the 1980s.
   These critics pose the issue this way: If US intelligence
officials weren't aware of contra drug trafficking, they should
have been. And stopping the flow of illegal drugs, and the
proliferation of weapons and violence in urban America that come
with them, should have been a higher priority for the US government
than waging a foundering insurgency in Central America.
   The questions came up after the publication last month of a
series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News. Reporter Gary Webb
chronicled the drug-dealing activities of two civilian supporters
of the Nicaraguan Democratic Forces (FDN), who reportedly sold
"tons" of cocaine to street gangs in South Central Los Angeles. The
drug dealers say they turned their profits over to the contras.
   Mr. Webb reported that cocaine from the two Nicaraguans was sold
at cut-rate prices and helped spark the explosion of crack cocaine
use in Los Angeles and other cities in the early 1980s.
   The stories suggest the two traffickers were protected from
prosecution, but the articles do not identify who in the US
government may have protected them and why.
   The charge that a group supported by the Central Intelligence
Agency may have played a key role in supplying crack cocaine to
predominantly black neighborhoods in Los Angeles has angered the
African American community.
   Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who represents South Central Los
Angeles, is calling for a congressional investigation. "I think it
is unconscionable that the intelligence community or the CIA could
think so little of people of color that they would be willing to
destroy generations in an effort to try to win the war in
Nicaragua," Mrs. Waters says. "And they lost it anyway."
   The response among Clinton administration officials has been
lukewarm. The CIA's Mr. Deutch has asked the agency's inspector
general to investigate the allegations. But he says that in his
view there is "no substance" to the Mercury News accounts.
   In a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D) of California, Deutch
wrote: "The review I ordered of Agency files, including a study
conducted in 1988 and briefed to both intelligence committees {in
Congress}, supports the conclusion that the Agency neither
participated in nor condoned drug trafficking by Contra forces."
   But Jack Blum, former chief counsel to a Senate subcommittee
that investigated allegations of contra drug ties in the 1980s,
says he is dismayed by rapid-fire denials issued by the CIA and
Justice Department. He says he believes the accounts are accurate
and "raise very serious questions" about covert operations of the
day.
   Mr. Blum says Washington's zeal in the 1980s to fight communists
in Central America blinded officials from seeing the bigger
picture. Allowing Nicaraguan drug traffickers to receive a free
ride into the lucrative US drug market, Blum says, caused more
damage to America than anything that happened in Nicaragua.
   Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security
Archives in Washington, is considered an expert in the Iran-Contra
scandal and related issues. He says it will take more than the CIA
inspector general to get to the bottom of the issues raised by the
Mercury News accounts.
   "The CIA is denying that it knowingly participated in drug
trafficking. That is true. But that is not the right question," Mr.
Kornbluh argues. "The right question is: 'Was the CIA aware that
key FDN civilians in California were involved in drug smuggling,
and did {the CIA} protect them from prosecution in any way?' "
   Kornbluh says the Clinton administration should order an
investigation of the matter by the intelligence oversight board, a
body independent of the CIA.
   Tom Cash, a former top Drug Enforcement Administration official
in Miami, says that sometimes drug prosecutions take a back seat
when matters of national security are at stake. "When you have
those types of political upheavals and foreign policy
considerations of the president to start with, and at the same time
have a drug prosecution to contend with, drugs are going to be
second," he says. "It is something we grappled with on a daily
basis."