Found at: http://www.sjmercury.com/drugs/ Includes supporting documentation and testimony.

Found at:
        http://www.sjmercury.com/drugs/                 
Includes supporting documentation and testimony.

                        [Welcome to Mercury Center]

                                [Day Three]
                              [Dark Alliance]

 San Francisco Bay Area man tangled in drug web

 Tales to DEA of gun running,
 drug trafficking fall on deaf ears

 Published: Aug. 20, 1996

 BY GARY WEBB                                               
 Mercury News Staff Writer                                  

 DAVID MORRISON, A FORMER San Francisco Bay Area            
 economist, got his introduction to cocaine politics in     
 the spring of 1984. He hasn't been the same since.         
 ''I had crossed over into the nether world that 99         
 percent of the population wouldn't even believe            
 existed,'' he said. ''I still have nightmares about it.''  

 A conservative Republican Party activist and fundraiser,   
 Morrison became a supporter of the CIA's anti-communist
 army -- the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense or FDN --
 the early 1980s, while teaching international finance at   
 California State University at Hayward. Using his social   
 and political connections, he began helping families
 fleeing the 1979 Sandinista revolution find jobs and       
 friends in the Bay Area, which has had a large Nicaraguan   
 population ever since the Gold Rush.                       

 ''I was just trying to support the President's            
 position,'' Morrison explained. ''I thought it was just
 insane that we'd allowed things to get out of hand in       
 Central America.''                                         

 But after 18 months inside the FDN, as an adviser to the   
 group's political boss Adolfo Calero, a shaken Morrison
 went to the authorities and poured out a lurid tale of
 gun running and cocaine trafficking.

 His lengthy statements to the FBI were immediately
 stamped ''Confidential'' and remained secret for nearly a
 decade. They were recently declassified for the Mercury
 News by the National Archives.

 (Because he still fears for his safety, the newspaper
 agreed to substitute a pseudonym -- David Morrison -- for
 the economist's real name. His FBI interviews can be read
 in their entirety on the Mercury News' Web page.)

 ''(Morrison) said that the reason he was agreeing to be    
 interviewed by the FBI is that he has certain information     
 in which he believes the Nicaraguan 'contra' organization   
 known as FDN ... has become more involved in selling arms      
 and cocaine for personal gain than in a military effort      
 to overthrow the current Nicaraguan Sandinista                  
 government,'' one of the reports states.                    

 Much of what Morrison told the agents about the inner
 workings of the FDN and its ties to the U.S. government     
 was corroborated by the Congressional committees that        
 investigated the Iran-Contra scandal. But his information
 about the FDN's drug operation seemed to fall on deaf         
 ears, he said.

 Morrison stumbled into it in April 1984, when a neatly
 dressed Nicaraguan exile named Norwin Meneses started
 showing up at meetings of a San Francisco anti-communist
 group Morrison was assisting.

 Called USACA (United Support Against Communism in the
 Americas), it was a handful of mostly middle-class
 Nicaraguan couples who met in each other's living rooms
 and thought up ways to publicize the Contras' cause.

 ''All (they) were thinking of doing is writing a few
 letters to the editor,'' said Morrison, a veteran of
 several political campaigns. ''They had no (political)
 connections whatsoever.'' After hearing some of
 Morrison's ideas -- like hosting a speaking tour for FDN
 leader Calero -- the group delightedly asked him to join
 their board of directors.

 Meneses also decided to help. He became USACA's largest
 donor, records show, paying for dinners and parties for
 Calero, a Notre Dame-educated businessman and longtime
 CIA operative who became the public face of the Contras
 in the United States.

 Meneses' generosity impressed USACA's members, who
 excitedly listed his gifts in their meeting minutes as
 one of their first significant achievements. In an
 interview before his death from cancer in June, USACA's
 founder, Don Sinicco, said he and his friends thought
 Meneses was merely a sympathetic fellow exile who ran a
 successful restaurant.

 But Morrison, whom Sinicco described as a man who ''knew
 Senators,'' began hearing rumors about the group's dapper
 benefactor and asked some friends in Washington to check
 them out. He got back a two-page report from a Drug
 Enforcement Administration file.

 To his horror, he discovered what federal drug agents had
 known for years: Norwin Meneses was ''a major, major
 trafficker ... He was selling cocaine all over the
 country,'' Morrison said. ''The DEA had a file that was
 two feet thick on him.''

 The DEA refused to release any records regarding Meneses,
 on the grounds that it would be an unwarranted invasion
 of his personal privacy. The CIA refused on national
 security grounds.

 Alarmed, Morrison dug deeper and, from a Nicaraguan
 friend in the FDN, made his most jarring discovery:
 Meneses wasn't just smuggling cocaine for himself. He was
 also doing it for the FDN, and he was selling them
 weapons as well, with the knowledge of the FDN's military
 commander and, it appeared, the tacit approval of the
 U.S. government.

 An acquaintance in the U.S. Customs Service told Morrison
 that Customs agents had attempted to investigate ''the
 Nicaraguan role in a large narcotics ring extending from
 Miami, Florida, to Texas and California'' in mid-1985 but
 ran into interference from ''national security
 interests,'' the FBI report said.

 Morrison told FBI agents that ''Norwin Meneses would have
 been arrested in a major drug case in 1983 or 1984 except
 that he had been warned by a corrupt (information
 deleted) officer.''

 Morrison said he never heard back from the FBI and didn't
 know why. He also complained to Iran-Contra Special
 Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh's office and was told that
 Walsh had no jurisdiction to look into allegations of
 Contra cocaine trafficking.

 ''I thought this bastard (Meneses) should have been
 arrested. I assumed there would be an outstanding warrant
 on this guy. There was nothing,'' Morrison said. ''They
 had no interest whatsoever.''

 Stunned and disheartened, he left California and went
 into virtual seclusion in New England, where he lives
 today, writing about economic trends.

 ''I had worked on national campaigns. I had grown up in a
 family that knew politicians. And I thought I was part of
 the Establishment,'' Morrison said with a sad laugh.
 ''And all of a sudden I was a leper.''

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