	id AA16841; Wed, 2 Nov 94 14:03:20 CST
Subject: Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 2 Num. 65


              Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 2  Num. 65
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                    ("Quid coniuratio est?")
 
 
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THE PHONY WAR
An Interview with DEA Veteran Celerino Castillo
 
[...continued...]
 
TARPLEY:
So that's now the second time you got official testimony and 
corroboration that Oliver North was running these activities, 
first from Mr. Stia, and then from Ambassador Corr. Two different 
agencies.
 
 
CASTILLO:
That's right. Then I went to Jack McCavett and Jack McCavett's 
answer to me was the fact that they were being ordered to support 
the Oliver North Contra operation, to go above and beyond to 
support them; and also Col. Steele with the U.S. Military Group. 
He, of course, was the liaison officer from the U.S. embassy into 
the Salvadoran military.
 
 
TARPLEY:
Mr. Stia, your immediate superior: did he have the option of 
rejecting your reports, telling you to tear them up, or file 
them, or rewrite them? Or did he have to sign off on them and 
send them to Washington?
 
 
CASTILLO:
One of the things a lot of people don't understand is the fact 
that every time I wrote a report, or sent a cable off to 
Washington, it had to be approved by my supervisor (who was Bob 
Stia) *and* signed off by the ambassador of whatever country I 
was sending the cable out to. So, everything was approved. 
Whether DEA Washington did anything with it was a different 
story. And we had a place up there they called the "Black Hole"; 
all these reports went in there, and they were never distributed 
to the right people.
 
                -+- Laundering the Profits -+-
 
TARPLEY:
Can you remember the date of your first dispatch to Washington 
that basically stated these facts?
 
 
CASTILLO:
We go back to early 1986. The cable came in from Costa Rica in 
April, so we continued to follow up on the request to conduct an 
extensive investigation into Hangars 4 and 5, and cables started 
coming and going.
 
Costa Rica was giving us the information that narcotics were 
leaving from Aranchez airstrip in Costa Rica into Ilopango. Of 
course, our informant at Ilopango was being told, by the pilots 
when they were leaving, how much dope they were taking, how much 
money they were flying into the Bahamas or Panama.
 
At one point, he saw $4.5 million cash taken from Ilopango into 
Panama, to launder. These were incidents that were reported. We 
have a time and date for one of the pilots, Chica Guirola, 
departing El Salvador to the Bahamas where he was airdropping 
monies on the Contras -- the profits of narcotrafficking.
 
 
TARPLEY:
Do you get the impression that the narcotics ultimately came from 
people like the Medellin cartel, or the Cali cartel, or people 
like this?
 
 
CASTILLO:
I had a CIA agent in El Salvador who actually came up and asked 
me: How do you expect us to support the Contras when Congress cut 
aid to the Contras? How are they going to support themselves? 
Which means that we have to sleep with the cartels.
 
And basically, during the Kerry Committee [i.e., Senate Committee 
on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and 
International Operations] hearings we had a lot of informants, a 
lot of individuals who flew for the Contras, who gave testimony; 
but their credibility was not that good, because they were known 
traffickers, and so forth. But there was a lot of testimony, a 
lot of evidence to the fact that there was a lot of narcotics 
trafficking.
 
 
TARPLEY:
O.K. You've mentioned the Kerry Committee. I guess that's Sen. 
Kerry of Massachusetts, the Senate Investigating Committee '85, 
'86, '87?
 
You tried to tell part of your story to them. Am I right? You 
tried to inform them of what you knew?
 
 
CASTILLO:
No, not the Kerry Committee. As a matter of fact, on Oct. 22, in 
1987, I got a call from Washington requesting for me not to close 
the files on the Contras because the Kerry Committee wanted 
copies of my reports, and under the Freedom of Information Act, 
if it's a closed case they cannot have access to it.
 
During the Kerry Committee, we had Mark Richards, who is an 
assistant U.S. attorney... He was involved in a meeting with 25 
individuals from the DEA and the Department of Justice who 
*refused* to give this information to the Kerry Committee.
 
 
TARPLEY:
This was the committee that investigated this "frogman" 
operation?
 
 
CASTILLO:
Yes. We had the "Frogman Case" going back to 1985. A couple of 
Columbians and Nicaraguans were trafficking in large quantities 
of cocaine into San Francisco. It was called the "Frogman Case" 
because they were bringing ships into the San Francisco area, and 
a couple of frogmen would go out there and take the coke.
 
As it turns out, on their own testimony, testifying before the 
committee, they reported that the profits from those sales of 
narcotics were going to the Contras. So, we start there. In 
December of 1985, a CNN reporter broke the story on the Contras' 
involvement in narcotics trafficking.
 
So, the investigation into it started; but at no time did the 
Kerry Committee *ever* contact the agents down in El Salvador who 
actually conducted the investigation. I sat there and I waited 
for the phone to ring, and nobody ever called so that I could 
testify before that committee to advise them that large 
quantities of drugs were being trafficked by the Oliver North 
Contra operation.
 
 
TARPLEY:
You later also tried to get in touch with the special prosecutor, 
Lawrence Walsh, in order to look into this entire matter.
 
 
CASTILLO:
That's correct. Right before I left the agency in 1991, I 
secretly met with Mike Foster, the FBI agent assigned to the 
Iran-Contra committee, Walsh's committee, with my attorney 
present. He came, and he was just stunned when he saw copies of 
my reports, cables, etc.
 
His thing was the fact that he had asked the DEA, that Walsh's 
committee had asked and requested all this information from DEA, 
and DEA *denied* the fact that there were such reports. 
Basically, he was just stunned by what I showed him there. He 
said, "You know, if we can prove that the Contras and Oliver 
North were heavily involved in narcotics trafficking, it would be 
like a grand-slam home run."
 
We left it that I would try to get this girl named Sandrita from 
Salvador into the U.S. so that she could be debriefed by Walsh's 
committee with regard to her personal knowledge of narcotics use 
by some of the Contra pilots and some NSC individuals.
 
 
TARPLEY:
Well, it looks like you attempted, at one point or another, to 
bring your revelations, these charges, to the attention of the 
State Department, the Special Prosecutor, the FBI, the CIA. Did 
you ever talk to Customs?
 
 
CASTILLO:
Yes, I sure did.
 
One of the things is that the DEA has not acknowledged the fact 
that there are such reports. Yet, on the Kerry Committee and its 
report, we have the DEA assistant administrator, Dave West, in 
talking about the Nicaraguan war, saying that it is true that 
people on both sides of the equation in the Nicaraguan war were 
drug traffickers, and a couple of them were pretty significant.
 
Well if the DEA denies that, why is this man saying this?
 
We have the CIA chief of Latin American countries down there 
stating, in the Kerry Report: We suspected drug trafficking by 
the resistance forces. This is not a couple of people, it's a lot 
of people.
 
So, we have contradictory statements from both the State 
Department and the DEA, to the fact that the Contras were heavily 
involved in narcotics trafficking.
 
 
TARPLEY:
When you sent these reports into Washington, who in the DEA would 
get those on his desk?
 
 
CASTILLO:
Well, first of all, the chief of Latin American countries was 
John Marsh, who now, I understand, is the third-ranking DEA 
official.
 
 
TARPLEY:
He's moving up the ladder.
 
 
CASTILLO:
He's moving up the ladder. He is the individual who is 
responsible for the cover-up of the Contras involving narcotics 
trafficking. He gave me a letter of "reprimand", I guess you 
could say, when I refused to stop reporting on the Contras' 
involvement in narcotics trafficking. He actually wanted me to 
use the word "alleged". I explained to him: How can I use the 
word "alleged" when I'm seeing all this that's happening in 
Ilopango? We have reliable informants in there. And he went back, 
and he stated the same thing, that it would mean the end of my 
career in Latin America if I kept reporting this.
 
                   [...to be continued...]
 
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Aperi os tuum muto, et causis omnium filiorum qui pertranseunt.
Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et 
  pauperem.                    -- Liber Proverbiorum  XXXI: 8-9 

 Brian Francis Redman    bigxc@prairienet.org    "The Big C"
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"Justice" = "Just us" = "History is written by the assassins."
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