Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 2 Num. 65

("Quid coniuratio est?")

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...]

I encourage distribution of "Conspiracy Nation."

Brian Francis Redman bigxc@prairienet.org "The Big C"

"Justice" = "Just us" = "History is written by the assassins."