Affidavit by Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D.

THE CIA AND DRUG-TRAFFICKING
BY CONTRA SUPPORTERS


     My name is Peter Dale Scott. I am an author with a doctorate in Political Science from McGill University. After four years as a diplomat in the Canadian Foreign Service I taught for thirty-three years at the University of California, Berkeley.
     Four of my books have dealt with the problem of drug-traffickers who owe their prominence and protection to their involvement with CIA-backed covert operations. The most relevant of these books is Cocaine Politics, co-authored with Jonathan Marshall and published in 1991 by the University of California Press. (Four of the chapters dealt with the subject of Contras and drug-trafficking, including the California network of Norwin Meneses.)(1)
     At various times I have taken leave from teaching to conduct full-time research into covert politics. In 1970 I was a Guggenheim Fellow for a year. In 1973 I took leave again for six months, for part of which I was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for International Studies at M.I.T. In 1987 I served in Washington for six months as a Senior Fellow at, and drug consultant to, the Center for International Development Policy, gathering information in support of the investigation into Drugs and Foreign Policy conducted at that time by Senator John Kerry. In that capacity I consulted with a number of experts in Washington inside and outside government. I was also a personal eyewitness to the falsity of a story published in the Washington Post (and subsequently retracted) which exonerated the Contras from involvement in drug-trafficking.(2)
     My researches into U.S. government involvement with drug-traffickers date back to 1970, when I wrote a book, The War Conspiracy, about the origins of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. I returned to this topic yet again in 1986, when I noticed that certain Cuban exiles I had already written about, some of them indicted or convicted drug-traffickers, were involved in the Contra support movement in Costa Rica.(3)
     After twenty-five years of research, I have come to believe, as I wrote in 1992, that "governments themselves, and the links they develop with major traffickers, are the key both to the drug-trafficking problem and to its solution."(4) The United States Government is by no means the only example of such involvement, but it is the one with the most deleterious impact on its own citizens.      One can see this impact in the efforts in the 1980s by the CIA, and later Oliver North, to arrange for extra-governmental support for the Contras. These arrangements led to documented U.S. government involvement with, and often support to, top-level drug-traffickers in Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama, as well as with domestic traffickers in the states of Florida, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Texas, and California. This recurring pattern of involvement with those who dominated the drug traffic cannot be dismissed as an accidental or coincidental aberration.
     In a few cases, Contras and their supporters became traffickers after their contact with CIA officers. This was the case with Ricky Ross's supplier, Danilo Blandon Reyes. The CIA might argue in its defense that Blandon, and others like him, were not traffickers at the time contact was made. But one hears recurring reports that such recruits were given to understand that funds should be raised for the Contras by any means, which was taken to include drug-trafficking. Blandon has testified that he heard this from a leading U.S. protege in the Contras, Enrique Bermudez. Other, more senior Contra officials have claimed to have heard the same guidance from at least one high-ranked CIA officer.
     It is a matter of record that the CIA has also established contacts with those already known to the U.S. government as major narcotics traffickers. This was the case with Blandon's supplier, Norwin Meneses, a highly publicized Contra supporter who had been listed as a trafficker in DEA records since the 1970s.



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