-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: High Times, January 1999, No. 281 Trans-High Corporation©1999 235 Park Avenue South, 5th Floor New York, NY 10013 ISSN #0362-630X 12 issues/$29.95US 12 issues/$37.45Foreign http://www.hightimes.com ----- Michael Levine - The DEA's Exiled Dissident the high times interview By BILL WEINBERG Michael Levine is a veteran of 25 years of undercover work with four federal agencies an three continents. He is now the Drug Enforcement Administration's most prominent and outspoken critic. From the Golden Triangle to the Andes, he claims his efforts to snare the dope trade's biggest bosses were sabotaged by the DEA "suits"—and CIA pressure. The story of his operations against the Bolivian coke mafia is detailed in his books DEEP COVER (Delacorte, 19901 and THE BIG WHITE LIE (Thunder's Mouth Press, 19931. His newest book, TRIANGLE OF DEATH (Dell, 19961, coauthored with his wife, Laura Kavanau, is a thriller based on his real-life experiences. He also hosts the weekly EXPERT WITNESS radio show an New York's WBAI-FM, in whose studios this interview took place. HT: So why is an ex-DEA agent doing talk radio? Michael Levine: Because we're seeing the complete abdication of the media from any role whatsoever as a watchdog. I was the senior US law-enforcement officer in the Southern Cone, and you can't imagine a greater betrayal of the trust of the American people than what I observed. And that is the support by CIA and their assets of the takeover of Bolivia by drug dealers and escaped Nazis. The "Cocaine Coup" of 1980, which turned the South American drug trade into a major industry. Right. I mean, it happened right under the nose of the media. Newsweek wrote an article that was so far off-base on the Bolivian revolution that I did what was probably one of the dumbest things of my life. I wrote a letter to them on embassy letterhead saying, "You missed the whole story, the story was the CIA betrayed us." Why was it a mistake? They never called me, and I was put under investigation. And, lo and behold, who seized that something was really wrong with the Bolivia coverage? HIGH TIMES. Dean Latimer. I'm gonna paraphrase his article [August 1981]: He said, "The government did this incredible, giant sting operation, and they don't want any credit for it. Something is wrong." And that was a reference to... The Roberto Suarez case, which was sabotaged all around me. And HIGH IMES was actually the only member of the media that was on the right track. I should have written HIGH TIMES instead of Newsweek' It would've got out! Let's start at the beginning. How did you become a DEA agent? A guy stuck a gun in my stomach when I was in the military police and pulled the trigger over a three-dollar hat. It misfired. I was amazingly lucky. The event inspired a profound change in me. I was in a rush to live. I thought I could become this James Bond type of undercover agent. I was very good at undercover. I could speak fluent Spanish. I knew the streets—I was a bad kid, I had been arrested twice before I was sixteen. I was getting paid to hang out in the Bronx like when I was a kid. With IRS intelligence, in '65, I was one of the few guys who could go down in the street and get bolita, Spanish numbers. I could pass as anything. But it was a meaningless game to me, it was just a lot of thrills. And then I found out that my brother David was a heroin addict. Suddenly, the whole thing seemed to come home. I believed all the rhetoric, you know? I believed that the drug dealer was the lowest. And I decided I was saved for a reason, and that was to get into narcotics enforcement. So you were with the DEA from the inception of the agency? Yeah. In '70, I transferred from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms into the hard-narcotics-smuggling unit of Customs. And that was my first run- in with the CIA. It was US v. Liang-Sae Tiw, et al. It began with a July 4, 1971 heroin arrest at JFK airport. He became my informer. He made heroin runs from Bangkok, Thailand. We busted his pick-ups, who were distributing nationwide, in a Florida swamp. I go undercover to meet their connection in Bangkok. These guys loved me, they wanted to take me up to Chiang Mai. But the case started coming apart. I wasn't getting operational funds—I'm this Mafia guy and I'm lying like hell and they're getting ready to kill me. So I started really screaming to my superiors, and I was brought into the American Embassy at midnight. I meet the boss of Customs there, Joe Jenkins, and a bald guy in a guayabera shirt who tells me, "You're not going to Chiang Mai." When we left, Jenkins turns to me and says [sotto voce], "That guy is CIA." So I followed my orders to bust the guy I was dealing with, and close the case. I was given a special Treasury Department award. But I didn't go to Chiang Mai and get the suppliers. Years later, I was put on the DEA desk tracking tribal factions in the Golden Triangle, and learned that the people who I had been stopped from penetrating were the source for the case in which they were smuggling heroin in the dead bodies of GIs. But at the time, all I knew was I was stopped from getting the biggest heroin bust ever. The DEA was formed in 1973, and I was inducted from Customs. The next time I ran into the CIA was in South America. And that's when I really flipped out and risked myself. Meanwhile, your brother killed himself. Yeah, in '77. He left a note saying, "I can't stand the drugs anymore." He was 34. It doubled or trebled in me the drive of, you know, "I'm gonna get these motherfuckers." In South America, you targeted Roberto Suarez, Bolivia's reigning "King of Cocaine." Oh yeah, he loved me. We only spoke on the phone, but he was calling me "comandante," which was his title. He was busted years later, but my case was sabotaged. Our fictitious mafia was set up in a Miami house. We claimed we had all this money, and we didn't have a nickel, it was all acting. We had $2,500 to run the whole operation, and we spent it fast. A DEA report, Operation Hun: A Chronology, says we had enough to indict the Bolivian government, and CIA stopped us, because it would jeopardize their ongoing programs. They call them "another agency," the standard euphemism. I passed myself off as a half-Sicilian, half-Puerto Rican Mafia don, "Miguel Luis Garcia," and they ate it up. I pay $9 million to Jose Gasser and Alfredo "Cutuchi" Gutierrez in a Miami bank vault while our plane flies into the jungles of Bolivia and picks up their 900 pounds of coca paste. I set up the deal with Roberto Suarez from Buenos Aires, then fly to Miami. We count out $9 million in cash. It took two hours. So we busted them, but they were released immediately. Gasser had all his charges dropped by Michael Sullivan, US prosecutor in Miami. Gutierrez was released on bail, went back to Bolivia and put a contract out on me. Sullivan called the case unwinnable. I said, "We have so much less against so many Americans sitting in prison than we have against Gasser." It was bullshit. I started calling it the "Obstruction of Justice Department." Operation Hun ends with me under investigation, force-transferred out of Argentina. There's an attempt on my life in Buenos Aires by people who were working for CIA: Argentine murderers. Mass murderers. Serial killers. They qualify under any definition. The ones responsible for the "disappeared"? Yeah. I can't tell you how badly I hated these guys. But I was a survivor, I was no dope. So even before the Contra war in Nicaragua, the CIA was protecting the South American cartels? I was trying to figure it out. I found out Jose Gasser's father was one of the founders of the World Anti-Communist League. He was CIA-connected back to the early '60s. For my first sting operation in Bolivia, which Penthouse called the greatest sting ever done, we needed the help of the Bolivian government. And at the time, in '80, it was Lidia Gueiler. She had a liberal government, and she was a truly anti-drug-dealer influence, and she helped us. So the drug dealers went to their CIA connections and sold them on the idea that Lidia Gueiler was a leftist. So the US government supported this revolution-by sending in Argentines, providing secret funds, everything. Drug dealers are notorious capitalists. They're always anti-Communist! [Laughs] Who went to prison as a result of Operation Hun? The main one was "Papo" Mejia, one of the most prolific murderers to ever come out of Colombia. This very beautiful woman, Sonia Atala, Bolivia's "Queen of Cocaine," was selling more cocaine than any living human being. She had Nazi stormtroopers at her command. She could order people dead anywhere. When the Bolivian revolution comes about in 1980, she is in full power. By 1982, I am totally immobilized by investigations and the attempts on my life. I'm brought into DEA headquarters, I'm being followed, my phone's tapped. The next thing, I'm asked if I want a deep-cover assignment. I would have made a deal with the Devil just to get out of DEA headquarters. I said, "What is it?" He says, "This woman Sonia Atala. We want you to live with her." She'd become an informer. She got so powerful that the Bolivian "Minister of Cocaine," Luis Arce Gomez [Roberto Suarez's cousin], got crazed and tried to shut her down. After she had passed on two million up front from Papo Mejia, her suppliers refused to deliver. Papo said, "Either you pay me or I kill your whole family." So now both the Colombians and the Bolivians want to kill her. She goes to DEA. They bring me in to be her undercover partner. We lived together in Tucson, Arizona, posing as boyfriend and girlfriend. We were gonna start making payments-and target every Colombian and Bolivian drug dealer that we dealt with. I was building a really good case against Roberto Suarez, Arce Gomez, Klaus Barbie, all of 'em. The government started picking and choosing who they were gonna indict. But we did get Papo. He's doing 35 years. Sonia's back in Bolivia, she had all her property returned to her. What do you mean she had "Nazi stormtroopers" at her command? Paramilitaries from Europe who had been trained by Klaus Barbie [escaped Gestapo officer, "The Butcher of Lyons"]. Her house in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, was called the "torture house." It had thick walls and all this equipment. And you lived with this woman in Tucson? Yeah. She was dealing drugs at the same time. She sold to two undercover DEA agents in Texas, and they had to un-arrest her. That's in The Big White Lie. Name, date, place and time. Did you have sex with her? No. I had to be prepared to take a polygraph at any time. Operation Trifecta was your next attempt, to shut down the Bolivian mafia. Right. We targeted La Corporacion—the organization that was born as a result of the revolution. We also targeted the entire Mexican government up to the incoming Carlos Salinas administration. And once again, we found that the Justice Department was doing everything possible to kill the case—including Attorney General Edwin Meese telephoning the attorney general of Mexico and warning him! Once again, why? Incoming President Salinas was telling our politicians he was gonna deliver NAFTA. At the same time, his people were telling me"Luis Miguel Garcia," half- Sicilian Mafia chief-that when Salinas is in, Mexico's wide open. And it turned out to be. Exactly! And that's on video. But if the American people knew this, no NAFTA. You did bust Col. Jorge Carranza, son of the founder of the modern Mexican state. Right, son of Venustiano Carranza, the George Washington of Mexico! He sat in uniform and told me I could have the whole Mexican government. On camera. Where are they all today? They're all free. Carranza won on appeal. I wrote a memo on how the government had done everything it could to destroy the case. If we had gone through with my next deal, my next meeting would have been with all the ruling bosses of La Corporacion and the Mexican secretary of defense, Arevalo Guardoqui. I was promised a meeting with him, on camera! So why didn't it happen? You have to ask them. I went on McNeil-Lehrer, and the acting head of DEA, Terry Burke, refused to address my charges on the air. He said, "Well, he's involved in a commercial enterprise," probably a reference to my book contract. Today, Luis Arce Gomez and Roberto Suarez are both in prison. Yeah, Arce Gomez here and Roberto Suarez in Bolivia-if you can call it a prison! He lives a life of luxury. In your novel, Triangle of Death, many of the characters are recognizable as real-life figures from your earlier books. It's not really fictional. The "Triangle of Death" is a real name. It was the organization run by escaped Gestapo agent Auguste Ricord. He was sentenced to death in absentia by France. With the help of CIA, he set up operations in Paraguay. You want proof of the power of this organization? Our Customs investigation started with New York Italian Mafia receiving Triangle of Death heroin, but led to indictments all around the world. But Paraguay would not give Auguste Ricord up until Nixon threatened invasion. Then we got him. The first thing we did was offer him to France. They didn't want him! They said, "You got him, you keep him!" We convicted him, he was sentenced to prison. He didn't serve more than two years before he was quietly released. He went back to Paraguay and died a free man. If all this is documented, what's the point of fictionalizing it? Nobody reads nonfiction. People believe Tom Clancy is real. I saw people in the theater crying at Clear and Present Danger. I was almost screaming, "It's a lie, it's propaganda!" But people believe these images. So we decided to make a thriller with the real image of CIA-which I know now they're more afraid of than all the nonfiction in the world! Your son Keith was a New York City cop killed in the line of duty. December 28, 1991. He tried to stop a robbery. The man who killed my son was a crack addict who had killed two other men and been convicted twice, and was out on the street. You've actually published an offer to the Costa Rican government to kidnap Oliver North for them to face drug charges there? Our Supreme Court has ruled that our agents can go into other countries and kidnap people who have violated our laws. Well, Oscar Arias, the Nobel Prize- winning president of Costa Rica, banned Oliver North from entering Costa Rica for life for conspiracy to traffic drugs through his country to our country! My logic was, being that the US has ruled kidnapping legal, and I've done kidnapping for the DEA, I'd be happy to do it for Costa Rica! I was just trying to make a point. I'm a guy who spent most of my adult life on the inside, going from somebody who really believed that the ends justify the means to somebody Who learned that that's the worst thing we can believe in, that that kind of thinking will destroy our freedoms. pps. 72-74 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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