[Mb-civic] Courage Under Fire

Tue Sep 28 18:27:06 PDT 2004

Courage Under Fire 

By Jan Frel, AlterNet
 Posted on September 28, 2004, Printed on September 28, 2004
 http://www.alternet.org/story/20004/

There is a general lack of attention to Presidential candidate John Kerry's
20-year record in the Senate in this election. Using his background as a
state prosecutor in Massachusetts, Kerry launched his Senate career
conducting investigations from his perch as a member of the Senate Foreign
Relations Commmittee. Kerry spent almost all of his first term (1984-1990)
in the Senate investigating the Iran-Contra drug scandal in Nicaragua, the
role of the Panamanian government in drug trafficking and the corrupt
activities at the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI).

 Former Associated Press reporter Robert Parry recently highlighted some of
Kerry's work in the Contra scandals in his new book, "Secrecy and
Privilege," which explores how the two George Bushes have risen to the
pinnacle of political power. AlterNet spoke with Parry, who covered the
Contra drug scandal in the mid-1980s for the Associated Press, about Kerry's
investigative work in the Senate.

 There's a passage in your book that details a part of John Kerry's career
in the Senate  his investigations into the Central American Contra scandals
in the 1980s. You show that Kerry stayed firm under pressure from his
colleagues, the White House and the mainstream press. Could you start by
painting the background on the Contra affair?

In the early to mid-1980s, the war in Nicaragua was underway, and the
Reagan/Bush White House was determined to support the Contras  these
insurgents who were fighting against the Sandanistas, the leftist government
that had taken power in Nicaragua. The Contras were developing a pretty
unsavory reputation for human rights violations, and some of the activities
that the CIA made to back the Contras at the time were clearly in violation
of international law.

The U.S. Congress, beginning in 1984 and going on for the next couple years,
voted to restrict or prevent U.S. military assistance that would go to the
Contras in Nicaragua, and Reagan signed on to it with some protest. But the
White House tried to circumvent it soon after. They turned to Oliver North
who was then a Marine officer, serving on the National Security Council and
also working with office of Vice President George H.W. Bush and some of the
CIA people that he had surrounded himself with, going back to his days when
Bush was CIA director. There was an effort to run a secret operation to
provide various kinds of assistance to the Contras ‹ money, in some cases
helping them to get guns and other kinds of armaments to carry on the war,
which Congress had effectively tried to block.

You were covering this as a reporter at the time?

Yes, I was at The Associated Press at the time, and we were beginning to
investigate this. I did an early story mentioning Ollie North in 1985. We
were digging into this secret operation which the White House was denying it
existed. In doing so, we also began stumbling on to evidence that the Contra
units had turned to drug trafficking to help fill the void of money that the
CIA had stopped providing.

 The only person in the Congress who showed any imagination or strong
interest in these criminal activities that were going on underneath the nose
of the U.S. government was Senator John Kerry, who was serving his first
term. Kerry had heard about this through his family connections in
Massachusetts, and he took an interest. He turned his staff loose on looking
into the Contras. Working through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
they pressed the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide information about
this that was available. The Reagan/Bush administration tried to block
Kerry's inquiries at every turn.

And the media started to attack Kerry.

Right. Led by South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon's newspaper, the
Washington Times, the conservative news media began attacking John Kerry.
Some of the allegations were that he was off on some wild tangent, that this
was all crazy, that he was wasting government money. Later on, as the
evidence built up that there really was something going on, the Washington
Times started attacking Kerry with the tack that he and his staff were
"obstructing" the investigations of wrong doing that the Reagan/Bush
administration supposedly wanted to carry out. Kerry's early investigative
work involved piecing together how Ollie North's secret operation was
working, and that then spun off into looking at the drug trafficking that
was running up through Central America.

Essentially, some of the trafficking cartels were using the Contras as a
"cover"  I'm not sure the cartels particularly cared about the Contras one
way or the other, but they understood that if they got close enough to the
Contras and worked with them, the U.S. government would not want to expose
those smuggling routes and smuggling connections. So that made sense for the
drug cartels, and we now know of course that the U.S. government did turn a
blind eye to some of these drug shipments.

But this wasn't public knowledge at the time, was it?

No, this was unknown at the time, and John Kerry did some pretty courageous
work as an investigator exposing some of these dirty dealings. Kerry
eventually put out a report which was widely criticized by the Washington
press corps, which didn't really want to believe any of this. The New York
Times and The Washington Post and others sort of poo-poohed Kerry's
allegations and suggested that they weren't well founded. Newsweek, at one
point in its "Conventional Wisdom Watch," referred to John Kerry as a "randy
conspiracy buff," and he got a negative image by the national press corps,
because he was pursuing these allegations, which many of the media outlets
were not able to confirm. At The Associated Press, we were able to confirm
some of Kerry's claims and we ran some stories about them, but our stories
were not taken very seriously either at the time.

What were some of the specifics in Kerry's investigations?

Kerry's report came out in 1988 or 1989, and he was able to lay out that the
Contra operations on both the Honduran and Costa Rican sides of the border
with Nicaragua had become implicated in the cocaine trade, and that a number
of groups that were helping  for instance, the Honduran military, and the
Panamanian government  also were implicated in the cocaine trafficking. So
his report came out, and it was pretty much buried deep inside the
newspapers.

 Kerry then branched off from there to do some more work on the Panama
element, which were more widely accepted, which showed that Manuel Noriega
was involved in drug trafficking involved in various ways. That in turn led
Kerry to look at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), on
which he also did some remarkable work in terms of showing how this Middle
Eastern bank intersected with some of the drug trade, terrorist groups and
with intelligence agencies, including the CIA. This exposed this whole arena
of influence peddling and accepting corrupt money. The trouble with the BCCI
investigation for Kerry was that it was a bipartisan investigation  it was
a bipartisan scandal, and Kerry took a lot of hits from both sides, both
Republicans and Democrats in Congress were upset with him for looking into
some of that.

Editor's note: For more on Kerry's BCCI investigations, read John Baskin and
David Sirota's article, "Ahead of His Time."

So Kerry went through these investigations, which were really quite historic
in terms of their import, but Kerry got nothing out of it terms of credit
from the press or public. It wasn't really until 1998 that the CIA inspector
general, Frederick Hitz, did reports about the Contra drug activity  it was
in the context of later allegations that emerged about the Contra's
involvement with crack cocaine. While Hitz dismissed the more extreme
allegations that some were making about the CIA and its involvement in the
crack epidemic, Hitz's reports did confirm virtually everything that John
Kerry had said back in the late '80s. So, while Kerry was vindicated, no one
really noticed, and it didn't help Kerry politically. But these were
important investigations.

Was Kerry acting on his own when he conducted these investigations? Did he
have any allies in the House or Senate, or was it principally Kerry and his
staff working alone?

I think Kerry was certainly leading the way. But there were some Republican
and Democratic senators who supported his efforts. There was a subcommittee
in Foreign Relations that John Kerry was on that provided some assistance
and cover. There were also some Republicans who were opposed to drug
trafficking  the war on drugs was a big issue then  and some helped Kerry
with some leeway in pursuing these investigations.

Some of the Democratic Senators were giving him some assistance. Sen. Robert
Byrd was giving Kerry some advice, and providing him some of his staff
experts who moved over to join Kerry's staff during the time, people like
Dick McCall. I think that some of those efforts may have limited Kerry from
going much further in his investigations. I think there was a certain amount
of, "You've done some good work here, but don't go too far." So I think he
was reined in by having these these grey beards in the Senate being there at
his side. But Kerry was the driving force, these other folks may have given
him some assistance here and there, but he was the one who pushed it.

He didn't make a big deal out of it.

Maybe it was because Kerry was new to Washington and didn't realize that his
career wouldn't advance as long as he pursued investigations like these. The
sad thing is that since his reports weren't taken seriously in the 1980s
when he released them, he essentially never brought it up after.

It was one of those things that a politician should be proud of. It was hard
work, it was dangerous politically  he got a lot of heat for it  and Kerry
followed up on his work. He probably pulled a few punches in what his
reports said, but basically he saw it all through. All Kerry got was
ridicule. That's what the smug Washington media gave him for his work, and
Kerry didn't push it back in their faces.

What you've said here in this interview is something that the public does
not really know about John Kerry.

Yeah, I think it's a sad little chapter. But in a way I think that's who
Kerry is  or at least part of who he is. Kerry has always had this duality
where he wants to be the accepted insider, but he also wants to be the rebel
outsider. He has this "I want to do what I think is right" attitude, but he
also has this more cautious side. You know, "my political career will be
toast if I go this way."

 You can certainly see that in his career: Kerry will charge out and do this
heroic stuff that stands for a lot of the best principles about what our
government is supposed to be about, then he'll get whacked around the neck
and head for a while, and he will be told by the grey beards to be more
cautious if he still wants to have a career. But I think everybody deep down
is that way. Journalists are that way, everybody who has a job is that way.

It's sad that shortly after he did these investigations, in his election
campaigns, he never brought up the Contra drug stuff, at least that I ever
heard of. He mentioned the Noriega stuff a little, I think, and he might
have mentioned his work on BCCI. But Kerry put aside and didn't talk about
the Contra drug story, which is probably the most heroic of them all,
because it went head on into this hypocrisy of the Reagan/Bush
administration, which was waging a "war on drugs" while it was doing this
Contra war that implicated the U.S. government in this drug trafficking, and
caused them to look the other way.