THE PHONY WAR

An Interview with DEA Veteran Celerino Castillo

The following is an interview with Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) veteran agent Celerino Castillo, first published in *The New

Federalist*, October 24, 1994.

Before beginning, by way of a preface, let me state a few things.

Officer Jack McLamb (retired) of the Phoenix Police Department,

in a speech given to his fellow police officers, had this to say:

...there's been much research, *much* research, and much documentation to the fact -- and I say *fact*, fellow police

officers (We've got some female police officers here too. Thank you for coming.), -- but I'm telling you, I want you to hear this, I'm talking about *fact* that we can prove, we've got the evidence -- an evidentiary foundation that would stack as high as *I* am, the evidence, I've seen it -- that the U.S. government, certain factions of the U.S. government, have been involved in importing the majority of drugs in the United States since the '60s. Since 1960.... We have, folks, in the United States, a phony war on drugs.

Then there's former DEA agent Mike Levine, author of *Deep Cover* and *The Big White Lie*,

speaking at Northern Illinois University in 1991:

The drug war's a sham. I threw my life to the winds believing in the war against drugs. If I died, I believed I was dying for a just cause.... I realized the reality of what I was doing never quite matched what the public was seeing. DEA was designed to put itself out of business but that doesn't happen. The opposite happens. It's always, "We need more." ...It's all a show... The drug war is the laughing stock of South America. My guess is that there is a moment of truth that comes to our soldiers in the "War Against

Drugs"; a moment when they realize it's all a crock. It seems that most choose to lay low and

hang onto their jobs when that moment of decision arrives. A few, though, have got something

that you could call "honor". When their moment of truth arrives, they are unable to rationalize

themselves into a "go along to get along" lifestyle.

But this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper. A thousand little compromises, a thousand little rationalizations, and we have got a

world of trouble. Thank God that not all of our soldiers in this "War Against Drugs" have turned

out to have the souls of petty bourgeois shopkeepers. Thank God there have been some great

souls among them.

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[September 27, 1994]

WEBSTER TARPLEY:

I'd like to go immediately to the very interesting book that you've put together [*Powderburns:

Cocaine, Contras & the Drug War*]. On page 132 of that book, you describe a kind of cameo

appearance by Vice President George Bush. I believe this was in Guatemala City in January of 1986, and that would have been shortly after the inauguration of the new Guatemalan President

Cerezo. I'd just like to acquaint our viewers with that conversation, the events that led up to it,

that followed it, and revolved around it, because this seems to sum up the heart of the matter.

CELERINO CASTILLO:

Basically, what happened there, was that at that time, Jan. 14, 1986, to be exact, George Bush

was in Guatemala City. At the same time that George Bush was there, I also saw Calero, head

of the Contras, and Oliver North. And I met George Bush at the cocktail party at the

ambassador's residence, and basically, what he was doing, was walking around, shaking hands with everybody. And he came up to me, and asked me what my job description was as DEA

agent. And I told him that I conducted international narcotics investigations on traffickers down in Central America. I also advised him that I was the agent in charge of reporting for El

Salvador, and I forewarned him that there were some funny things going on at Ilopango Airport,

with the Contras. He shook my hand, he smiled, and he just walked away from me, without saying another word. From that moment, I knew he knew something about the Contras.

TARPLEY:

That's what you write: "He simply smiled and walked away, seeking another hand to shake.

After that exchange, I knew that he knew."

CASTILLO:

That's correct.

TARPLEY:

What did George Bush know, and when did he know it?

CASTILLO:

Before my arrival in Guatemala, we had received intelligence that the Contras were heavily

involved in narcotics trafficking. Basically, I was forewarned by the country attache' in Guatemala,

Bob Stia, upon my arrival, that there was a covert operation being conducted by the White

House, and run by Oliver North at Ilopango in El Salvador.

TARPLEY:

So this was your official superior in the DEA?

CASTILLO:

That's correct.

TARPLEY:

And the first thing he did when you arrived in the country was to tell you: Look, this is now the scene of a covert operation with Oliver North, and they're running drugs. [CN -- See, kiddies?

Run drugs, and you too can grow up to be a U.S. Senator.]

CASTILLO:

That's correct, and since we had obtained intelligence already about the Contras being heavily

involved in narcotics trafficking, he advised me to stay away from it and not to get involved in the investigation, because that would mean that if I started reporting that information to

Washington, I would be kicked out of El Salvador and Guatemala very quickly.

Photo: Ilopango

-+- The Ilopango Connection -+-

TARPLEY:

Now, when you say the "Contras," does that mean *all* the Contras? Were there groups that were more into it, that were less into it? Was there Calero, were there others in that group? Was

it a universal thing, that all the Contras were into drugs?

CASTILLO:

It was a universal thing. The DEA refused to accept that answer, but we had intelligence

gathered from all parts of Central and South America in regard to the narcotics trafficking going

on. We had cables from the country attache', Bobby Nieves in Costa Rica, advising us to look

into Hangars 4 and 5 at Ilopango. And of course, Hangars 4 and 5 were bought and paid for by the U.S. government -- the CIA and the National Security Council.

TARPLEY:

Ilopango Airport: What is that? Is that a large commercial airport?

CASTILLO:

No. Ilopango Airport is the military airport with civilian small planes that arrive at Ilopango. And

it's a military base, but most international pilots who fly small planes get to arrive at Ilopango.

TARPLEY:

Tell us what the atmosphere was at Ilopango in the middle of this Contra dirty war, 1985, '86, '87.

CASTILLO:

We had major narcotics trafficking going through Ilopango from Costa Rica, which is further

south. We had obtained a lot of intelligence. We had an informant placed at Ilopango who actually did the flight plans for the Contra pilots, and everybody spoke freely about the loads

that they carried, the monies that they took to the Bahamas and to Panama for laundering.

All this was reported to the U.S. Embassy, to the CIA, to Washington, DEA headquarters; and

nobody wanted to do anything about it.

TARPLEY:

Tell me just briefly: what kinds of planes were these, where were they coming from, where were

they going?

CASTILLO:

The cable that we received from Costa Rica in April of 1986 came in from the country attache',

Bobby Nieves, like I stated before, and was for us to check Hangars 4 and 5, that they had very

reliable information pertaining to the trafficking from around Central and South America into

those two hangars.

It turned out that of those two hangars, one was run by the CIA, and the other one was run by Felix Rodriguez,

[CN -- This man, Felix Rodriguez, also shows up in connection with activities surrounding

Terry Reed and the Mena Airport operation. Rodriguez is also reportedly the man who killed

Che Guevara.]

who ran the Contra operation at Ilopango.

TARPLEY:

These, then, were not jets that you would see at an American airfield, but these were smaller

planes?

CASTILLO:

Yes, smaller planes, like Caravans, Pipers, Cessnas. They were coming in without being

inspected by the Customs officials, or anybody else.

As it turned out, the informant who did the flight plans actually gave us copies of all the flight

plans of all these Contra pilots, and when we ran checks on the names of all these pilots,

they were all documented in DEA files as narco-traffickers. Yet they were being hired by the

CIA, Felix Rodriguez, and everybody else, who were trying to obtain U.S. visas for them to go to

the U.S. -- even though they were documented traffickers.

TARPLEY:

So, these planes would then fly north. Could they make it all the way to Miami?

CASTILLO:

They would go to Miami, they would go to Texas. They were going to California; anywhere that

they were able.

For example, a Contra pilot was arrested in late '85 in south Texas with five-and-a-half million dollars cash. It was Contra money. You know, you carry credentials from the President of El

Salvador, from the Chief of Staffs in El Salvador, the Chief of the Air Force and so forth; they

were all very well protected, and every single pilot talked about how they had permission to

run narcotics, because they were working for the Oliver North Contra operation.

-+- The Rodriguez Dossier -+-

TARPLEY:

Now, you've mentioned Felix Rodriguez, Max Gomez. I happen to have read his autobiography,

and he's somebody who participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion back in the early 1960s, and it's

speculated that George Bush was involved in that.

[CN -- According to Brigadier General (retired) Russell S. Bowen (*The Immaculate

Deception*), "The truth is that Bush has been a top CIA agent since before the 1961 invasion

of Cuba, working with Felix Rodriguez and other anti-Castro Cubans."]

Certainly, Felix Rodriguez has been with George Bush for a very, very long time, and what you

can see in that book is, he's got a signed photograph from George Bush telling him what a great

patriot he is.

Would you agree with that judgement on Felix Rodriguez/Max Gomez?

CASTILLO:

No, sir. If you go back to the Vietnam War, we have intelligence where the CIA and those

individuals were heavily involved in trafficking heroin into the U.S. in bodybags and so forth.

So, Felix Rodriguez was documented, in our DEA files, as a trafficker. He was a retired CIA agent, and they brought all these people who were heavily involved. If you go back, most of

these Bay of Pigs operatives were all documented traffickers, who all served time for narcotics

trafficking, for gun-running. They were all criminals; yet, they were being hired by the Oliver

North Contra operation to run the illegal narcotics trafficking out of Ilopango [Airport].

TARPLEY:

Now, Felix Rodriguez has a DEA file.

CASTILLO:

That's correct, sir. I myself documented him involved in trafficking with the Contras, and so forth.

TARPLEY:

Does Oliver North have a DEA file?

CASTILLO:

That's correct, sir. As a matter of fact, there's a 1991 file on Oliver North for smuggling weapons

from the U.S. into the Philippines with known narcotics traffickers, and I'm talking

about a 1991 case. I'm not going back to the Contra issue.

TARPLEY:

This is *after* the television appearance, after the great 1987 celebrity parade?

CASTILLO:

That's correct, sir. Absolutely.

TARPLEY:

Can you make a Freedom of Information Act request, to get hold of Oliver North's DEA file?

CASTILLO:

I tried that already, and they cited the privacy act. I asked for my own files, that I wrote on the

Contras and different individuals, and these requests were denied.

TARPLEY:

So, I can imagine that there would be a lot of voters around Virginia and elsewhere who would like to have a look at Oliver North's DEA file again, with an incident from 1991?

CASTILLO:

That's correct. One of the questions I've always been asked is, Why can't the White House get

that?

Somebody else has to answer that. I don't know. It's there. They just need to get that. That file is out of the Washington office here in Washington, D.C.

TARPLEY:

That certainly makes you think twice.

Now, did you ever see Felix Rodriguez running around Ilopango?

CASTILLO:

Yes, sir. I saw him running around Ilopango. I used to see him around the U.S. Embassy,

having lunch with the ambassador and others. Col. Steele from the U.S. Military Group [was]

down there. I saw him everywhere.

-+- Coverup -+-

TARPLEY:

And how about Oliver North? Did you ever see him there?

CASTILLO:

I saw Oliver North in Guatemala, not in Salvador.

TARPLEY:

And what were the circumstances where you saw Oliver North?

CASTILLO:

Well, that's when I met George Bush, on Jan. 14, 1986...

TARPLEY:

Could you just give us an idea of what kinds of people were telling you about these activities,

and what they were telling you?

CASTILLO:

Well, go back to Ilopango. We had an informant who had worked there, at Ilopango, for many

years. He had given reliable information to the Consulate General there, Robert Chavez, at the

U.S. Embassy, and some cocaine had been seized before. So, this guy was very reliable. He had been reporting all this activity on the Contras.

We had another informant who was also placed to work at Ilopango, Salvador, and Guatemala,

who was a documented informer going back to 1981, who gave us a lot of the intelligence that

we had on this Contra operation.

TARPLEY:

Let's now turn to what you did with the information that you got, and how you reported it. I

understand from your book that one of the first people you tried to tell about this was the U.S.

ambassador to Salvador, Edwin Corr.

CASTILLO:

That's correct. Once we obtained a lot of the intelligence and we started writing reports, we went

to the U.S. ambassador, we went to the CIA Chief of Station, Jack McCavett, in Salvador, and

Col. Steele, who was a U.S. Military Group commander.

There was an individual, an American, who lived in El Salvador, who was a civilian, and as it

turns out, he was working for the Oliver North Contra operation. And when we received all this

information, we reported it. I personally reported it to my boss, first of all, Bob Stia, who kept forewarning me about my reporting on the Contras because it was going to come back and

hurt us in Guatemala.

TARPLEY:

Did he suggest it was going to be bad for your career?

CASTILLO:

It was going to be bad for my career and his career, and he had a couple of years left to retire,

and not to make any waves. I told him that if I actually found any evidence, that I would continue

to report the allegations that the Contras were involved in trafficking.

I went to the U.S. ambassador, Edwin Corr. He told me right off that it was a White House

covert operation run by Col. Oliver North, and for me to stay away from it.

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.

-+- Assassination Threat -+-

TARPLEY:

And I understand that then the DEA actually investigated *you*, that is, they sent some people

to check up on what you were doing?

CASTILLO:

That's correct. The pressure was on, "the hammer dropped", as they say. They came down

gunning for me.

When Kiki Camarena got killed in 1985, the administrator for the DEA came out with a memo

stating that no DEA agent is to travel by himself in a foreign country; yet, that did not apply to me, because I was one of two agents to cover four countries in Latin America, which were

Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

TARPLEY:

Two agents for four countries? That was called the "war on drugs"?

CASTILLO:

That's correct. That was called the "war on drugs in Central America", and I was being forced to

travel by land, mind you, through guerrilla territory.

TARPLEY:

"By land" means in a car, on a country road, where guerrillas are operating?

CASTILLO:

That's correct. It's a three to four hour drive.

TARPLEY:

Did you have an armed escort?

CASTILLO:

No, sir, I drove by myself, and most of the time my only back-up was my informant, who

travelled with me. And of course, the DEA manual states that you cannot be with an informant

by yourself; yet, DEA refused to give out any back-up agents. That's what happened to Kiki

Camarena. Kiki had to work by himself. [CN -- Kiki Camarena was a DEA agent slain in the line of duty in Mexico in 1985.]

We had Victor Cortez meeting with an informant in a restaurant, he gets grabbed. Why?

Because there was nobody to back him up. And while our lives were being put on the line out

there, carelessly, by the DEA, the DEA refused to do anything about it.

TARPLEY:

So the resources are totally inadequate.

CASTILLO:

Totally inadequate, and unsafe.

TARPLEY:

Worse than that, though, it sounds like somebody was trying to get you bumped off, or would

have been glad to see you bumped off.

CASTILLO:

That was at the very end of my career, where there was an OPR investigator, Tony Ricevuto.

We have a Guatemalan colonel who puts a contract on me [i.e., offers to pay money in return for the murder of Castillo], who's going to assassinate me. We had tape recordings on him, on

how he's going to assassinate me in El Salvador and blame it on the guerrillas. And Tony

Ricevuto, a senior inspector, goes into Guatemala and speaks to the U.S. ambassador there,

requesting a U.S. visa for this colonel so that he can testify before the BCCI [Bank of Credit and Commerce International] investigation in Miami.

In other words, telling them that it's o.k. that he's going to assassinate me, but they want him to

testify in a trial in Miami! That's when I knew that I was going to get hurt sooner or later.

TARPLEY:

This would have fit into a kind of general liquidation of all sorts of people in 1986, 1987, 1988, who were very knowledgeable about different sides of Iran-Contra. You can think of Olof

Palme, you can think of people in Germany...

CASTILLO:

There were people being taken out [i.e., murdered].

TARPLEY:

Eyewitnesses were disappearing, they were dropping left and right in those years.

CASTILLO:

That's correct, and I was one of them who was going to be taken

out by the DEA, because they could not justify the fact that this individual was going to

assassinate me. There was a case out of Houston, Texas, that was conducting the

investigation; yet, my own people at DEA wanted to get him to the U.S. to testify. It

was more important to them that he testify before the BCCI investigation, than my security.

Mind you, while I was down in Central America, during my career with the DEA, *I* *kept* *a*

*daily* *journal* *of* *everything*. Case file numbers, individuals I talked to, people who called me to tell me to close the files, everything that the DEA had conducted illegally, condoning

murders that the DEA knew about, down in Central America, killings and assassinations of

Columbian traffickers; the massacre of them. I have passports to prove my allegations, and this

was done with the knowledge of the DEA.

TARPLEY:

To the bottom line: The net result of everything you sent in to DEA headquarters in Washington,

was what?

CASTILLO:

Was suppressed, I guess the word is... To this day, they continue to cover up the fact that there was a lot of intelligence involving the CIA, involving Oliver North's Contra operation.

I have pictures, I have photos, I have documents. I have everything that can justify what I'm

saying. It's just that people refuse to acknowledge the fact that this was going on.

There was a cover-up being conducted by the DEA on orders from the White House.

TARPLEY:

Now, if you had to formulate charges against Oliver North, what would you charge him with?

CASTILLO:

First of all, the violation of the Federal Narcotics Law, which states, in general, the fact that if

you have knowledge that narcotics trafficking is being conducted, and you don't do anything

about it, you can go to jail for that.

TARPLEY:

Now, Oliver North says he's "the most investigated man on the planet". He says, well, this is all

done to death. We've been over this terrain a million times. Nothing has ever been found.

Do you think that the investigations up to now have been adequate on precisely this key topic?

CASTILLO:

No, sir, not at all. To start off with, it was inadequate investigation. "The most investigated man

on the planet" -- they should have contacted the agents in Salvador, the people who actually

conducted the investigation on the Contras...

TARPLEY:

Have you found, I guess you've mentioned this now in the course of our talk, but corroboration:

have you found other people, other sources, who also can document what you saw?

CASTILLO:

I want to go back a little bit. In September of 1986, we had an individual who was an American, who was Oliver North's right-hand man down in El Salvador. He was a civilian. He worked out of

Ilopango Hangars 4 and 5. He was a documented narcotics trafficker, all the way from Panama.

We call him, in the book, "Brasher", and we hit his house. I built up a unit there, and they hit the house. At his residence, we found what was a Contra supply operation. We found U.S. military

munitions, heavy guns, cases of explosives, C4.

TARPLEY:

In a private home of a friend of Ollie North?

CASTILLO:

Yes, in a private home. Cases of grenades, sniper rifles, uniforms, military equipment; and it

was all U.S. military issue, brand new, some of it.

Before I hit his house, I went to the U.S. ambassador, who denied the fact that ["Brasher"]

worked for the U.S. embassy; I went to the U.S. Military Group commander, who denied that

["Brasher"] worked for them. I went to the CIA, who denied. All three of those people told me

that ["Brasher"] was working for the Oliver North Contra operation.

At the residence, all his vehicles had license plates for the U.S. embassy. We found radios belonging to the U.S. embassy. We found weapons belonging to the U.S. embassy. Yet, this

individual was a documented narcotics trafficker working for the Oliver North Contra operation.

-+- Planeloads of Cocaine -+-

TARPLEY:

If you had to go back and estimate, could you give some kind of a ballpark figure of how much

drugs, I guess in this case it means cocaine pretty much, how much cocaine, crack cocaine and other kinds of cocaine, came into the United States as a result of these operations?

CASTILLO:

We had thousands of kilos that came in. We had surveillance set up up there. We saw the

planes coming in. We had reports where they came in, they dropped it off at Hangars 4 and 5;

yet, we were not allowed to touch it.

TARPLEY:

Could you just estimate, if at all possible, what percentage that might have been of the total

drug-trafficking flow into the United States?

CASTILLO:

Maybe one percent -- and that's a lot. One percent is a lot.

Now, you're asking me about monies? Millions of dollars...

We have a guy who was an honorary ambassador to Panama, who flew four-and-a-half million

dollars from Ilopango into Panama. This was reported to the DEA Washington...

TARPLEY:

Later on, toward the end of his term in office, George Bush came along and pardoned quite a

number of the top figures in this, and I guess that had the effect of shutting down most of what

was left of the official investigation.

What do you think of George Bush pardoning these people?

CASTILLO:

George Bush was trying to save himself, and pardoning these people who were known

traffickers was a slap in the face to us, the DEA agents who were out there putting our lives on the line, going undercover in Third World countries.

TARPLEY:

And you've done undercover operations in Central America yourself.

CASTILLO:

That's correct. So the fact that we could have another branch of our government heavily

involved in narcotics trafficking was just devastating to me. And a lot of people go into the

government and spend twenty years and then retire; it didn't take me twenty years to figure out

that my own government was heavily involved in narcotics trafficking, and putting our lives on the line.

Just a couple of weeks ago, we lost five agents in Peru. We cannot work with Third World

countries that are heavily involved in narcotics trafficking.

We had documented reports on Third World countries. For example, Guatemala. Guatemala is heavily involved in narcotics trafficking. The Cerezo government was heavily involved, sleeping

with the cartels. Yet, it was a democracy, and the U.S. government did not want to do anything

about it.

I went undercover on a Congressman down there. He was going to sell me 200 kilos of cocaine.

When they came down to arrest them, I was told by the U.S. embassy not to arrest him, because we were not there to embarrass the Guatemalan government, but we were there to

help it.

The same thing happened in El Salvador. All the weapons that were being seized by the

guerrillas were being sold to the cartels.

So, we spent $1.5 million *a* *day* in El Salvador for the past 10 years, and they couldn't win

the war.

TARPLEY:

Well, let's sum up now. We have a few minutes left. Do you think that Oliver North is qualified to be a United States Senator?

CASTILLO:

No. He is a convicted felon. He lied to Congress, he is a chronic liar. He lies to everybody. A lot

of people feel that he can be forgiven for what he did, but what I don't think they realize is

the fact that he cannot justify the narcotics trafficking that his organization conducted in the

1980s. And he cannot guarantee to me the fact that nobody, or none of those drugs that were

being smuggled into the U.S., that people died of, was not Contra cocaine. So, he's got to take

responsibility for what is happening on our streets today, the cocaine epidemic that we have.

We have more cocaine on the U.S. streets now than we did ten years ago; yet, we spend

billions of dollars in Third World countries trying to combat this trafficking.

But Oliver North should be in jail, and not be running for the U.S. Senate...

TARPLEY:

Would you think that the Virginia voters ought to have the right to see Oliver North's DEA file?

CASTILLO:

Absolutely. It's there. Whether the DEA wants to continue the conspiracy to cover it up is a different story...

TARPLEY:

You tried to tell your story inside the federal agencies for quite a number of years, we've seen,

with very limited results, and then you turned to your book, *Powderburns*.

What made you decide to get into writing books?

CASTILLO:

I was sick to my stomach when I saw Oliver North up there. Everybody looked up to him as a

hero, "Oliver North for President", and so forth.

I had to tell my story...

I can live with myself now. North has to hide. What conscience does he or his family have, that

they know that his organization is responsible for a lot of deaths in the U.S.? For the epidemic

cocaine addiction that we have? What does his family think about it?

TARPLEY:

Well, I understand you're going out on the stump in Virginia now, in the closing days of the election campaign?

CASTILLO:

Yes, that's correct. I've always made the assumption that I'm going to go out there and try. I'll

never quit. I'll go out there, tell them what I know. If people want to listen to me, I'm

there. If they don't, it's their prerogative. It's a free country. If they want to elect an official who is

a documented trafficker and a convicted felon, then that's their prerogative.

http://www.guerrillanews.com/crack/c_castillo.html

Cele Castillo Former DEA Agent Author: Powderburns

Please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your personal history.

My name is Celerino ‘Cele’ Castillo III and I'm a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent.

I was with the Agency for 12 years - most of my time was down in Central and South America

with some tours in New York City and the San Francisco area. I took an early retirement in 1992 because of the atrocities that I saw happening down in Central America. I teach now. I teach the

other side of law enforcement, as they say, and I also teach Latino studies in South Texas.

How did you first become involved with law enforcement, how did your work for the government

begin?

First of all, I come from a very patriotic family in South Texas. My father was shot six times in the Philippines and we lost an uncle to the war - WWII - and all of our families have been

involved. Me being the only son in my family, I was instructed by my father to pay my dues to

my country by going to Vietnam and fighting for my country, which I did. And, I come also from a

law enforcement family involving my father who used to be a police officer for some time and my sister who used to work for the police department and I also had worked for a police department

and as a federal agent for the U.S. government.

At what point did you encounter a certain type of corruption in the system and what did you do?

First of all, what I encountered when I went to work at the US government - I encountered

discrimination - there was a lot of discrimination. In the 1980’s, twenty years ago, when we, as

Latinos or minorities, went to work for the US government, we thought that everything was on the uppity up - and it wasn’t. I found out that every Agency in the federal government has filed

class action suits for discrimination against their own agencies. When I got hired by the Drug

Enforcement Administration, I was hoping that they would send me somewhere in South Texas,

somewhere where there was a Latino community of Mexican Americans and so forth. But they sent me to New York City where, at that time, the 1980s, there were no Mexicans in New York

City. I ended up being the first Mexican American in New York City and that's when I first started

to see what it was really like to work for the U.S. government.

But it backfired on the government because, as they say: if you can make it in New York, you

can make it anywhere. And in reality I got the best experience an undercover agent could have

gotten in New York City working Organized Crime, working all kinds of major major cases… and I did a tour of four years in New York City and I loved it. I got educated into what was known as

the ‘opera’ and the ‘theatre’, where if I would have been somewhere in the Southwest, there

was no way I would ever learn that. You know reading the New York Times down in Central

Park - it was just fabulous for me. I was in culture shock at the very beginning but then you wake up and you get off it and you just go with it… I loved it. I really loved New York City.

Describe your work in New York and what it involved – specifically.

My job was to conduct undercover operations. I ended up doing a lot of undercover work as a

South American connection with the Italian organized crime families - the Gambino family,

Lucese family and so forth. And me and my partner - my partner being an Italian American - we ended up doing the biggest heroin bust in New York City and that was in 1984 when we took

down hundreds of kilos of heroin and it was written up all over the world how heroin was still

very big in New York City. And because of that I was promoted to go down to South America

and actually conduct the search and destroy missions on cocaine labs in South America.

And so what did that consist of?

That consisted of flying air assault helicopters into clandestine air strips, destroying the

airplanes, the cocaine labs and… we had an operation called Operation Condor that seized a

cocaine lab valued at 500 million dollars, and a large seizure of cocaine. The airstrip was a mile

long, they had barracks, they had guard-houses and the lab was producing hundreds of kilos a day of 100% pure cocaine.

So when did you realize that there was corruption?

I found out when I was on patrol up there in Peru with the anti-narco-terrorist units in Tingo

Maria - the Huayaga Valley. We would find the Colombian drug traffickers playing soccer with

the Colombian and the Peruvian military. And that was my initial contact with the corruption and

we used to see those jets that would come in from Lima, Peru into the Huayaga Valley to pick up narco-dollars for their banks. So if you wanted dollars in Peru you would have to fly down to

the Huayaga Valley and pick up US dollars because that’s what the Colombians dealt with in the

processing of the cocaine in the source countries. And that was one of my first experiences of

how the US government was building what was known as cocaine democracies. They could build and sleep with the cartels as long as they stay to be a democracy.

So cocaine democracies are intimately tied to the war on drugs. Describe that relationship.

Well, first of all, there is no such thing as the War On Drugs, there never has been and there

never will be. I call it the ‘drug war follies’ because, for example, when I was sent to fight the war

on drugs in Guatemala City, we had two agents that covered four countries. I mean how can you have a war on drugs when you have two agents covering four countries - which were

Belize, Salvador, Hondurans and Guatemala. How can you do that? It’s impossible to do that.

And when we came face to face with the contradictions of my assignment - when we had these

governments, they were all documented in DEA files as drug traffickers. I'm talking about the President’s brother and so forth - all documented in the DEA files as drug traffickers. They were

sleeping with the cartels and it was OK for the U.S. government because it was a democracy

and not a Communist or Socialist government.

So, in fact, are the leaders of these countries - are they totally involved?

Absolutely, they are totally involved. And nothing moves without the Central Intelligence

Agency's approval. We saw it in Mexico when we had Carlos Salinas and all the Salinas

brothers who were heavily involved in drug trafficking with the U.S. government. You gotta remember that George Bush - the father - was an associate of Carlos Salinas in an oil company

called Zapato Oil. And they were both Yale graduates and they were friends after they left the

presidency. And we had Salinas where they seized 250 million dollars in a City Bank in New

York City - so we knew from the get-go that those governments were heavily, heavily involved in drug trafficking. Never in the history of our time did we have more cocaine on our streets.

Because the floodgates opened and those rivers were full of cocaine and they just segregated

the whole country - from L.A. to South Texas to Little Rock, Arkansas. It was just everywhere.

So do you see this as a strategic policy that emanates from Intelligence – of bringing drugs into

the country, making money from them for covert ops while at the same time, creating division

within the country they are trying to control? Or is it just a money thing…

To me it was money thing. You gotta go back to the history of the Central Intelligence Agency -

how they have been involved in drug trafficking. We gotta go back to the Vietnam era when they

were smuggling heroin in body bags back to the U.S. and using the U.S. soldiers that were back here as soldiers to distribute the heroin that was coming in. And you gotta remember that at that

time period, we had those same individuals who operate as the apparatus outside the Central

Intelligence Agency, that don’t have to report to anybody - that’s why there is no paper trail to

find.

We had like Felix Rodriguez - former CIA operative, Oliver North… we had John Secord. All of

those individuals who were in Vietnam working those covert operations were the same

individuals working in El Salvador at Ilopango Airport where they were running the Iran-Contra operations. There was a civil war going on in Nicaragua and basically what happened was we

were supporting the Contras – ‘contra’ means against - which means that we were supporting

the rebels in Nicaragua that were fighting against socialism in Nicaragua. The United States

government didn’t want to have Communism in the background so we needed to put a stop to it. So, we ended up supporting the Contras by letting them go ahead and sleep with the cartels

and get them involved in drug trafficking in the name of democracy.

And, of course, the United States government knew and didn’t care how they made money for covert operations. It’s a history that goes back to where you get involved with drug trafficking

and you use that money for covert operations and for lining their own pockets - which they did.

Iran Contra was a smokescreen - the diversion was not from the sales of the US government

selling missiles to Iran, but the diversion was actually from the Contras to Swiss bank accounts where they ended up finding millions of dollars in the name of Oliver North and General Secord

and Project Democracy - a company they had opened up to launder all that money.

So it seems like everyone who is above a certain level is compromised. Once they're into it, they

are compromised and they can't get out of it. Is that then case?

Absolutely. It goes to the highest level. I'm talking about the National Security Agency, the National Security Council, we had Oliver North who was heavily involved and in his own diaries

he had documented the drug trafficking stuff that was occurring. January 14, 1986, when I was

in Guatemala City, I had a chance to talk to then Vice President George Bush and he came up

to me and he asked me what my job description was and I told him I was conducting international drug trafficking investigations. And I also told him that I was the agent who actually

was investigating the Contras in El Salvador and he just smiled at me shook my hand and

walked away. So I knew then and there that he knew that the Contras were heavily involved in

drug trafficking. Number two, that same afternoon, he went up there and met with Oliver North, Collero (who was head of the Contras) and a whole bunch of military officials on the third floor of

the US embassy to discuss the Contra operation.

See, if we go back, every drug trafficker that was signed for the Contras were all documented in

DEA files and yet they were getting US Visas to fly to the US by the Central Intelligence Agency.

So the corruption went right to the top.

All the way to the very top. There is no doubt in my mind that the President of the United States

knew. You gotta remember we had the best Intelligence network in the world, which was the

Central Intelligence Agency. We knew who was doing what when and where and why.

Let's talk about your book Powderburns.

Powderburns was co-authored by another individual and myself who was an excellent reporter -

I was the guy who actually saw what happened. So we put our things together. One of the

reasons that we were able to put Powderburns together was because I kept journals. One of the

things, if you want to learn, in life is you always document everything. People used to make fun of me - saying you know, ‘you keep diaries.’ Well, you can call them diaries, I call them journals.

And at the end of the day I would go home and I would sit down and write just about everything

that happened that day. And believe it or not, I did that for my whole experience with the Drug

Enforcement Administration, which is twelve years - and I have a stack of journals and those stacks of journals is what saved my life because I was able to document every allegation. Every

allegation that I make in my book Powderburns can be verified by documentation or by pictures.

I also took over 2,000 pictures while I was down in Central and South America.

So Powderburns was written in 1994, that, ironically, was an election year in which where Oliver

North ran for U.S. Senate. He was one of two Republicans who lost the elections. Mind you he

had 45 million dollars to run for President and yet the American people were not fooled by that

and they voted against him and he lost. So Powderburns was just the tip of the iceberg. And it was sabotaged.

The book?

There were close to 500 pages written and actually 200 and some odd pages were actually

printed because I feel that it was sabotaged. The introduction and the forward on the book was

sabotage where they claimed that the CD-ROM on it went haywire on them and they printed 16,000 before they got to it and the pictures were perfectly clear and they ended up being very

dark - the pictures. So from the get-go, there's no doubt in my mind that that book was

sabotaged. And, it was never marketed properly. It was printed in New York City from a

company out of Canada and it was never distributed anywhere. So I kept the books and I ended up buying whatever was left of the books so that I could sell my books to people that are

interested in this issue.

How do you distribute them?

I got them all in storage now and what I do - when I go on a lecture tour, I try to sell them. I have

Mike Ruppert, a friend of mine, who tries to sell them for me. He gets half of whatever he sells

and I keep the other half….

Do you think people are aware of what's happening in Colombia right now?

Well the question about the people caring about Colombia is an issue that has not hit home yet.

And the people don’t realize and they don’t really care that much but they’re starting to care. I

feel the reason why people are caring about what is going on in Colombia is that now we have

one out of four of every family who's actually involved - whether they're selling drugs or using drugs - and it's destroying the family. So now they want to get involved and now they want to

write the Congressmen and now they want to do something about it.

But are they aware of the political reasons for the U.S. intervention in Colombia and the relationship between the US military and Intelligence and drug traffickers?

Well, what’s happening is that the American Government is saying it’s safe to go into Colombia when, in reality, Colombia is the Spanish word for Vietnam. And it’s exactly what's going to

happen. I saw it in Vietnam, I saw it in Central America, I saw it in Mexico. It's an apparatus

outside the CIA that’s going to go in there and of all the same atrocities will be committed where

there's no paper trail to be followed and its all gonna blow up in their face. And it’s got to stop.

Kind of reminds you of Hamburger Hill in Vietnam, where we had to take that hill. It took us days

to take that hill and then once we took it, after we lost hundreds of soldiers, we took it and then

we gave it back the following week. It didn’t make sense but that’s exactly what's going to happen in Colombia. They're gonna use all that military not against drug traffickers or anything

else - they're gonna use it against the guerrillas, the subversives down there, which they did in

Mexico with those helicopters that Clinton shipped down to Mexico. They were supposed to be

used on the War On Drugs. In reality they started using them against the Zapatistas in Chiapas. Salvador, the same thing. There's no such thing as the War On Drugs. There never has been

because we don’t even make a dent. We have more drugs today than we ever did thirty years

ago. Or twenty years ago.

So it’s more like the War For Drugs.

The War For Drugs - exactly. Because if you have - and none of this thing about legalizing

marijuana - that will never happen. Not because of the moral issue but because there's too much money to be made on it. Look at the money that’s been laundered - some of it - a very

small percentage being seized OK? It’s being seized in the US - very small numbers. We got

more banks in South Texas than we do 7-11s or Circle Ks, whatever you call it. There’s just so

much money to be made on this.

So if people were to question the government about what they are doing in Colombia, what

would the government say they are really doing?

We’ll they say that they're fighting the so-called War on Drugs because the numbers are there.

Our elementary schools are infested with cocaine. They're starting to use heroin now. It used to

be the middle class people, or the lower income people that were doing coke and now we got like in Plano, Texas, where the rich kids are, they are using heroin and we got a lot of people

doing heroin. We got so many drugs and they're using those numbers to justify the War On

Drugs when in reality they’re going down there and getting involved in drug trafficking. Let the

people - they're blaming the guerrillas for being involved in drug trafficking when all these years

we’ve known that the government has been involved in drug trafficking. It's very well

documented, very well established that those governments or these third world countries down there are known as cocaine democracies.

Talk about Clinton and how he fits into the equation.

Well Clinton, as far as I'm concerned, was involved with the Mena operation when the CIA was

involved in training the Contras in Mena, Arkansas. And there was the allegation of cocaine

coming in to Mena, Arkansas and so forth. Now this is my understanding… the fact is that it's not a two Party thing - remember, the Republicans were accused during the Iran-Contra thing of

being involved in drug trafficking and so forth. They had investigations. The House Select

Committee on Intelligence did an investigation on the CIA and so forth.

You’ve got to remember he was Governor of Arkansas when this whole Contra operation with

the CIA started so he was part of the problem to the extent that he didn’t want to admit to the

fact that Mena, Arkansas was being used by the CIA to train the Contras.

When you first discovered the CIA drug operation at Ilopango you were warned to leave it alone.

Describe the climate of fear you endured as a DEA agent knowing that if you did your job, you

would face some form of retaliation.

Well, when I started - one of the things as you grow up - as you grow up in the world… you

know, your parents taught you what was right and wrong. And my father always said: ‘you're

gonna come to that Y in the road. You can go to the right - the right means doing the right thing. You go to the left, and it means you ain't gonna make any waves. You go with the flow, and you

do what you gotta do. But there are consequences you will pay if you go to the right and tell the

truth. And what happened to me was when I started to see all of this, I started documenting and

writing reports and I was forewarned by my supervisor that if I kept it up, I was going to get kicked out of the country and sent back because I was making waves against the country.

When I approached the Ambassador in El Salvador and I told him, "Look, the Contras here at

Ilopango Airport - your airport - they're flying in drugs." He says, "Cele, my hands are tied. It’s a covert operation being run by the White House - there's nothing I can do about it." So I said,

"Well I'm going to go ahead and report this to Washington." And he said: "Cele - do what you

gotta do, let the chips fall where they may."

And, in reality, I felt that he just wanted to put a stop to it and he was gonna use me to do that

and that’s exactly what happened. Then again they came after me. You're right, you start

stepping on people's toes and they're gonna come after you and what they did is they came

after me with little claims: that I was too close to an informant; I was using an M16 that I was unqualified to use. I'm a Vietnam veteran - how could I not be qualified to use an M16? Little

things like that…

So then, the reason I left the Agency in 1992, was the fact that I went in an undercover

operation and they tried to set me up. It was an operation where some Mexican cartel

individuals were going to sell me some heroin and cocaine - large quantities. I went up there, I

was wired, it was an undercover operation. Then I gave the buzz signal for them to come take me out and I said the word: ‘excellente’. And if I said the word ‘excellente’, it means: ‘he's got

the dope come arrest him’. So I said ‘excellente’ and nobody came.

And I could see the agent sitting around and just looking at me. And I thought: ‘Well, if I pop the

trunk, you know, that’s a visual signal in case my wire went down that they’ve got the dope and

for them to be arrested. So I popped the trunk and nobody came. I kind of felt like Frank Serpico when he goes through the door - his face is caught in the door and his partner is not there and

there's nobody there to help him. In other words, he was being set up to get killed and have it

blamed on the bad guys and that’s how I felt. I didn’t have the money to buy the dope and they

knew it. They had guns with them and they were gonna kill me. I was being set up to be assassinated so they could blame it on the bad guys and that’s the day that I decided to quit the

Agency. I went into the office, put everything in a cardboard box and I left the Agency.

And once I left the Agency, what I did was my last duty for my government - I thought - was that

I secretly met with Lawrence Walsh and his people from the Iran Contra investigation to advise

him of what I had had and to show them what I had of the government's involvement in drug

trafficking and I gave that to them. Needless to say, when I left the Agency, the first thing that the government did was they sent the IRS after me. And by that time I was going through a

divorce, I lost my family and I was paying bills and they took all the savings I had on CDs and so

forth and they took a penalty on it and up to this day, I owe the government 15,000 dollars. And

that’s one of the tools that they use to come after you. And then, of course, they start conducting some kind of investigation.

The problem they had with me is the fact that I kept pictures. Pictures don’t lie. I kept

documentation. Documentation doesn’t lie when it’s signed by my supervisor. And I got my journals. The only thing - and I feel - I strongly believe that because I am telling the truth and I'm

here educating the students of this country then I will not be around for long because they

cannot let this happen. Because students are always taught that we live in the best country in

the world, when in reality we don’t. In reality that’s not what's happening. I have a son who I would never ever let him go into the military or work for the U.S. government because that’s just

like selling him into the same thing that I was doing. And I've taught my son what's right and

what's wrong. I taught my daughter what's right and what's wrong. Because they ask me, "Dad

how do you feel? How do you feel that all of your life you wanted to be a drug agent and all of a sudden you're not? How do you feel about your government and how does your government

feel about you?" You know, and I say - you know it's the same thing. Now I have the burden of

my dreams that I always wanted to retire as a drug agent and in reality, I became controversial

instead of fighting for what I believe in - I mean being what I wanted to do. And it was a sacrifice. I gave up my dream to get involved in the movement - to be an activist - to fight for

other people's battles that won't fight for themselves.

But don’t you think that you are actually pursuing your dream?

Exactly but not a day goes by - not one day or one night goes by that I don’t dream about what I

used to do for a living. This was my job. I loved it. But that’s why when I speak out and I talk to

people, I talk from the heart. Because what I'm doing now it's much stronger than what I was dreaming of doing because now I am actually saving people. If I can save students from the

drug problem that they are having and if I can save then from doing things or believing in things

that they don’t really know anything about. Like when I teach criminal justice, I teach them about

corruption - I teach them about police corruption, which is called a tarnished badge. I tell them about the suicide rate in law enforcement. You know the corruption, the stress, the post-

traumatic stress that they go through. The high rate of divorce for law enforcement. If I would

have known all that before I went into law enforcement, there was no way I would have gone

into law enforcement. Not to say that everybody - we got good police officers in there. So you

know it’s a good thing. It's just up to you - for me, I got a bitter taste from it all.

What can we do?

Well the first thing you can do is to educate yourselves. Education is powerful, man. And I've always said that in any aspect of life, you have to read and educate yourself. A lot of people

say, ‘believe what you read’ and so forth. But you have to question what you read. When you

listen to people that were actually there - they have nothing to win by going up there and putting

their lives on the line because of what they believe in. A lot of students are scared. They don’t want to know the truth. They are in denial. Why? Because they live in their own little world - it's

very comfortable and they don’t want to make any waves, they have an agenda. I have a lot of

friends that are still with the Agency that I get calls from - from the DEA, telling me that I am

doing a good job and so forth - but they will not come forth and do anything because they have a mortgage to pay, they have a career to save and they gotta save money to send their kids to

school.

So basically, that’s what it is - you got two different kinds of individuals: people that will actually fight for the rights of the people and the other ones that just sit back and let it ride.

So what is the character of a government that is involved in this kind of drug exchange and at the same time has systematically imprisoned an entire generation of young black and Latino

men?

Well first of all, you know, as a patriotic Latino family where I came from, you know, my father taught me that American people are decent people – they’ve got integrity. It’s a good

government, the best government in the world. And when I went up there and worked for the

government I realized that it wasn’t true. And it's not that those third world countries are bad -

it's that the U.S. government has destroyed those countries. They have let them sleep with the cartels in the name of democracy and in reality that’s what really hurts. I went out there and I

saw, for example, the civil wars in San Salvador and Guatemala. It was their own people killing

their own people. The same indigenous people in the Guatemalan military were killing their own

race - their own culture - and this was how the U.S. government was working in doing all that stuff.

And to me, I felt that we are the worst human rights violators in the face of the world because

we were down there training the death squads. I thought, ‘this cannot be - not the United States government!’ We've always been taught that we are the best country in the world and there was

no way … and it dawned on me that we were not. They were not letting us win that War On

Drugs down there or help anybody because that’s business as usual for the US government in

those third world countries. And I was devastated because I was, first of all, trying to justify what they were doing. I said, ‘there's got to be a catch to this - there is something here that’s not

right. Maybe it’s a real deep cover operation. I don’t know what it is or maybe there is just

something else to it.’ And in reality - no! It was just that they were lining their own pockets. They

were making money for their covert operations and I came to learn that this is the history of the United States government working in those third world countries.

So as more developing countries become savvy to what's going on and become self-aware and

start looking at their populations and realizing that they’ve in fact shrunk their own populations with wars that were manufactured by the United States to facilitate the flow of drugs into the US

so that they could control those markets, aren't those countries going to wise up and eventually

band together - what fate does the U.S. face?

The leaders of these countries - they all have their own agendas and it's always about money.

Every third world country’s President that helped the U.S. government is now retired in the U.S..

They are up here sending their kids to Ivy League schools and so forth. They're all working. Nobody cares about their governments. They leave office and they're gone.

We saw with Carlos Salina, the President of Mexico - he's gone, he left. We saw with Alan

Garcia in Peru - he left. They all leave and they really don't care because corruption is the number one thing in those Latin world countries. It always has been and always will be. I

remember a colonel I was telling, "why are you taking the money from the traffickers?" He said,

"Cele how can you as an American come down here and tell me not to be corrupt when this is

all we have learned all our lives? Either we do it or we don’t do it. We want to be the right people - nice people and be the clean people but it's never gonna happen because they're never gonna

let us do it! The American government is not going to let us do it and our own people in our

government are not going to let us do it. Corruption is the way of life in this world. The rich get

richer and the poor get poorer. There's no middle class in Latin America. So that’s exactly what it is."

You know there was a story about - will we come out of this OK? Will we survive? I don’t think

we'll survive - I think we're too late for this. Unless we educate our students and let them know what our government is really all about. Unless we go back to the history books and find that the

history books lied to us about just about everything that the government did. And, in reality, the

government is still lying to the American people. They are not coming forward with their

investigations. Iran Contra missed a lot of details - why? Because the Special Counsel had an agreement with the government not to pursue the drug issue. OK? And the House Select

Committee on Intelligence that just now finished their report - they are saying that they did a

thorough investigation. Well, how could they have done a thorough investigation when they

don’t even investigate the agents who were down there conducting these investigations? The documentation is there - all you gotta do is look for it.

Now, of course the government will abuse it by using the National Security Act so that you won't

have access to the files. Or they sign the Privacy Act Law, which says you're not accessed to it because of National Security. They abuse that National Security Act by not giving you those

documentations.

So is there something we can do to change that?

Yes there's something we can do - it's called the Open Records Act. If Congress can pass this,

what we'll have is an act of Congress and the Senate that enables us to have access to those reports that are filed by the government. That’s the only way you're going to be able to make

people accountable for their actions. Then we can see it in black and white that we know who is

behind the massive cover-ups and so forth, and they will be punished for that. We don’t want it

to take 30 years to find out who killed JFK or who was involved in all kinds of assassinations. Look at the history on the Central Intelligence Agency. Just last week there was an allegation

that the CIA was instrumental in the murder of a diplomat here in the US - a Chilean diplomat

and so forth. The Central Intelligence Agency has been very much involved in atrocities… the

patchwork they did down in Central America, you know, dealing with drug traffickers, assassins, murder - it's just business as usual for the government - the U.S. government.

Who benefits from this system of control like this?

Well, it’s the U.S. government that benefits. First of all, corporate America, Wall Street. All the

money that comes in from the drug trade goes through Wall Street. And, like I said before - we

got more banks in South Texas than we do 7-11’s. And we got people from Mexico coming in

and depositing $9,999.99 (because if you go with $10,000, you gotta report it to the IRS). And we got hundreds of people coming in with money - laundering money.

Talk about the Prison Industrial Complex.

Well the theory is this: they are building more prisoners instead of more universities or more

schools now and what it is is a control of the minority groups. For example, we’ve got a couple

of million people - African Americans - that are in prison that are not able to vote anymore. So

we have large minorities - the Latinos for example are the biggest minority going up in this country - there's several million. Well a couple million are not going to be able to vote because

they are on parole. And no matter what it is, you know, they're putting the minorities away - we

had the federal laws on mandatory minimums for coke and crack… the differences between the

sentences for crack and coke are totally imbalanced. Who uses crack? Well minorities do. Who uses coke? Well, middle class and upper class people. And what happens is you have people

who are in there doing 25 years for a couple of hundred dollars of crack.

Do you think this is an intentional, systemic agenda? That the government is in some way

controlling the drug flow and, at the same time, enacting very tough legislation that directly

targets minorities and the poor? Is it racist?

I think it is. It is obvious that it was established that way. I think that it’s a racist development

within the crack and the cocaine laws especially. Because if you look at the numbers that the

government gives us - we got more Blacks and Latinos in jail for drug offenses that anybody

else and their sentences are way higher compared to cocaine; and that was developed to put them away because the government knew that the minorities were coming up into this country.

So by imprisoning young Black and Latinos, they are preventing them from being able to vote.

Exactly and it destroys the family values. I've always said to students: ‘you know when your

father or your mother gets involved in drugs - when he goes to jail or when she goes to jail, it

doesn’t only destroy him - it destroys the brother, the sister, the siblings - everybody.’ And it

goes down the tubes and it's the family that is destroyed.

And the problem is, there's so much money to be made. We have teachers, we have lawyers,

we have doctors that are involved in drugs now. Why? Because this generation that’s coming up, we've always talked to them about materialistic things - money - what's in it for me? Nobody

wants to do anything unless there's money involved. And that’s what we teach them - money,

money, money. Without money you ain't gonna have anything. Forget your morals, forget your

values, forget everything else. If you don’t have money, you are not going to go anywhere. I see it in school. You know, I have a guy - a football player who has a bankroll of money in his

pocket. We have another guy who works at Burger King after school and then has another job

and goes home and says it's not fair that I have to work after school, then do my homework

while this guy has money, drives the best cars, and has all the girls around. Who's the winner and who's the loser, here?

So how do we make it so that something else becomes attractive other than money? What are

some of the values that we can endorse and how can we ingrain within the system a sense of

respect and heroism around people like you?

One of the things is education. I keep going back to education because you gotta teach them.

Show them the picture before it happens. Show them what's gonna happen if this happens. Not after it happens, you know? Let them know, ‘well, you should have done this…’ Let them know

what it is that they're gonna be going through. They have no concept of what is gonna happen.

That’s the education part but you know, going back to being patriotic… I am a Vietnam veteran.

I go to parades on Veteran's Day and I go out and I lecture to kids and everybody's wearing the American flag. They’re waving these little American flags around, and right after the

presentations, when the students are gone, all you see on the ground are small little American

flags. Because they have no concept of what being a patriot is. And needless to say, you need

to have a war to find out what patriotism is and if you don't have one, you're not going to know.

Because you can't feel it.

You can't feel the pain when you’ve lost a brother or a sister in a war… and what that person was doing out there - fighting for your wars, for your causes, and he paid the ultimate price by

giving his life to what? Whether he believed in it, or did not believe in it, he went ahead and paid

the ultimate price.

There's an individual here named Peter Dale Scott who wrote a book called The War

Conspiracy, where he talks about the fact that war is in fact manufactured. Most people think

that war emerges from passion - from different factions fighting against each other because they disagree over a moral principle or something else. Is that the case? Are wars manufactured?

Wars are manufactured. And the reason I know that for a fact is because I was in that civil war

in El Salvador - where we spent 1.5 million dollars a day. We could have won that war in the second year. But it went on for ten years - why? Because we had vendors - for example,

vendors that were involved in night vision equipment that they were selling to the guerrillas.

They were making money - night vision equipment companies. Helicopters - Bell Company was

making money. And the U.S. military was using the war for its own purposes.

See, we had a company of ranger units that came in there to find out if they had what it takes to

be a good soldier. To have a good soldier, you have to have a good war. If you don’t have a

war, you don’t have any good soldiers because you don’t know what it is. So the US government had to send them in there covertly to get involved in fire fights to find out how they

would be able to survive. And that’s why they were manufacturing this civil war in El Salvador,

where it could have been won easily. But we let it - I remember a no-good commander came up

to me and told me, "This is how we find out. This is what we need. If we don’t have this, then we don’t know what kind of soldiers we got. This is what we do - we come out here and we buy

these third world countries."

I had a CIA operative that came up to me and said, "Cele, what are you doing reporting this to Washington about the drug trafficking with the Contras and so forth? These are our countries -

we buy 'em - we elect the Presidents - we do all this because this is known as our training

grounds. This is what we use to find out if we have, or if the soldier has the guts to go out there

and torture people and kill people. That’s the only way we're gonna find out, so we need these civil wars."

Is there something that you'd like to say to the CIA?

You know, what I would have to say to the Central Intelligence Agency is exactly what I told

Randy Capister, this CIA agent that was down there in Central America training the death

squads, getting involved in drug trafficking and all this. I said, "Randy, one day, all this is gonna

come back and bite you in the ass." He says, "Cele, this is what we've been doing all of our lives. Nobody's going to do anything to us because we are who we are." But as we now know,

there are talks about dismantling the CIA because of these atrocities that they have been

involved with for so many years. And accountability - accountability - like Jack McCavet, who

was Chief of Station in El Salvador and Guatemala all these years was forewarned - that it was going to come back and bite him in the butt and he didn’t believe that. And now it's gotten back

to him. The ball's in his court and now he's gonna have problems trying to justify his actions.

Because now the problem is not from whistleblowers like me, but from his own people - a

different generation - they are not gonna put up with these atrocities. And that’s why they are having problems trying to recruit CIA agents into the Central Intelligence Agency - because

nobody wants to see these atrocities happen anymore.

Speaking of the CIA – we have seen a picture of you with George Bush Senior. Can you tell us about it?

On January 14, 1986, I was assigned to Guatemala City in Guatemala as a special agent with

the Drug Enforcement Administration. And that certain date, then Vice-President George Bush arrived at the Ambassador's residence. He was there to welcome the new so-called democracy

that had come into power in Guatemala. In reality, it wasn’t a democracy - it was still the military

running the country.

Anyway what happened was George Bush came in as a representative of the United States to

congratulate the new government, and there was a cocktail party at the residence - Ambassador

Piedra's residence - who was a Cuban American. So basically I saw George Bush and he comes up to me and asks me what my job description was and I said, "Well, I do narcotics

investigation, international narcotics investigation for the Drug Enforcement Administration and

I'm also the agent that covers El Salvador." And I said, "Well you know we have some

information that there's something funny going on with the Contras at Ilopango airport." At that

time, he just smiled and looked at me and shook my hand and walked away without saying a word. I knew then and there that he knew what the Contras were doing at Ilopango airport.

Ironically, that same afternoon, he met with Adolpho Collero, who was head of the Contras. He

met with Oliver North, and a whole bunch of other people on the third floor of the US embassy,

which is known as the Bubble - it's a CIA floor. So I knew right then and there that he knew that the Contras were involved in this drug trafficking.

Was there any follow up to that event?

No. What happened there in '86 - it was January 14 - the follow-up on the event was that he

continued to meet during that time period with different people - traveling to different parts of the

country of Central America and meeting with people that were stationed in Central America and going to Washington to discuss the Contra operation. That's very well established in the Iran

Contra investigation and John Kerry's report - Senator Kerry's report on the Contra operations.

How can he run around with a straight face and talk to people that he knows he's employing to do something that he knows he doesn’t really want them to succeed at doing?

Well that was his baby. That was his project. You've got to understand that the Contra operation

was his baby and he was going to take care of that baby any way he could. What happened

was he knew it was happening but it was OK. He knew that the Contras were involved in drug trafficking but it was OK because we were fighting communism in Central America and they

were making all kinds of money for the covert operation. And being an ex-Director of the Central

Intelligence Agency, he knew that these things happened. It was no shock to him. He knew from

the get-go what the Contras were doing, and how the CIA was running the operation out of Ilopango. He also knew that pilots that were flying for the Contras were all documented

traffickers in DEA files.

And I remember that DEA Washington came down and spoke to me and said, "Look you’ve got

to use the work allege on your reports." And I said, "Well how can I use the word allege when I

actually see these people and they're getting arrested in South Texas!" For example, Francisco

"Chico" Guirola-Beech got arrested in South Texas with 5.5 million dollars cash! He was known at Ilopango as the 6 million dollar man! Now that was just one load of money that was taken

down in South Texas that belonged to the Contras and to the CIA and he flew around all over

Central and South America with credentials from the Central Intelligence Agency, from the

President of El Salvador and so forth and he was able to come and go as he pleased! And he was the right hand man for Major Roberto D'Aubuisson… and the money issue - they were also

- the far right was also very much involved in drug trafficking. It’s very well documented in the

DEA files because I documented it and other people in Costa Rica documented it, so it’s no

question that these things occurred and there’s no question that the White House knew about it.

You gotta remember with that operation at Ilopango, the Ambassador’s own words were, "It’s a

covert operation being run by the White House. Cele, stay away from it," you know? And I told

him, "I’m gonna do what I have to do…" and I strongly feel that the Ambassador didn’t like it either but he had no choice – he was the Ambassador, he was given instructions to play ball…

and that he did.

Can you just talk to me briefly about your experience with the media - we talked about ABC News before, about 60 Minutes - talk about some of the experiences you’ve had and how

information has managed to be suppressed.

The media is good to a point and you gotta remember why they are out there - there are numbers to be made and so forth. But the problem is that they have their own orders like

everybody else. If it touches into something that - for example ABC - I did an exclusive with

Prime Time Live on the atrocities in Guatemala and they did a perfect job. They showed the

pictures, the viewers saw the people that were murdered and killed. But what they failed to do was mention the Central Intelligence Agency. They failed to mention the names of the agents

that were involved in these murders for accountability. Why? Because they are not going to get

involved in a dispute with the Central Intelligence Agency. They are not going to go that far.

Any major news media will go to a point but you will never find them naming names or pictures

because then it's too close to home… and that’s reality. I just did a story with ABC. They came

down, they filmed for two hours. I told them about how the drug money was coming into the Republicans for George W. and so forth and a guy who's documented in the FBI files was doing

the fundraisers. They are probably not going to do that story because it's an election year and

so forth and whatever happens, happens.

Any other stories where you’ve been suppressed or there were threats…

I've done approximately two and a half hours or maybe three hours of exclusives from Discovery

to CNN to Dateline to Prime Time Live to Current Affair - I've done just about everybody and it

gets to a point where they will, you know, they’ll film you for three hours for an eight minute segment. It gives you no justification. It gives you nothing. I mean you're out there talking your

heart out – and for what? So they can put maybe a four minute thing on your story? And that’s

it? So how can you justify the story with eight minutes - you can't. I mean you can touch the tip

of the iceberg and that’s it. You can't go any further than that.

I mean, when have you ever seen ABC, NBC or CBS do an exclusive on the War On Drugs?

Where they actually went out there and interviewed the people that were involved in it? They didn't. Why? Any major investigation on the House Select Committee on Intelligence - the same

thing. They're not going to cover it. Iran Contra -the same thing. One of the first questions I

asked was, "why didn’t you send somebody to Guatemala or El Salvador to interview the drug

agents about the drug issue?" And they never did it. Why? Because they had an agreement with the government not to pursue the drug issue.

You are familiar with Mike Ruppert’s showdown with CIA Director John Deutch in California. Did

his public questioning of Deutch have any effect on the people?

Well ignorance to a liar is an excuse, as they say. Deutch knew exactly what was going on.

What he didn’t realize was the fact that that so many people were gonna show up. I was here. I

refused to go up there because I knew it was going to be an Intelligence gathering for the Central Intelligence Agency to find out who had what on who… And Mike Ruppert went up there

and said, "Well, you know, they've been involved for many years in drug trafficking in the

Central Intelligence Agency in South Central" and so forth. We knew that. Deutch says, "How

many directors have ever come down here and sat here and talked to you about it?" Well none. But he came down here and he lied to us! So what was the big deal? He came up here, he sat

there, and he lied to the American people. And his famous words were "If we find any

wrongdoing, we will prosecute…" Well, he came, he went, and nothing ever happened. And I

knew exactly that that was what was going to happen - and nothing happened.

So it seems like that too was a strategy of containment.

Exactly. They came up here and tried to quiet the troops down. Calm them down. You know,

‘we're here and we're listening and we're doing this and we're doing that.’ And they did calm

down. And then nothing happened. And that’s the MO. That’s exactly what happens. They come

up here and they try to justify it. Maxine Waters came here - the Congresswoman. Juanita Macdonald came down here and tried to talk to the people and nothing happened. Nothing

happened. Where is Maxine Waters now? Why is she not around to help us support the latest

thing in the Ninth Circuit that came out under Renaldo Pena? What happened? Why is there no

news release from her? Why? Because there's an agreement.

There's an agreement between the Republicans and the Democrats and that is: not to bring up

the drug issue on the candidates. George W. using the money from Mexico from a guy who’s

documented in the FBI files - will probably not be released because of the Republicans, and that’s what the Democrats are doing. They went after Gore in the Buddhist temple money

fundraiser. Well, why can't they get on Bush with all this illegal money coming in from Mexico

into his campaign? Why? Because there is an agreement.

So is Maxine Waters being suppressed by the Democrats internally?

Yes. I think Maxine has compromised herself. I hate to say that but time and time again, she is

being contacted to support us on this issue. She came in very strong and then all of a sudden,

she pulled back and she's out of the picture. You gotta remember her husband is Ambassador to the Bahamas, or was. So take it for what it's worth. You know, why is she not here helping

us?

Define the term ‘cocaine politics’ and how it applies to Colombia.

Cocaine Politics is another word for cocaine democracy. Cocaine democracy, as I said before,

the politics of cocaine is to make the money - and that's what they're gonna be doing in Colombia. They're gonna be taking large amounts of money and they're gonna put on a show.

They're gonna bust some people, they're gonna take down the major drug traffickers, the major

cartels and, as you know, they took Pablo Escobar out and somebody else popped up.

The Cali cartel - they are using drug traffickers to work against those people. For example,

Carlos Leder - he testified against Noriega - he never met Noriega in his life - but yet he

testified. This is a guy who was head of the cartels - founder of one of the cartels. This is the

guy that threatened to kill DEA agents and that blew up some DEA offices and so forth. He now works for the US government. He is now out of prison! He got life without parole – without the

possibility of parole. He went under the Witness Protection Program. He is now out and he's

working for the US government. By his wife's own words, he is out selling cocaine to the

Russians. He is doing all kinds of illegal activity for the U.S. government and this is what our government is about? You know, this guy who wants to murder and kill federal U.S. drug

agents, who has mass murdered people in Colombia, who is now working for the US

government?

Thank you… anything else you’d like to say?

One more thing... As you’re growing up as a student, you come to that fork in the road and that’s when you do what your heart feels and you do it at all costs. And if you don’t, then you’re

just gonna go with the flow and make no waves and do whatever. But if you go and do the right

thing, it’s gonna cost you a lot. In the end it might even cost you your family – it cost me mine.

But I could sleep easily every night because I knew I was making a difference. Like my little

daughter said, "Dad what do we care what’s going on in Colombia or what’s going on anywhere

in the world?" Well you should care because it’s going to hit home sooner or later. The atrocities

are gonna hit home and it's hitting home right now with the civil liberties violations - the civil rights problems we are having in our country. And that’s because of what’s going on all over

Central and South America and how the government works in suppressing those people. The

oppression of the indigenous people is very important. They are using their own people to

destroy them and I think it’s important for you to educate yourself – not for anything else but just for your own mind, to know exactly how our government works, and how it’s gonna come back.

You saw the history – all the history’s been written but it’s not right. Everybody knew that there

was a fight at the Alamo but nobody knows why. They don’t teach you why. And we talked

about how the United States stole the southwest part of the United States. They literally took it away from Mexico. So those are things that are important that I don’t want you to learn twenty

years from now - you know? You should learn this right now as you go through life, because you

need to make a difference. You need to get involved.

It seems like – you know, maybe this is obvious to you but it’s something that I just put

together… From opium to marijuana to cocaine to heroin, the pattern that we’ve seen is

consistently the same. The elites, or whoever is in power and fears the masses, use these substances to ensure and maintain their own power. They pique the public’s curiosity about

these drugs, get them addicted to them, and then prohibit their use…

Exactly.

So can you just say that in your own words?

OK, number one, what happens is that the U.S. government has been instrumental in bringing

drugs into this country - whether it was heroin, whether it was cocaine, and then the crack

epidemic. And it came and it captured the youth of our country and it basically almost destroyed

this generation that we have coming up. You know, we remember that at one time cocaine was only for the rich and the people who were able to afford it and so forth. Then crack came down

and the lower income and middle class minorities started to use it. But then it turned around

and… cocaine does not discriminate. Heroin does not discriminate. Look in Dallas - in Plano,

Texas, where we have a lot of rich families living there. You know, where have you ever heard of a teenager being hooked on heroin? And we had a whole bunch of young kids overdosing,

dying of heroin that was being brought in by the Mexican government with the U.S.

government’s knowledge. We have the best intelligence in the world. We could stop anything

we want to stop but because of economic reasons, it’s not gonna stop.

And now… we have captured you, we got you hooked on drugs, and now you’re gonna do what

we tell you to do. We’re gonna brainwash you and we’re gonna do what we have to do to suppress you…

It’s not that they want us to not do drugs because they are bad for us. It couldn’t be further from

the truth! They know that tobacco is bad for us – it’s addictive. Alcohol is bad for us, it’s sold in stores. So they’re not prohibiting drugs because they’re harmful to us – they are prohibiting

drugs because that way they can control the competing drug cartels through the DEA and FBI

and CIA. Whether those agencies are consciously aware of it or not. And they are able to use

the laws to control the population through imprisonment and addiction. Is that too wild an interpretation?

No. It’s exactly right. Look, we have more drugs today than ever before. I mean every major

drug is back. LSD is back. Heroin is back. Black tar heroin is back. China white heroin is back. Cocaine - massive amounts of cocaine are coming in from South America - it’s never been

cheaper! There was a time period when heroin was only coming in from European countries or

from China or the Triangle. But now it’s coming from Mexico, it’s coming in from Colombia…

I remember flying over the opium poppies in Guatemala - between Mexico and Guatemala. I

couldn’t believe that they were still producing heroin out of Guatemala and Mexico City. So it’s

getting in our backyard now as they say, and it’s gonna be accessible to anybody. But you know

one of the things that some students ask is, why don’t we legalize marijuana? That’s never gonna happen. Not because it’s morally wrong but because there is too much money to be

made on it. And that's why you need to learn to stay away from drugs because drugs will

destroy you. Cocaine, once it gets a hold of you, it’s not gonna release you. You gotta have a lot

of will power to let go of it and it will not only destroy you. Anybody around you that loves you is

gonna be destroyed. I promise you that. And if you don’t believe me, you just look around.

There’s a brother or sister in the immediate family, that’s gonna be destroyed by that.

Can you just say…

My name is Celerino Castillo the III, I'm a former Drug Enforcement Administration undercover agent and I'm here for Guerrilla News Network.

Right on… thank you