Barely a year had passed since the CIA had taken over the financing of the Contras, and already the covert war was no longer a secret. The week before the 1982 elections, Newsweek magazine published the first detailed account of the Reagan administration’s support of the Contras: “America’s Secret War: Target Nicaragua.” The cover story portrayed the Contras—whose forces had built up to around 4,000 men by this point—as being in a position to overthrow the Sandinistas. There were full-color photographs of paratroopers dropping from the sky, which made it appear as if the invasion was already under way.
But that was a gross exaggeration of reality. The Contras, in truth, had just started receiving the American weapons and supplies that Reagan had promised them a year earlier. According to one account, the main source for Newsweek’s story was none other than CIA director William Casey, who wanted to ensure that the Contra project didn’t get shelved. Now that it was public knowledge that the Reagan administration was helping the Contras, Casey’s reasoning went, it would look like a sellout—another Bay of Pigs—if it stopped.
The reporting incensed some members of Congress, particularly those who had been told by CIA officials that the Contras were merely border guards, keeping the Sandinistas from sending arms into El Salvador. The Contras’ first major act of war, in fact, had nothing to do with El Salvador. Under CIA direction, two bridges linking Honduras and Nicaragua were blown up in March 1982, an operation Contra commanders considered to be the opening shots of the war.
In response to the Newsweek report, Congressman Tom Harkin proposed a complete cutoff of funding for all paramilitary activities against the Nicaraguan government. The fact that the war was illegal, Harkin argued, was nothing compared to the U.S. government cozying up to “perhaps the most hated group of Nicaraguans that could exist outside the borders of Nicaragua, and I talk about the Somocistas.” Harkin called them “vicious, cutthroat murderers” and urged Congress to “end our involvement with this group.”
When the Reagan administration heard about Harkin’s proposed amendment to the annual defense budget bill, Oliver North later wrote, it “hit the roof.... The President let it be known that if Congress approved the Harkin Amendment, which was unlikely anyway, he would promptly veto it.” Instead, Congress passed the first Boland Amendment, named for the Massachusetts Democrat, Edward P Boland, who authored it. Boland, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, knew full well that the CIA was funding the Contras, and he was not opposed to it. But Harkin’s move—making a public issue out of a secret CIA project—had put Boland on the spot and riled up other liberals. Boland told Harkin that Congress had no business passing laws like the one he was proposing. That’s why there was an Intelligence Committee, Boland lectured, “to keep the nation’s secrets and exercise sensible and prudent oversight.” The Intelligence Committee, a body generally protective of the CIA, had been one of the few committees told of the secret Contra project.
To quiet Harkin and other liberals, Boland agreed to an amendment that prohibited the use of taxpayer funds “for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua or provoking a military exchange between Nicaragua and Honduras.” The House passed it on Christmas Eve 1982 by a vote of 411-0.
No doubt the lawmakers were eager to get home for the holidays, but the reason the Boland Amendment received unanimous support was because it accomplished nothing. It was largely a fraud, designed to make it look as if Congress was cracking down on the Contra project without actually doing so.
Internal government memos show that the CIA, the White House, the Defense Department, and the Contras’ congressional supporters knew that the Contras had no hope of defeating the Sandinistas. Since there was no way in hell the Contras were ever going to overthrow the Nicaraguan government, their supporters reasoned, they could continue spending CIA funds despite the Boland Amendment. If the Contras were given money for one purpose—arms interdiction—and decided to use it another way, well, that wasn’t the CIA’s fault, was it? The money hadn’t been given “for the purpose” of an overthrow.
Indeed, by early 1983, CIA dollars were pouring into Honduras and Costa Rica in torrents. Best of all, the Contras no longer had to ask their Argentine advisers for permission to spend it. Most of the Argentines were called home in 1982 after their country’s disastrous war with Great Britain over the Falkland Islands.
Enrique Bermúdez and the other top-ranking FDN officials started living like real generals. In Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Bermúdez moved into “an elegant two-story place, all dark wood and balconies, overlooking the Tegucigalpa basin from a lovely hillside lot in the exclusive neighborhood of Ciudad Nueva.” Bermúdez and his staff spent their evenings dining on roasts, puffing cigars, quaffing tequila, or carousing in the excellent casinos downtown. “Bermúdez had developed a taste for the teenage girls his men were recruiting in Nicaragua,” journalist Sam Dillon wrote in his 1991 book Comandos. “Bermúdez was inviting them from the base camps back to Ciudad Nueva, one at a time, to try out as his 'secretaries.’”
Dillon wrote that the CIA was sending “tens of thousands of dollars a month to Bermúdez’s general staff to pay the ‘family aid’ salaries of his field commanders, and other prodigious sums to buy food for the thousands of FDN fighters.” But much of that aid was being diverted and never reached the soldiers in the field. The Southern Front commanders in Costa Rica, Edén Pastora and “El Negro” Chamorro, constantly complained that Bermudúz and his CIA friends were stiffing them on the supplies, raking off the best weapons and the best food and sending them garbage—planeloads of diapers, feminine napkins, and extra-large underwear. It wasn’t merely unfair, they argued, it was an insult to their manhood.
“Bermúdez’s staff officers were pocketing the money,” Dillon wrote. “They were also stealing half the CIA’s food budget. Though they routinely shipped only half the necessary beans, rice and other foodstuffs to the base camps, they were billing the CIA for full rations.”
Several accounts, including Dillon’s, paint a picture of massive corruption inside the FDN, perpetuated by Bermúdez and his closest associates, death squad leader Ricardo Lau and millionaire land baron Aristides Sánchez. At one point, dozens of midlevel FDN field commanders petitioned to have Bermúdez fired for stealing money and squandering supplies. Some CIA field officers were pushing for his removal on the same grounds.
But Bermúdez had friends at CIA headquarters at Langley, and after he contacted them about the incipient mutiny, the complainers were the ones booted out of the FDN. The CIA brass felt they couldn’t dump “the obedient asset who’d helped construct their entire project,” Dillon wrote.
Still, congressional discomfort over the CIA’s army was growing. In May the House Intelligence Committee issued a special report suggesting that the “operation is illegal” and that the administration knew plainly that the Contras were trying to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. On July 28, 1983, the House passed a resolution by a 228-195 vote to stop all aid to the Contras. “Opposition in the House to aiding the Nicaraguan rebels seemed almost insurmountable and it would be easier for House Democrats to block passage of a new aid authorization in 1984 than it had been to cut it off in 1983,” former State Department official Robert Kagan, a Contra supporter, wrote.
Yet it was somewhere around this time, according to Danilo Blandón, that he stopped sending the profits from his L.A. cocaine sales to the Contras. At other times he has said it was late 1982. In either case, Blandón said that the reason he was given for halting the donations was that the Contras had plenty of money.
“In 1983, okay, the Contra gets a lot of money from the United States,” he told a federal grand jury in 1994. “And they were—when Reagan get in the power, Mr. Reagan get in the power, we start receiving a lot of money. And the people that was in charge, it was the CIA, so they didn’t want to raise any money because they have, they had the money that they wanted.”
“From the government?” Assistant U.S. Attorney David Hall asked.
“Yes, for the Contra revolution.”
“Okay.”
“So we started—you know, the ambitious person, we started doing business by ourselves,” Blandón said.
“To make money for yourselves?”
“Yes.”
“There’s a lot of money to be made?”
“Yes.”
Blandón told CIA inspectors that FDN commander Enrique Bermúdez came to California sometime in 1983 and told him personally that it wasn’t necessary for the Los Angeles group to raise any more money. “The FDN needed people, not money, because the CIA was providing money,” he said Bermúdez told them. But Blandón’s mentor, Norwin Meneses, said Blandón remained a loyal financial supporter of the Contras for the duration of the war. Asked when Blandón stopped giving the Contras monetary support, Meneses replied, “Never, as far as I know.”
Blandón said he was working for Meneses at the time the Contra cocaine kickbacks ended. “I continued working for a period of time, about six months, and then I changed because Meneses was—it was the same thing. I wasn’t making any money.” Blandón was tired of being stuck in the middle of fights between Norwin and his estranged wife, Maritza. Meneses was still charging him too much for cocaine and was refusing to let him share in the spoils. “When I was with Meneses, you see, I didn’t make no money at all,” Blandón griped. “Meneses was charging me, you know, a big price, that I couldn’t meet. I couldn’t make enough money, you know, because all the time I owe him.”
Blandón said he owed Meneses around $100,000 and couldn’t seem to reduce the debt because “I didn’t make any money. So I start looking for my own resource, or my own sources.” He found them by going behind Meneses’s back and dealing directly with Norwin’s L.A. suppliers—a couple of Colombians he knew only as Luis and Tony, to whom he had been delivering cash for his miserly boss. “I used to deliver money to the Colombian connection from Meneses, and I got a friendship with them and they know how hard I was working at that time. It was easy for me to ask them for credit because they knew how, how hard I work at that time for them.”
The Colombians were happy to help, Blandón said, and encouraged him to strike out on his own. “When I fight with Norwin, the Colombian people started, you know, pushing me along, trying to cross Norwin, and they go with me and talk to me that I can make it myself.” Asking the Colombians for cocaine on credit was not difficult. They were used to working cocaine deals that way. They would give you the cocaine and a few days to sell it. Then you’d pay them what you owed. It was a clever way for the cartels to expand their customer base in the United States and keep their own exposure to a minimum.
The Colombians advanced Blandón fifteen kilos—worth about $885,000—and they were off to the races. He started out getting fifteen kilos a month and within a couple months had progressed to thirty kilos a month. He left Meneses and the Contras behind and concentrated on making money for himself, he said.
But several parts of Blandón’s story don’t add up. He testified that when he was supplying Henry Corrales in 1983, Ross was already selling up to seven kilos a day, and Blandón said he had other customers as well. If Blandón’s testimony about the size of his initial dealings with the Colombians is true, he wouldn’t have had enough cocaine to supply Ross for a week, much less a month. Before his purported split from Meneses he had been selling far larger quantities of cocaine than that, he admitted.
“And do you remember if you were getting large amounts or small amounts from Mr. Meneses?” Blandón was asked in 1996.
“At the end, large.”
“And what is a large amount?”
“About 40, 50, at this time,” he testified.
During his federal grand jury appearance in 1994, Blandón was asked to estimate “how much total you would have gotten from Norwin” during the time he was receiving cocaine from him.
“How many I received from Norwin?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it was—I received from him, okay, not for me, because it was—I was only the administrator at that time. I received, in L.A. about 200, 300,” he said.
But if Blandón didn’t make his first sale until the spring of 1982 and spent a year to eighteen months dealing only ounces and grams, as he testified, it would have been impossible for him to have sold 200 to 300 kilos for Meneses by late 1982 or early 1983, when he claims he broke from him.
In fact, evidence turned up by the FBI and DEA in later years showed that Blandón and Meneses were still working together as late as 1991. In August 1986 Blandón’s and Meneses’s NADDIS files—computerized intelligence profiles maintained by the federal government on suspected drug traffickers—showed both men as current associates. Moreover, if Blandón double-crossed Meneses in 1982-83 by stealing his sources and his L.A. customers, it is doubtful the men would have remained friends and business partners, yet they continued to operate hotels and other businesses together in Nicaragua.
What appears to have happened is that Blandón acquired additional sources of supply sometime in 1984 and became his own boss in L.A., while Meneses remained in charge of the San Francisco drug operation. And they continued working with each other and with the Contras for years, more or less as equals.
Others who were present at the time confirm that this, in fact, is exactly what occurred. “The principal group is controlled by Blandón and is the focal point for drug supply and money laundering for the others,” an August 1986 DEA report stated. “The other group is run by Meneses and is located principally in the San Francisco area.... Per Cl [confidential informant] cocaine is often transported to the Blandón association and then from Blandón to Meneses in San Francisco.” That DEA report, based on debriefings of an informant inside Blandón’s drug ring, showed Blandón and Meneses working together so closely in mid-1986 that they were sharing the same cocaine supplier and money launderer.
In a 1992 interview with the FBI, Blandón’s associate Jacinto Torres told agents that Blandón continued receiving cocaine from Meneses for at least two years longer than Blandón admits. “As of approximately 1984, Blandón was involved in cocaine sales in the Glendale, California area. Blandón’s supplier as of 1984 continued to be Norwin Meneses,” Torres told the FBI. Torres said Blandón’s cocaine business “dramatically increased” in 1984, and that Meneses was flying planeloads of dope in from Miami to keep up with the demand; “Norwin Meneses, Blandón’s supplier as of 1983 and 1984, routinely flew quantities of 200 to 400 kilograms from Miami to the West Coast. Blandón eventually ‘separated’ from Meneses and obtained other sources of supply.”
A 1990 DEA report, requesting the formation of a multi-agency task force targeting Blandón and Meneses, shows that the DEA also believed the two “disassociated” from each other in 1984 but had, by the late 1980s, reunited to head “a criminal organization that operate(s) internationally from Colombia and Bolivia, through the Bahamas, Costa Rica, or Nicaragua to the United States.” The report claimed their drug ring was getting its cocaine from the politically connected Suarez family in Bolivia, and the Ochoa family in Medellín, Colombia, the founders of the notorious Medellín cartel. The Bolivian cocaine was coming into Miami, the report said, and the Colombians’ powder was landing in L.A.
The DEA reported that Meneses had given Blandón his start in Los Angeles in the early 1980s and that from 1982 to 1984 “Blandón had operated directly under Meneses.” After that, the DEA said, Blandón “began to work as an independent drug distributor with several subordinates working directly for Blandón.”
That Blandón continued dealing with Meneses through 1984 was unwittingly confirmed by the Los Angeles Times in a 1996 story that attempted to demonstrate that Blandón and Meneses had split in 1982. The Times claimed to have interviewed an unnamed “cocaine trafficking associate” of Blandón, who said he was present at Meneses’s house in the Bay Area on a day when Meneses and Blandón were celebrating the consummation of a big drug deal. “Danilo and Norwin had done some business,” the Times quoted the associate as saying. “The deal involved 40 or 50 kilos. The money was all divvied up. There was cash all over the place. Norwin had steaks on the grill. It was going to be a big party.”
The phone rang, and Meneses’s girlfriend, Blanca Margarita Castaño, answered it and then shrieked, “‘Jairo’s been arrested!’ Well, everybody cleared out in a heartbeat. They grabbed the money and ran.... I don’t think anyone turned off the steaks.”
Records show Jairo Meneses was arrested on November 26, 1984, roughly two years after Blandón claims he quit dealing with Norwin. San Francisco cocaine dealer Rafael Corñejo, a longtime wholesaler for Meneses, also confirmed that Blandón and Meneses were still working together then. “I didn’t see him a lot, but I know he was with Norwin in ’84,” Corñejo said. Blandón and Meneses had paid him a memorable visit in San Francisco that year, stopping by a commercial building Corñejo owned on Chenery Street. Norwin wanted to store something in his building, and Corñejo didn’t ask what. “It didn’t matter to me. You know, if Norwin wants to do something.. .1 said, ‘Anything you want.’ I like Norwin, I respect Norwin.”
During that visit, Corñejo said, “Blandón starts telling me he’d been doing lots of things with the black people down there [in L.A.]. And I said, ‘Yeah, so?’ And he wanted to see if I was interested in doing something up here. And I said, ‘Why?’ And he said I should get into the black thing. No one cares about them, he tells me. When they start killing themselves no one cares.” Corñejo told Blandón “not to play me with that race thing. Business is business, but don’t play me with that race thing. The difference between him and me was that I grew up in San Francisco and it didn’t mean that much to us. But he grew up in Nicaragua, with these rich and powerful people, and that’s the way he thought.”
Blandón’s own experience had taught him that no one cared about the cocaine that he was pouring into South Central in 1984. By then, he’d been dealing ever-increasing amounts to Ricky Ross for two years and had received no interference from the police whatsoever. The only media in L.A. that seemed alarmed by the spread of crack in black neighborhoods was the African-American press. The white newspapers didn’t even know what crack was.
In December 1983, for instance, former L.A. Dodger legend Maury Wills was arrested for driving a stolen car. The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner noted that the “arresting officers also found a small vial on the automobile’s front seat containing a white, rock-like substance believed to be cocaine. Police said a clear glass water pipe was found next to the vial.” An LAPD officer “refused to speculate if the water pipe may have been used for free-basing, a technique in which cocaine is smoked to intensify the high.” The story said Wills was “booked on the grand theft auto allegation pending further identification of the white substance by the LAPD’s narcotics laboratory.”
Starting in 1984, unlike what they’d been seeing one or two years earlier, street cops like Steve Polak were arresting low-level dealers in South Central with more cocaine than they had ever seen before. The patrolmen were reporting their finds to the LAPD’s Major Violators Unit but were getting nowhere, said Polak, who was one of the LAPD’s crack experts and lectured police departments around the country. “A lot of detectives, a lot of cops, were saying to them, ‘Hey, these blacks, no longer are we just seeing gram dealers. These guys are doing ounces, they were doing keys.’” The Major Violators Unit, which dealt primarily with Colombians and South Americans, found such reports hard to swallow. “They were saying, basically, ‘Ahh, South Central, how much could they be dealing?”’ Polak laughed. “‘The money’s not there. We’re not going to bring in millions of dollars in seizures or large quantities of coke down there.’” As a result, the crack dealers of South Central “virtually went untouched for a long time. They enjoyed quite a run there without anyone ever working them.”
The same could not be said for the Meneses organization in San Francisco. Since 1981, it had been under constant investigation by the DEA, the FBI, and the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement (BNE). But aside from a couple of nickel-and-dime busts of Norwin’s nephews, nothing much happened.
“Norwin was a target of ours, and his organization was one that we’d worked on,” said Jerry Smith, former head of the BNE’s San Francisco bureau. But Smith said Meneses’s network was so tight-knit that it was impossible to get anyone inside. The Meneses organization, one federal prosecutor wrote in 1993, had been “the target of unsuccessful investigative attempts for many years.”
Meneses, on the other hand, seemed to have much better luck at infiltration than the police.
“There were some things that happened and I’m really kind of reluctant to go into that particular thing,” Smith said. “It had nothing to do with the CIA or the FBI. It had to do with one of my guys, who subsequently was fired...I think he was trying to broker some information to somebody for some money. And we got onto it very quickly and so he’s no longer around, and I don’t think anything ever came to fruition. But it was something that bothered us at the time.”
Meneses, in an interview, boasted that he had a DEA agent on his payroll who was feeding him information about the government’s many investigations, allowing him to stay one step ahead of the law.
Even if that’s true, however, it does not fully explain the drug lord’s complete imperviousness to prosecution. It’s hard to imagine how one or two corrupt narcoties agents could have held off the entire U.S. law enforcement community, especially when the DEA and FBI had been aware of Norwin’s criminal activities since the 1970s. It becomes even harder to fathom given the events that would unfold in late 1984.
“Oh, he [Meneses] was totally protected by the U.S. government,” insisted Contra supporter Dennis Ainsworth, a former San Franciseo-area economics professor. “He was protected by everyone under the sun.”
That conclusion had been a difficult and painful one for Ainsworth to reach. A staunch conservative and Republican party stalwart, the tall, patrician Ainsworth had believed in the Contras, and threw himself wholeheartedly into their cause starting in late 1983, when he became involved in efforts to assist Nicaraguan refugees who had settled in San Francisco after fleeing the Sandinistas. The Nicaraguans, he said, most of whom had been Somoza supporters, had difficulty getting help from the liberal churches in San Francisco, which Ainsworth claimed were interested only in assisting refugees from right-wing Central American dictatorships. “All of a sudden, bang, we’ve got a problem in our backyard, and nobody wanted to help them,” Ainsworth recalled. “And so, I met some of the Nicaraguans and we started helping. Getting clothing donations and stuff like that.”
In February 1984, Ainsworth said, he saw an announcement in the San Francisco Chronicle about a seminar at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel concerning Central America and the Contras. He attended and met Julio Bonilla, a Nicaraguan who was the local coordinator of the FDN. The men chatted briefly and exchanged phone numbers. (According to one published source, Norwin Meneses helped finance that seminar at the Drake.) About three weeks later, Ainsworth said, Bonilla called him and invited him to an informal gathering at a house on Colon Avenue in San Francisco, to meet with some of the Nicaraguans who had helped put the seminar together. Ainsworth found a pleasant group of middle-class husbands and wives, many of them recent immigrants. One, he said, had been Anastasio Somoza’s dentist. Their leader was a jovial pharmaceutical salesman, Don Sinicco, known to others in the trade as “Mr. Maalox” because he sold the popular antacid to local hospitals. Sinicco was not Nicaraguan; he was born in Italy and lived there until 1938, when Mussolini came to power. He later married a Nicaraguan, Nydia Gonzáles, the daughter of a powerful Nicaraguan general, Fernando Gonzáles. Through them, he became fascinated with Nicaraguan politics.
As the covert war in Nicaragua escalated, stories about the conflict began popping up in San Francisco’s newspapers, and Sinicco read them avidly, but not happily. He believed the press was cheerleading for the Sandinistas, and he fired off dozens letters to the newspapers, chiding them for their “slant.” Many were published. “I got a reputation,” he said proudly.
In late 1983, Sinicco said, he got a call from a man named Adolfo Calero, the head of the political wing of the FDN. Sinicco said Calero called him because of his letter-writing campaign, which flattered him considerably. “He said, ‘We need someone like you to help us get the word out. People will listen to you because you’re an American.’ So they contacted me, and I said that’s fine.” At Calcro’s suggestion, Sinicco formed a small organization called United Support Against Communism in the Americas (USACA), and he and his friends began holding regular meetings, casting about for ways to publicize the Contras’ plight.
Sinicco said he’d never met Calero before, but his wife and Calero’s wife were old friends. In Managua, Calero had been a well-known businessman, a Chamber of Commerce type who’d run the bottling plant for the local Coca-Cola distributorship. He was also a CIA asset, someone the U.S. government had hoped might replace Somoza as Nicaragua’s president before the Sandinista takeover. According to former FDN director Edgar Chamorro, Calero “had been working for the CIA in Nicaragua for a long time. He served as, among other things, a conduit of funds from the United States Embassy to various student and labor organizations.” In early 1983 the CIA had brought Calero out of Nicaragua and installed him as the political director of the FDN; his broad, acne-scarred visage soon became the most familiar face of the Contra rebels in the United States. Tall and imposing, Calero spoke English well, not surprisingly for a graduate of Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana. “Calero and Bermúdez were our main links with the CIA,” Chamorro declared. “They met constantly with the CIA station chief.”
In 1984 Calero began visiting San Francisco frequently, Ainsworth and Sinicco said, and would usually stay at their homes while in the city attending to FDN business. While finding Calero personable and smooth, Ainsworth was dismayed by the lack of political sophistication displayed by the FDN support group Sinicco had assembled at Calero’s request. The Nicaraguans were eager and committed to the Contra cause, Ainsworth recalled, but there wasn’t a soul among them who knew anything about working the American political system. “That little group that used to meet at his house...would have done nothing if I hadn’t come over and said, ‘Look, I’ll set these things up.’ All Sinicco and his friends were thinking of doing was writing a few letters to the editor. They had no connections whatsoever. And I happened to walk in and I was a well-connected guy.”
Ainsworth gently suggested to the Nicaraguans that there were other ways of drawing attention to their cause. Why not sponsor a speaking tour for some Contra officials, such as Adolfo Calero? Bring him to town, show him around, get some press coverage. Sinicco, who was USACA’s president, said he and his friends were “very impressed” with Ainsworth’s ideas and his political connections and voted to make him a director of their new group. “As far as I knew, he was presumably very active in Republican politics. He knew senators, he knew representatives, both federal and in Sacramento. He knew the chairman of the party. He seemed to be influential and was active internationally in anti-Communist efforts,” Sinicco said. Ainsworth, he said, began opening doors all across San Francisco. “He was the one who appeared to be able to get us these bookings at places like the Olympic Club, the Commonwealth Club. None of us belonged to those kind of places. But he either did or knew people that did. He was able to devote his full-time attention to the group. Most of the rest of us were working men. We had businesses to run, jobs to go to.”
On June 4, 1984, Ainsworth arranged a private reception for Calero at the exclusive St. Francis Yacht Club in San Francisco with about sixty of the city’s most influential business leaders and Republicans. “It was just a chance for everybody to meet and greet. It wasn’t a fund-raiser. Calero was in the news, he was a newsmaker, and some people I knew had expressed an interest in meeting him,” Ainsworth said. Calero gave a short speech, answered a few questions, and mingled. “The cocktail party went very smoothly,” Ainsworth would later tell the FBI.
Afterward, Calero, Ainsworth, Sinicco, and about twenty others drove over to Caesar’s Italian Restaurant, one of the many near Fisherman’s Wharf. When the bill came, Ainsworth said, a small neatly dressed man he had not noticed before called the waiter over and picked up the tab for the entire party. Ainsworth leaned over and asked a Nicaraguan friend who Mr. Generosity was. “'You don’t want to know,” was the response he said he got.
Sinicco said he initially assumed one of the Mendoza brothers—two strident Cuban anti-Communists who were members of USACA—had paid the bill. “When we called for the check, we were told it had been taken care of, and I thought it was one of the Cubans who’d paid for it. I thought Max [Mendoza]’s brother had paid for the dinner, and in fact I went up and thanked him afterwards and I’m sure he wonders to this day what I was thanking him for.” Before the evening was over, Sinicco was set straight by another Nicaraguan: the big spender was named Norwin Meneses. He owned a restaurant and a travel agency in the Mission District. “I’d never heard of him,” Sinicco said, “but we were glad for the financial assistance.”
At the end of the dinner, Ainsworth stood and announced that in two days, Don Sinicco was going to be hosting a cocktail party for their esteemed guest, Adolfo Calero, and that everyone in the room was invited.
At the party two days later, Norwin Meneses came in with the crowd dressed in an expensive white linen sports coat with a cashmere overcoat draped over his arm. Sinicco said Meneses spoke to Calero briefly, and the two men retired to a back bedroom, apparently for a meeting. Ainsworth confirmed that. Calero has said he never met privately with Meneses.
Later, as the party was winding down, Sinicco got out his Instamatic camera and began snapping pictures of the historic occasion. He got a shot of some of the wives posing behind a handmade cloth map of Nicaragua. He snapped one of Max Mendoza, the Cuban, with a big grin on his mustachioed face. Sinicco found Calero in the kitchen, huddled by the refrigerator with Meneses, San Francisco FDN coordinator Julio Bonilla, and some other local FDN officials. He told the group to smile and lined up the shot, but just as he snapped the shutter, Meneses closed his eyes and turned away. “Let me get another real quick,” Sinicco said. This time Meneses kept his eyes open, but he didn’t smile. He looked at Sinicco and glared. Calero posed with a tight smile on his face.
Sinicco suddenly remembered Meneses from the restaurant two nights earlier, and he approached him and thanked him for his kindness. “I told him that now that he knew where we lived, he should come to our next [USACA] meeting and he said that he would, but that he really needed to leave now.”
After that Meneses began attending USACA’s meetings, Sinicco recalled, usually arriving with the Mendoza brothers, who ran a Cuban anti-Communist group in San Francisco. Ainsworth said he did not believe there was a connection between Meneses and the Cubans, other than a political one. However, a former FDN mercenary from Florida, Jack Terrell, said Meneses was plugged tightly into the Cuban exile community in Miami. “He assisted the Cuban Legion in their radio propaganda shows coming from Miami,” Terrell said, adding that Meneses was an associate of several members of the 2506 Brigade, which was made up of Bay of Pigs veterans.
Sinicco showed the author attendance records, minutes of meetings, and other assorted paperwork he kept as USACA’s president. One of the documents he provided was a handwritten note that he said were his talking points for one of USACA’s earliest meetings. “Our first time venture as USACA has proven highly successful,” Sinicco had written, and he listed “seven successes.” The first was that “Adolfo was brought over.”
Success No. 6: “We are receiving some attention from some Cuban people who appear eager to help.”
Success No. 7: “Mr. Meneces’ [sic] contribution.” Meneses dropped a $160 contribution on the little group one night, Sinicco said, and picked up another dinner for $324.20.
According to Sinicco’s files, another founding member of USACA was Father Thomas F Dowling, a San Franciscan whom Sinicco said was “some kind of a priest.” Though he sometimes passed himself off as a Roman Catholic priest, Dowling was an ordained member of a tiny splinter church called the North American Old Roman Catholic Church of the Utrecht Succession, a church whose legitimacy is a matter of some debate. While working with USACA and the Contras, Dowling appeared before Congress in 1985 sporting a clerical collar and identifying himself as a Catholic priest, to testify as a purported witness to Sandinista atrocities. His appearance had been arranged by the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America, later described by congressional investigators as an illegal CIA-run domestic propaganda mill.
“Senior CIA officials with backgrounds in covert operations, as well as military intelligence and psychological operations specialists from the Department of Defense, were deeply involved in establishing and participating in a domestic political and propaganda operation run through an obscure bureau in the Department of State,” a 1992 House committee staff report concluded. “Almost all of these activities were hidden from public view and many of the individuals involved were never questioned or interviewed by the Iran/Contra committees.”
Through that office, the CIA and the National Security Council engaged in “a domestic, covert operation designed to lobby the Congress, manipulate the media and influence domestic public opinion,” the report said, echoing a 1987 investigation by the Comptroller General of the United States, which said the State Department had engaged in “prohibited, covert propaganda activities.”
Dowling later admitted receiving about $73,000 in cash and travelers checks from Oliver North, CIA agent Adolfo Calero and other members of North’s operation between 1986 and 1987 “to affect public opinion favorably toward the Reagan position inside, regarding Central America.” Dowling testified that the money went to a non-profit organization he’d set up in San Francisco called the Latin America Strategic Studies Institute (LASSI). In addition to Dowling, LASSI employed a recently retired CIA officer with extensive Latin American experience, G. James Quesada, a Nicaraguan who lived in the San Francisco area. “I met [Quesada] when I spoke before the retired group of intelligence officers a few years back,” Dowling testified in 1987.
Quesada confirmed that he worked with Dowling but said he did so as private citizen, not for the CIA. “I know nobody thinks a CIA agent ever retires, but I really did retire,” he said in an interview, with a laugh. Quesada also met Norwin Meneses and Danilo Blandón at an FDN meeting, and instantly, he said, his antennae went up. “I found out what Meneses was pretty quickly, but he was not involved in our side of things, which was the political side,” Quesada said. Meneses and Blandón had something to do with “the other side,” meaning the military part of the Contra operation. “As I recall, Blandón was looking for medical students or was recruiting medical students to go down to Honduras. I stayed away from both of them.”
In addition to his work with Oliver North and the San Francisco FDN, Father Dowling was also heavily involved with CAUSA, a conservative political organization that was part of the Rev. Sun-Myung Moon’s Unification Church. During the time of the CIA funding cutoff, Moon’s organization—which was linked in the 1970s to the Korean Central Intelligence Agency—stepped in and began funneling money and supplies to the Contras. Dowling was a member of CAUSA’s national advisory board and a frequent speaker at CAUSA rallies and conferences. Among the documents USACA founder Sinicco showed the author was an August 1984 letter from CAUSA’s president, retired air force general E. D. Woellner, thanking Sinicco’s organization for attending the annual CAUSA convention and suggesting that the groups work more closely in the future.
Though the combination of fringe religions and the Contras may seem strange, partly declassified CIA records show that the agency had evidence as far back as 1982 that there were unwholesome connections between Meneses’s drug ring, the FDN, and an unnamed religious organization in the United States. According to a 1998 CIA Inspector General’s report, the CIA’s Domestic Collection Division picked up word in October 1982 that “there are indications of links between (a U.S. religious organization) and two Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary groups.” The heavily censored CIA cable said, “These links involve an exchange in [the United States] of narcotics for arms.”
The CIA’s domestic spies reported that “there was to be a meeting among the participants in Costa Rica regarding this exchange” and that two U.S. law enforcement agencies were aware of it. Though the agencies were not named in the censored CIA cable, the FBI had the Meneses organization under investigation at the time and had learned through wiretaps that Norwin’s Costa Rican Contra associates—Horaeio Pereira, Troilo Sánchez, and Fernando Sánchez—were shipping cocaine to San Francisco.
CIA headquarters ordered its domestic agents to get more information about the upcoming meeting in Costa Riea, and a few days later another cable arrived at Langley with additional details. “The attendees at the meeting would include representatives from the FDN and UDN, and several unidentified U.S. citizens,” the CIA cable reported. It “identified Renato Peña as one of four persons—along with three unidentified U.S. citizens—who would represent the FDN at the Costa Rica meeting.”
Renato Peña Cabrera was one of Norwin Meneses’s San Francisco drug dealers and a friend of Dennis Ainsworth. Peña was dating Danilo Blandón’s sister, Leysla, and was a top official in the San Francisco FDN. Peña told CIA investigators that he met Meneses in 1982 at an FDN meeting and served as an official representative of the FDN’s political wing in northern California from 1982 until mid-1984. After that, he said, he “was appointed to be the military representative of the FDN in San Francisco, in part because of Norwin Meneses’ close relationship with [Enrique] Bermúdez.”
Peña said Norwin introduced him to his nephew, Jairo, who was in charge of distributing the family’s cocaine to other dealers. Soon, the young Contra found himself hauling cash and drugs up and down the freeways of the Golden State. “Peña says he made from six to eight trips from San Francisco to Los Angeles between 1982 and 1984 for Meneses’ drug trafficking organization,” the CIA Inspector General reported. “Each time, he says, he carried anywhere from $600,000 to $1,000,000 to Los Angeles and returned to San Francisco with six to eight kilograms of cocaine. Peña says that a Colombian associate of Meneses told Peña in general terms that a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the cocaine Peña brought to San Francisco were going to the Contras.”
Even with the inflated cocaine prices of the early 1980s, the amount of money Peña was taking to L.A. was far more than was needed to pay for six to eight kilos of cocaine. It seems likely that the excess—$300,000 to $500,000 per trip—was the Contras’ cut of the drug proceeds.
When the information about Renato Peña’s involvement in the upcoming Costa Rican meeting was relayed back to Langley, CIA head quarters immediately ordered the Domestic Collection Division to halt any further investigation, allegedly because “of the apparent participation of U.S. citizens.” But the agency began having second thoughts about sitting on the information. On November 17, 1982, Langley worriedly cabled one of its stations in Latin America to tell its agents that while headquarters didn’t think the reports about the Contras and drugs were true, “the information was surfaced by another [U.S. government] agency and may return to haunt us. Feel we must try to confirm or refute the information if possible.” Langley wanted to know if Contra leaders had “scheduled any meeting in the next few weeks? If so, what information do you have regarding the attendees?”
The response was probably not what CIA headquarters wanted to hear. “Several Contra officials had recently gone to the United States for a series of meetings, including a meeting with Contra supporters in San Francisco,” the Central American CIA station reported back. (It was during October 1982 that FDN leaders met with Meneses in L.A. and San Francisco in an effort to set up local Contra support groups in those cities.)
The CIA Inspector General’s report is silent about what, if anything, the agency did next. Peña told CIA inspectors that the unnamed U.S. religious organization mentioned in the CIA cables “was an FDN political ally that provided only humanitarian aid to Nicaraguan refugees and logistical support for Contra-related rallies, such as printing services and portable stages.”
When Renato Peña and Meneses’s nephew Jairo were arrested on cocaine trafficking charges in November 1984, Ainsworth began suspecting that the FDN was also involved in drug trafficking. “Renato wasn’t a drug dealer,” Ainsworth said. “He was a Contra and he was duped. When Congress cut off aid in the fall of 1983, these guys had nowhere else to turn and they wanted to get their country back. And once you say I’ll do anything to get my country back, then they were easy prey for Meneses, who said, ‘Hey, you do this for me and I’ll help you guys out.’”
Agents found a kilo of cocaine in the trunk of Peña’s car. At an apartment Jairo Meneses maintained in Oakland as a cocaine storehouse, the DEA found half a kilo in a safe. Because the evidence against him was so overwhelming—hand-to-hand sales to DEA agents and a kilo in his car— Peña pleaded guilty to one count of possession of cocaine with intent to sell in March 1985. He also agreed to help the government prosecute Jairo Meneses, and was given a two-year sentence in return.
As part of his deal with the government, Renato Peña was extensively debriefed by the DEA and his interviews were nothing short of astonishing—which is probably why they remained sealed for 15 years.
“When debriefed by the DEA in the early 1980s, Peña said that the CIA was allowing the Contras to fly drugs into the United States, sell them, and keep the proceeds,” the Justice Department Inspector General reported in 1997. Jairo Meneses had told him that “the United States was aware of these dealings and that it was highly unlikely that I would even get in trouble.” Both Norwin Meneses and Blandón told him they were raising money for the Contras through drug dealing; Blandón had even claimed “the Contras would not have been able to operate without drug proceeds.”
Further, FDN leader Enrique Bermúdez “was aware of the drug dealing” and Peña described Bermúdez as “a CIA agent.” When challenged by CIA questioners on that statement, Peña merely laughed. “It’s very obvious,” he said: Bermúdez had been Somoza’s military attaché in Washington and it was common knowledge in Nicaragua that anyone who had that job under Somoza also worked for the CIA. (Bermúdez, in fact, was on the CIA’s payroll from 1980 to 1991, which means at the least that he was a contract agent, if not an agency officer.)
As if Peña’s testimony wasn’t convincing enough, the DEA obtained independent corroboration in the spring of 1986 from a longtime informant who’d known Meneses since childhood described by the DEA as “extremely reliable.” He told a DEA intelligence analyst that Meneses was indeed part of the FDN and had been using drug money to buy weapons for the Contras. He also vouched for Renato Peña’s credibility: “Renato Peña worked for Jairo Meneses and ran the San Francisco office of the FDN,” the informant explained. “Peña was one of the major Contra fund raisers in San Francisco and was one of those responsible for sending Meneses’ drug proceeds to the Contras.”
In interview years later with inspectors from the CIA and the Justice Department, Peña defiantly stood his ground, even though he was under threat of immediate deportation. He insisted that “the CIA knows about all these things...The money the Contras received from the Reagan Administration was peanuts and the growing military organization needed supplies, arms, food, and money to support the families of the Contras. The CIA decided to recruit Meneses so that drug sales could be used to support the Contras. Bermúdez could not have recruited Meneses on his own...but would have had to follow orders.”
Ainsworth said Peña was devastated by his arrest and confessed to him his role in the Contra drug network. Alarmed, Ainsworth began looking into the relationship between the FDN and drugs. He made “inquiries in the local San Francisco Nicaraguan community and wondered among his acquaintances what Adolfo Calero and other people in the FDN movement were doing and the word that he received back is that they were probably engaged in cocaine smuggling,” Ainsworth later told the FBI.
During one of Ainsworth’s trips to Washington in 1985, he said, “I went to see some friends of mine and started asking some questions.” One friend slipped Ainsworth a copy of a Drug Enforcement Administration intelligence report dated February 6, 1984. The DEA report, prepared by agent Sandalio González in San José, Costa Rica, told of the results of a debriefing of a confidential informant. Ainsworth’s heart sank as he read it. The informant “related that Norwin Meneses Cantarero, Edmundo’s younger brother, was presently residing in San José, Costa Rica, and is the apparent head of a criminal organization responsible for smuggling kilogram quantities of cocaine to the United States.” The discovery left Ainsworth reeling: “I had gone through the Looking Glass. I had crossed over into the nether world that 99 percent of the population wouldn’t even believe existed.”
In September 1985 Ainsworth was contacted by a U.S. Customs Service official who was “investigating the Nicaraguan role in a large narcotics ring extending from Miami, Florida to Texas and California.” The Customs agent wanted to ask Ainsworth about the FDN. “During the contact, [name deleted] complained to Ainsworth that national security interests kept him from making good narcotics cases and he acted frustrated at this chain of events,” Ainsworth would later tell the FBI. “According to [name deleted] two U.S. Customs Service officers who felt threatened and intimidated by National Security interference in legitimate narcoties smuggling investigations had resigned and had assumed false identities.” The FBI report went on to say that the Customs agent “told Ainsworth that Norwin Meneses would have been arrested in a major drug case in 1983 or 1984 except that he had been warned by a corrupt [information deleted] officer.”
Other law enforcement sources told Ainsworth “they had a file on Meneses that was two feet thick. I thought this bastard should have been arrested. I assumed there would be an outstanding warrant on this guy. I was amazed. There wasn’t a single outstanding warrant on Meneses. Not one. They had no interest in him whatsoever. Here you had a major cocaine trafficker who was deeply involved with the Contras, and apparently, everyone but me knew about it. After I broke with Calero, I found out Calero and Meneses were very good friends.”
Calero has admitted meeting with Meneses on at least six occasions in San Francisco, but he has portrayed them as simple greetings during large public gatherings. He has repeatedly denied knowing Meneses was a drug trafficker, yet he admitted to a Costa Rican paper in 1986 that he knew Meneses was “involved in some illegal things, but I don’t know anything.”
USACA president Don Sinicco said he never suspected Norwin Meneses was involved in criminal activities, but he confirmed that Ainsworth began muttering about it. “What always bothered me about [Dennis] is that towards the end, I don’t know what, he seemed to get disillusioned or disgusted with Calero. Dennis got disillusioned about something,” Sinicco said.
Ainsworth’s disillusionment caused him to quit working with the Contras and seek out the FBI. In early 1987, records show, during his first meeting with FBI agents, Ainsworth warned them that the FDN “has become more involved in selling arms and cocaine for personal gain than in a military effort to overthrow the current Nicaraguan Sandinista government.” He told the agents about Norwin Meneses and Renato Peña, about Tom Dowling and Oliver North, and about North’s illegal Contra support network in the U.S. and Central America. Much of the information Ainsworth gave the FBI and, later, Iran-Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh’s staff about the inner workings of the FDN and the relationships between Contra leaders and U.S. government officials was corroborated during the congressional Iran-Contra investigations.
Ainsworth was also getting death threats, he told the FBI, but the agents seemed unimpressed. “He had no information to substantiate this alleged threat,” they wrote. Ainsworth never heard from them again. “I mean, here I am as a citizen, I complained to the FBI and they tell me they have no interest in the case. Then I call Walsh’s people up and they sent a couple FBI guys out to talk to me and they have no interest in it. I couldn’t find anyone who was interested in this. And I made a legitimate effort. And people were like, ‘Den, leave this alone. Just leave it alone,”’ Ainsworth remembered. “I thought I was part of the establishment. And all of a sudden I was a leper.” Frightened and heartsick, Ainsworth fled California for the East Coast, where he went into semiseclusion.
Meanwhile, the narcotics investigation that began with the arrests of Renato Peña and Jairo Meneses seemed to fall into a black hole. The case federal prosecutors had assembled against the drug kingpin’s nephew was a slam-dunk. They’d found cocaine in Jairo’s apartment; his codefendant had cut a deal and was prepared to testify for the government. If convicted of the charges against him—one count of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and six counts of possession with intent to distribute—Jairo Meneses would spend the next fifteen years in the federal pen. His decision to plead guilty and rat out Uncle Norwin could hardly be considered a surprise.
Like Peña, Jairo Meneses was debriefed by the DEA and he, too, implicated the Contras in Norwin’s drug sales, confirming that his uncle had direct dealings with both Blandón and FDN commander Enrique Bermúdez. But his admissions in court were limited to the bookkeeping work he’d done for Norwin in San Francisco; he never breathed a word in public about the Contras.
Were these men telling the truth? If one looks at the outcome of their criminal cases, the inescapable conclusion is that they were. Inventing stories about Contra drug trafficking was not the usual way admitted dope dealers ingratiated themselves with Ed Meese and his hypersensitive Justice Department. But despite being caught red-handed with pounds of cocaine, they were neither sent to jail nor deported. They got probation and a work-furlough job and kept their mouths shut, which suggests that the Justice Department found them entirely too believable.
In an interview with a Costa Rican paper in 1986, Meneses scoffed at his nephew’s testimony. Jairo had made it up, Norwin declared, because he’d refused to bail the boy out when he’d gotten arrested. “If Jairo supposedly was my accountant, like he says, I would have been interested in taking him out of jail because he would have had me by the tail,” Meneses told La Nacion. “Isn’t that logical?” (Norwin didn’t mention that Jairo’s bail was paid by Danilo Blandón’s sister, Leysla Balladares, who also bailed out Peña, her boyfriend.) “Besides,” Norwin added, “I remained in San Francisco. I have never hidden. There’s never been a warrant for my arrest. I have not changed passports. That I directed a drug trafficking organization is totally false.”
Some of Meneses’s assertions were indeed irrefutable. With the testimony of Jairo Meneses and Renato Peña, and the stacks of other evidence the police had compiled against him over the years, it would have been a relatively easy matter to have convicted the drug lord on any number of trafficking and conspiracy charges. Many dopers have gone to jail on much less evidence. At a minimum, the government could have deported him as an undesirable alien and banned him forever from the United States; he was, after all, living in the United States as a guest of the government—a political refugee.
But it didn’t happen. Nothing happened. Norwin Meneses continued living as a free man, crisscrossing U.S. borders with impunity, dealing cocaine and sending supplies to the Contras. And his relationship with the U.S. government grew even closer.