Rick Reuben wrote:Josef K wrote:Ok, but the DEA is hardly going to target artists who smoke a little pot are they? Don't you think that their operations have some value especially in curtailing the activities of the criminal drug organisations?
No. The DEA protects the exclusive license to traffic drugs into the US and partner nations that was granted to the CIA's designates, in order for the Agency to fund their operations off-budget. Secondarily, the DEA helps make sure that all income from drug smuggling is funneled through the proper banks, which reap huge profits from blending the lucrative drug economy into the 'clean' pool of capital. The DEA chases renegades, not those who play by the rules.
It's actually a whole lot more complicated than that. Some top drug trafficking organizations are given immunity, and often aided and abetted by the CIA.
The CIA is different from other government agencies in that CIA is an espionage organization. To protect the secrecy of its actions and resources, it does not report details of its budget to Congress. In the pursuit of critical sensitive information, many of its operations include "extralegal" activities. This means that they look for ways to get the information, regardless of the law. They're always developing clever ways to get
around the law, or to break it outright without getting caught.
Spy agencies are concerned primarily with the collection and dissemination of privileged political information, and powerful international crime organizations always have high-level political connections, so the CIA often makes contacts with organized crime. Many dissident political groups of interest to the US use criminal trades to fund their operations, because large sums of untraceable cash can be procured through the international drug trade. Since these organizations are already operating outside the law by taking up arms against their country's government, so dealing shit on the side is no big deal to them.
These connections between crime and espionage are pretty universal. Spy agencies all over the world cultivate relationships with criminals or whomever can provide them with the information they seek. In return, they offer connections, funding, weapons, even some degree of legal immunity. In many historical cases, the CIA and NSA have worked closely in support of small anti-communist political organizations in Southeast Asia, Afghanistan and in Central and South America. These are organizations which obtained much of their funding through the large-scale production and trafficking of illicit drugs. The US government places such a high priority on these "national security" operations, that the resulting flow of dangerous illicit drugs into the USA presents a serious conflict of interests between the actions of CIA and DEA. For example, I once read that in the 1970s, there was a small village in the Chiang Mai province of Thailand which was home to several poppy farms and illicit morphine factories that were responsible for up to 20% of all the street heroin on the East Coast of the US. In this small town, the US DEA had a ramshackle office with a 3 or 4 agents, a few desks and a fax machine, but the CIA and NSA had hundreds of operatives in the fields outside the town, arming and training the drug dealers and
using American CIA helicopters to airlift the opium poppies from the fields into town where it was processed into morphine.
Now contrast that with the procedures of investigative agencies like the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, etc. Those guys are cops, "door kickers", Law-and-Order types. They follow very strict laws when performing their investigations, then they sweep in with extreme force to make the arrest without harming anybody. They meticulously document all their evidence just like cops do, and then they turn the information over to the Federal prosecutors to make the case.
Two very different animals, the cops and the spooks. That's why there is such a long history of poor communication, interference and animosity among those agencies.
If you're interested in a fascinating book about the history and operation of US intelligence agencies, check out :
Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence
and these two excellent books by James Bamford:
The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency.
If you want a good read about the conflict of interests between the DEA and the CIA, check out:
The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade by Alfred W. McCoy.