The Drug Enforcement Administration
has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a
reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation
so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it
against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables.
In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks
and made available to some news organizations, offer glimpses of drug
agents balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be
hard to tell the politicians from the traffickers, and where drug rings
are themselves mini-states whose wealth and violence permit them to run
roughshod over struggling governments. Diplomats recorded
unforgettable vignettes from the largely unseen war on drugs: In Panama, an urgent BlackBerry message from the president to the
American ambassador demanded that the D.E.A. go after his political
enemies: "I need help with tapping phones."
In Sierra Leone, a major cocaine-trafficking prosecution was almost
upended by the attorney general's attempt to solicit $2.5 million in
bribes. In Guinea, the country's biggest narcotics kingpin turned out to be the
president's son, and diplomats discovered that before the police
destroyed a huge narcotics seizure, the drugs had been replaced by
flour. Leaders of Mexico's beleaguered military issued private pleas for
closer collaboration with the drug agency, confessing that they had
little faith in their own country's police forces.
Cables from Myanmar, the target of strict United States sanctions,
describe the drug agency informants' reporting both on how the military
junta enriches itself with drug money and on the political activities of
the junta's opponents. Officials of the D.E.A. and the State Department declined to discuss
what they said was information that should never have been made public. Like many of the cables made public in recent weeks, those describing the drug war
do not offer large disclosures. Rather, it is the details that add up
to a clearer picture of the corrupting influence of big traffickers, the
tricky game of figuring out which foreign officials are actually
controlled by drug lords, and the story of how an entrepreneurial agency
operating in the shadows of the F.B.I.
has become something more than a drug agency. The D.E.A. now has 87
offices in 63 countries and close partnerships with governments that
keep the Central Intelligence Agency at arm's length.
Because of the ubiquity of the drug scourge, today's D.E.A. has access
to foreign governments, including those, like Nicaragua's and
Venezuela's, that have strained diplomatic relations with the United
States. Many are eager to take advantage of the agency's drug detection
and wiretapping technologies. In some countries, the collaboration appears to work well, with the drug
agency providing intelligence that has helped bring down traffickers,
and even entire cartels. But the victories can come at a high price,
according to the cables, which describe scores of D.E.A. informants and a
handful of agents who have been killed in Mexico and Afghanistan.
In Venezuela, the local intelligence service turned the tables on the
D.E.A., infiltrating its operations, sabotaging equipment and hiring a
computer hacker to intercept American Embassy e-mails, the cables
report. And as the drug agency has expanded its eavesdropping operations to keep
up with cartels, it has faced repeated pressure to redirect its
counternarcotics surveillance to local concerns, provoking tensions with
some of Washington's closest allies.
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