Money Laundering & Murder in Colombia: Official Documents Point to DEA Complicity

Money Laundering & Murder in Colombia: Official Documents Point to DEA Complicity
Kent Memo’s Corruption Allegations Bolstered by FOIA Records, Leaked U.S. Embassy Teletype



By Bill Conroy
Special to The Narco News Bulletin
May 18, 2008

The bullet-riddled body of a DEA informant was dumped on the street in front of his home in Bogotá, Colombia, in June 2002. The informant, who had a background as a self-taught chemist, had been released from a Colombian prison in March of that year, after being arrested by Colombian police on narco-trafficking-related charges.

Prior to his lifeless body being thrown from a car onto the hard pavement of a Bogotá road, the informant had been reported missing after embarking on a trip to the airport.

The informant’s death was due to a deceit that has since metastasized inside the DEA and is spreading like a cancer, threatening to undermine any credibility the agency might have gained in the years since its creation in the 1970s.

The core of that deceit is outlined in a memo leaked to Narco News in 2006. That memo, drafted by Department of Justice attorney Thomas M. Kent in December 2004, contains some of the most serious allegations ever raised against U.S. antinarcotics officers: that DEA agents on the front lines of the drug war in Colombia are on drug traffickers’ payrolls, complicit in the murders of informants, and directly involved in helping Colombia’s infamous paramilitary death squads to launder drug money.

To date, officials with DEA — and the Department of Justice under which it is housed — have been content to dismiss Kent’s allegations as being without merit, the product of a simple turf war between rival agents. (For more on the Kent memo, see Narco News’ Bogotá Connection series at this link.)

However, Narco News recently obtained documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request as well as additional information from DEA sources that lend credence to the Kent memo and provide new insight into a few of the specific corruption allegations outlined in that memo.

The FOIA documents obtained by Narco News appear to implicate a former high-level Bogotá DEA agent in a perjury that led to the death of the DEA informant. That agent has since been promoted to command a major DEA field division in the United States.

In addition, the new information provided by DEA sources appears to implicate another former high-level Bogotá DEA agent (who went on to oversee a major inter-agency antinarcotics task-force program) in money laundering activities linked to a Colombian rightwing paramilitary group.


Death of an Informant

The FOIA documents provide background on a narco-trafficking case that was handled by a DEA group supervisor in Florida named Edward Fields. The documents were obtained from the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), which hears cases related to whistleblowing by federal agents.

Fields authored a memo in June 2001 (under orders from his superiors) that outlined a “factual chronology of events” leading up to the arrest of several DEA informants in Bogotá. Those informants were assisting Fields in a case revolving around a Colombian narco-trafficking ring’s use of chemistry to conceal cocaine and heroin that was being smuggled into the United States and Europe.

Fields MSPB case was sparked, in part, by the retaliation he suffered in the wake of writing the memo. The administrative judge in the case ultimately dismissed Fields’ case, claiming the MSPB had no jurisdiction because the memo drafted by Fields did not constitute an act of whistleblowing.

But the court of public opinion does have jurisdiction over Fields’ pleadings, and based on a reading of those pleadings obtained through the FOIA request, they do seem to mirror nearly precisely the allegations advanced in the Kent memo.

Following is a summary of the account of the acrylic case provided in the Kent memo.

“Specifically, the narcotics traffickers in Colombia were infusing acrylic with cocaine and shaping it into any number of commercial goods,” the Kent memo states. “The acrylic was then shipped to the United States and Europe where, during processing, the cocaine was extracted from the acrylic.”

Informants working for Group Supervisor Fields’ Florida agents sent samples of the cocaine-laced acrylic to the DEA, but the agency’s chemists couldn’t figure out how to extract the cocaine. As a result, the Florida agents decided to have the informants come to the United States with a sample of the acrylic, so they could walk DEA’s chemists through the extraction process.

“Agents contacted the Bogotá Country Office to discuss the informants’ planned travel and their bringing cocaine out of Colombia infused in acrylic,” the Kent memo states. “They were advised that the best tact was for the informants to carry it out themselves.”

But when the informants got to the airport to leave for the U.S., they were arrested. A DEA agent in Bogotá, it turns out, had told Colombian officials to “lock them (the informants) up and throw away the key,” according to the Kent memo. The Bogotá agent then claimed that he had no idea the Florida agents had given the informants permission to transport the cocaine.

“His misrepresentations were backed by another agent in Bogotá,” Kent states in the memo. “The informants were imprisoned for nine months while the accusations flew back and forth. Once it was determined that the agents in Bogotá were lying, the informants were released. One of the informants was kidnapped and murdered in Bogotá where he had gone into hiding.”

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http://narconews.com/Issue53/article3099.html