Columns

HIDDEN AGENDAS

March 1990 Mort Rosenblum
Columns
HIDDEN AGENDAS
March 1990 Mort Rosenblum

HIDDEN AGENDAS

The Honduran connection makes hypocrisy out of the hype about Bush's war on drugs

MORT ROSENBLUM

Drugs

George Bush's war on drugs opened with all the fanfare of a Napoleonic campaign. The president held aloft a Baggie of crack purchased from a miscreant produced for the occasion. His field marshal, given the title of czar, peered sternly from television sets and front pages. Real soldiers were enlisted. A drug summit was convened for this month so that Bush could plan strategy with his Latin-American colleagues.

And then Bush nabbed his man in Panama, showing that when it comes to drugs the law's long arm knows no boundaries. But Operation Just Cause leapfrogged Honduras without a pause. U.S. administration officials have known for years that senior Honduran military officers are funneling cocaine by the ton into the United States. All things being equal, drug-enforcement agents say, they could build a stronger case against the Hondurans than against Manuel Antonio Noriega. Clearly, all things are not equal.

The Noriega case underscores the U.S.'s selective—not to say hypocritical—approach to fighting drugs. People tend to forget, in the tumble of recent events, that it was a maverick chief assistant U.S. attorney, Richard Gregorie, who chanced upon the evidence against Noriega and insisted on indicting the Panamanian strongman in February 1988. The administration was dragged along, kicking and screaming. Gregorie has since resigned in disgust. He could not indict the Hondurans, he said, because the State Department and the intelligence community withheld their help.

For Washington is at war not only with drugs but also with Communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and Honduras may be its last, best proxy in the region. The drug-enforcement agents who are expected to take the battle into the trenches know they are using spiked guns. Few of them hope to seize much ground until Washington's selectivity— hypocrisy—vanishes. Many remember what happened in Lubbock.

Lubbock is a rawboned West Texas trailhead, a long drive from anywhere else. Music stores put Percy Faith in the classical section. When China erupted last year, it was the third item on the evening news. Cops are busy separating cowhands from lawyers in love at a disco bam called Cheers. Courts are somnolent, and reporters don't wait up for the Pulitzer committee's decisions. No one even noticed when, on January 18, 1987, federal agents arrested Eugenio Molina Osorio.

Undercover Drug Enforcement Administration officers had spotted the mysterious Honduran months before in Florida, and they wanted him. Molina described himself as a dealer in heavyconstruction equipment, a businessman looking around. But something about this portly and polished man said you wouldn't want to buy a used backhoe from him.

Molina's eyes darted too quickly under his expensive steel-rimmed glasses. His tongue was too silvery, his Xavier Cugat mustache too well pruned. His brisk gait suggested a man about to glance furtively over his shoulder and make a phone call. He had made seven trips to the United States in two years, sometimes through Guatemala and Mexico. And his business contact in the U.S. was a known Honduran cocaine trafficker.

Honduras was a sore spot among D.E.A. men, the connection they couldn't close down. They were hardly allowed to talk about it. Several years earlier, the D.E.A. agent there had reported that senior Honduran military officers were relaying cocaine to the United States. Rather than following up, Washington moved the man to Guatemala and closed his Tegucigalpa office. The Hondurans picked up their tempo. During a fifteen-month period lasting until 1988, perhaps as much as fifty tons moved through Honduras—nine tons of which was seized—amounting to half the estimated consumption in the United States.

Molina looked as if he had a main line into the Honduran network, and the D.E.A. went to work on him. A Cuban undercover agent befriended him and eventually arranged a buy. The D.E.A. selected Lubbock, far from the insalubrious swamps of south Florida, where drug cases are sloughed off as routine and prosecutors don't always have the time to go for blood. Molina took a room at the Holiday Inn and called a number in Miami. The deal was that Molina would sell two kilos to a rancher the Cuban knew; if the buyer was happy, Molina would provide another twentyeight. Two days later, a rented Chrysler showed up.

Drug-enforcement agents say they could build a stronger case against the Hondurans than against Noriega.

Molina led the rancher to the car, opened the trunk, and handed over the cocaine. The rancher, Special Agent Kenneth Lee, nodded over his shoulder, and the bushes sprang to life with Feds, a state narcotics officer, and Lubbock cops.

Federal Magistrate J. Q. Wamick Jr. denied bail. The defendant's passport, full of visas, suggested he might neglect to attend his trial. Still, Judge Wamick regarded this as a run-of-the-mill drug bust, yet another Latino with a couple of keys to peddle. But D.E.A. agents, onto something big, planned to squeeze Molina until he pointed them to the top. They knew Assistant U.S. Attorney C. Richard Baker, a drug-hating crusader with an open-and-shut case, could go for twenty years. Molina had a better idea. When he had had enough of Lubbock, he phoned his wife in Tegucigalpa. Within weeks, Baker told the judge he did not have sufficient evidence, and moved to dismiss the case.

The case would have gone unnoticed had reporter Chris Alexander not been hanging around the courts one day, bored. Working for KLBK-TV, the CBS affiliate in Lubbock, he badgered a friendly bailiff for something to report. Well, the guy said, there was this contra... Alexander let the tip slide; Lubbock is farther from Central America than the map suggests. Then one night he noticed a CBS West 57th segment on contra drug running. He began to ask around. But the newspaper reporter who covered the courts knew nothing. It seemed Judge Wamick had cleared the room before Molina's second hearing, for reasons of national security.

Alexander persuaded the station owner to sue for court records. Judge Warnick ^released a transcript so heavily edited it barely made sense. But the envelope contained a bonus. Someone had forgotten to classify the defense attorney's requested deletions. Alexander scanned two pages of such references as "delete 'besides your working for the CIA,' " and he headed for the door. Judge Wamick realized what had happened and sealed the document after the fact. Alexander had his story, but he was under a gag order.

All KLBK-TV was able to show was a smirking ex-defendant walking out into the Texas sunlight, resplendent in a white guayabera and carrying his sturdy frame with the easy confidence of a Juarez divorce broker. The station fought on and got the full transcript three months later. By then, the case was a historical footnote. The local paper ran a few items and dropped the story. By the time I got to Lubbock two years later, Molina had all the impact of a puzzle piece left too long on the kitchen table.

Alexander pawed through his files and found me a stack of court documents. According to the full transcript, Molina had told the judge he was working for the C.I.A. His brief for the agency was political espionage, but he had set himself the task of penetrating Honduran drug smuggling because, he said, he wanted to prove that corrupt Honduran officials were helping Communist forces earn chug money.

Judge Wamick's response went right to the point: "I hate to say this—I guess we're all aware that they [the C.I.A.] do business in a different way than everybody else—but I guess their understanding is that with some folks, and I'm not saying it's true here, they leave you to hang out to dry. And if that's the problem, that's your problem, not theirs."

But Molina was not about to hang out to dry. His problem, he made clear, was the C.I.A.'s problem. It did not take long to solve. Shortly afterward, a letter arrived from C.I.A. headquarters which only Judge Wamick and the assistant U.S. attorney were allowed to see. Molina's attorney, though, had a pretty clear idea of its contents when he saw Baker's motion to dismiss.

"Investigation by agents of the United States has failed to establish sufficient legally admissible evidence to insure a conviction... on charges of Possession With Intent to Distribute and Distribution of a Controlled Substance," the motion said. It added, "There exists no reasonable prospect at the current time or in the near future" that the government would find the evidence.

This surprised the agents who had watched Molina hand over $90,000 worth of cocaine. Special Agent Robert Shannon's affidavit was detailed down to the Florida-license-plate number. There was also Molina's own testimony.

"We worked out a deal," explained David Martinez, the young Lubbock lawyer who took over Molina's defense. "They knew if we went to trial he was going to have to say a lot of stuff that no one wants to hear about."

In his chambers, Judge Warnick poured me a cup of coffee. Diffident, balding, with a kindly face, he was the sort of man you'd hope to encounter if the Feds caught you burrowing under a bank. I asked why the charges were suddenly dropped. "We didn't even ask the question," Wamick said. "If the government says they can't prosecute, that's pretty much it.... We can't whop 'em over the head and make 'em do it." Nonetheless, he recalled, "it was all sort of casual." The Dallas immigration officials did not even escort Molina out of the country. ' 'They sure as hell don't treat the illegal aliens around here that way.

They put 'em on a bus to Acapulco."

Pleasantly, he declined to discuss the letter or details still under seal. But I broadened the question to include the role of the U.S. attorneys. If the administration was obstructing justice in embarrassing cases, it was an important point. Judge Wamick grinned and finished his coffee. Strictly speaking, he began, the Justice Department can't interfere with the work of U.S. attorneys, although they all report to the Justice Department. It is more a question of influence than orders. He chuckled and added, "It depends on who's running for federal judge among the U.S. attorneys as to who listens to Washington."

Finally, I asked what happens in a case like Molina's, when a defendant is involved in something that requires background information from federal agencies. Wouldn't anyone be interested in fitting him into a larger picture?

Wamick shook his head. "We're just the hinterlands, out here in West Texas," he said.

Molina led the rancher to the car and handed over the cocaine.

The bushes sprang to life with Feds.

Out beyond West Texas, in 1987, Honduras was the last precarious pillar holding up Reagan's contra apparatus. Costa Rican president Oscar Arias insisted on neutrality, and El Salvador had problems of its own. Honduras was hospitable to the contras, but also to some big-time drug traffickers. It was a tricky balance.

With the benefit of hindsight, the unedited transcript of Molina's hearing makes for fascinating reading. His C.I.A. function, he said, was to provide political intelligence. He claimed close links to the Honduran government. And, around the time Iran-contra investigators were trying to unravel Israel's role in Central America, Molina happened to have a fresh Israeli visa.

His business was construction equipment, but he wanted to make wood furniture as a sideline. He had been in North Carolina, talking about importing wood products from home. Wood was a favorite conveyance for Tegucigalpa traffickers. Officers in Florida would later find four tons of cocaine hidden in hollowed furniture from Honduras, the largest seizure ever at the time, worth about $1.4 billion on the street.

"Colombia and Nicaragua are flying loads of drugs to Honduras," Molina testified. "They're paying off officials, military officials, to allow this exchange of one plane for a clean plane of Honduras so that then they can transport drugs over into this country." In other words, a C.I.A. informant was reporting under oath that our allies the Hondurans were funneling drugs into the United States.

This was startling stuff in early 1987. While reporters were laboring to prove what they knew—that some contras sent drugs back to Florida in the same planes which brought them arms—Molina revealed to the closed court that the Hondurans were doing much more. He seemed to suggest that drugs were flown from other Honduran bases, contra supply points, which were all but run by Americans. But this was a court hearing, not a debriefing. The questioning moved on to something else.

The transcript showed that after he was arrested Molina phoned Andreas Lopez—the same man he had called just after telling the undercover D.E.A. agent he would order the cocaine. So who was Lopez? I found him running a rental-car concession at the Miami Airport Inn, a favorite haunt of spooks. Lopez is a charming man of handsome Cuban features and a prosperous air. He said he had rented cars to Molina, and they had gotten to know each other. Since Molina had no friends in the United States, Lopez said, he wanted help in getting money from Honduras to pay for his defense. When I asked about Lubbock, Lopez smiled. "I guess Molina threatened to say a few things people didn't want to hear," he said. "He told me he worked for the C.I.A. I didn't believe him, but I guess it was true."

I thanked him and left my card. Shortly afterward, a long-distance voice with an Anglo drawl phoned my number to find out about this Rosenblum running around Miami asking questions. When the voice was asked to identify itself, it said, "That doesn't matter." Then the caller hung up.

Later I telephoned the C.I.A. for a ritual denial that the agency had anything to do with drugs. The line had always been that drug trafficking is illegal and the C.I.A. does nothing illegal. But William Webster had brought in a new team. The spokesman explained that dealing secretly with corrupt people in their own countries was no easy job. He said he had not heard about Molina. But he added, "You must have stumbled on one of those cases. . . . We use smugglers, but we are careful what they do at our behest."

It is C.I.A. policy to pass along drug intelligence to other agencies, he said, but its first concern is to protect its contacts and stick to its defined priorities.

C.I.A. agents have a horror of being hauled into court as witnesses; they fear sources will dry up. Some regard the

D.E.A. as a pack of semi-literate cowboys who have no business messing with world affairs. The C.I.A. spokesman put it more tactfully: "We are not a lawenforcement agency."

In Washington, Frank McNeil sat down over chocolate eclairs and tea to explain some facts of life. "There is no one big conspiracy," he said. "Just a lot of little ones."

McNeil had been deputy assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research. Before that, he had been ambassador to Costa Rica. His real name, Francis, fit the fastidious manner in which he selected words and thoughts and carefully marshaled his gestures. You could hardly peel a banana in Honduras or Costa Rica without U.S. intelligence knowing about it, he said. C.I.A. people knew which military officers and public officials were corrupt. Jungle airstrips did not escape National Security Agency satellites. They all swung wide of drugs, however, for the reasons mentioned by the C.I.A spokesman: it was a question of priorities.

"Our emphasis is 90 percent Communism and 10 percent drugs," McNeil explained, "even though drugs threaten our national security just as much. We lack balance."

This was mid-1988, and McNeil had just appeared before the Senate subcommittee on terrorism, narcotics, and international operations. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the chairman, called the hearings after the first dribble of news reports on contra drug trafficking. At the time, Iran-contra business was taking up thirty investigators. The subcommittee on narcotics had one and a half. McNeil's explosive testimony had been all but ignored.

McNeil was particularly upset with the case of Honduran general Jose Bueso Rosa, which paralleled, at a high level, that of Molina.

(Continued on page 114)

Some C.I.A. agents regard the D.E.A. as a pack of semi-literate cowboys who have no business messing with world affairs.

(Continued from page 106)

In 1984, at a south-Florida airstrip, the F.B.I. seized a shipment of cocaine worth something near $20 million.

Bueso Rosa and others had planned to use it to finance the assassination of Roberto Suazo Cordoba, Honduras's first democratically elected president in a decade. The Justice Department called it the "most significant case of narco-terrorism yet discovered." This, McNeil pointed out to Congress, was not only drugs and terror but also a murder plot against an ally who was supposed to exemplify Reagan's goals for democracy in Central America.

But General Bueso Rosa, in golden exile as the military attache to Chile, had been liaison officer between the Honduran armed forces and the contras. After years of watching America's realpolitik undercut its rhetoric, he wasn't worried about being convicted by a U.S. court.

He came to Miami to face conspiracy charges, having bargained himself out of drug charges.

Senior Pentagon officers, agreeing with Bueso Rosa's lawyer that America should look after its friends, did try to get the case dropped. State Department and Justice Department officials resisted. Days before the general was to be arraigned, a fellow deputy assistant secretary of state called McNeil in a panic.

The Defense Intelligence Agency was about to throw a lunch for Bueso Rosa in the Pentagon's executive dining room. It took McNeil and others an hour and fifteen minutes to dissuade the general's would-be hosts.

Oliver North and Duane "Dewey"

Clarridge, the C.I.A. operations chief for Latin America, lobbied for leniency.

U.S. Army officers testified as character witnesses. Iran-contra files contain a note from national-security adviser John Poindexter telling North, "You may advise all concerned that the President will want to be as helpful as possible to settle this matter."

Bueso Rosa's co-plotters got thirty years, but he got only five years and was transferred to a prison McNeil described as a "country club."

North had warned in a memo that if Bueso Rosa were not kept happy he would "start singing songs nobody wants to hear." His words were almost the same as those used by Molina's lawyer in Texas.

Understandably, the Reagan-Bush administration was not eager to mess with Honduras right then. In the 1950s, American authorities had all but invented the Honduran army to protect United Fruit bananas from leftist activists. Thirty years later, it remained virtually on lease. When Washington organized its proxy war against the Sandinistas, Honduran bases at Palmerola and Aguacate were its cornerstones. The C.I.A. operated as if on sovereign territory; U.S. generals refused to tell Honduran commanders how many American troops came and went. When President Suazo finally balked at this, in 1985, George Bush hurried down. Blocked economic aid to Honduras was released and still more military aid was rushed south. Whether it was a quid pro quo is splitting hairs. The status quo continued, and no one asked quo vadis?

General Walter Lopez Reyes, then commander of the Honduran armed forces, continued to put up a fight over the U.S.'s high-handedness. He was bundled out of the job. Other senior officers, making money from contra aid and cocaine smuggling, were less perturbed. When I later asked General Lopez Reyes what impression Vice President Bush had left among military drug traffickers, he shrugged: "If no one tells them anything, they're going to go ahead."

The Honduran connection is hardly a secret. In February 1988, James LeMoyne wrote a front-page piece in The New York Times which began, "Senior Honduran Army officers and a powerful drug dealer with past ties to Gen. Antonio Noriega... are setting up major drug operations in Honduras, according to American officials and worried Honduran political leaders. The growth of drug trafficking by the Honduran Army, aided by the Colombian drug cartel, is especially troubling to American officials."

He quoted a "senior Reagan Administration official" as saying, "We can't compete with the kind of money the Colombian dealers are offering, and once the army is corrupted, we can't control it." Later LeMoyne reported, "According to two American officials, the American Embassy has opposed efforts by United States drug enforcement officials to thoroughly investigate the army."

LeMoyne also reported that the Honduran army had become involved in drug trafficking between 1978 and 1981, through Colonel Leonides Torres Arias. At the time, Torres Arias was head of intelligence in Honduras and a close friend of the Panamanian intelligence chief, Manuel Antonio Noriega. LeMoyne noted that the C.I.A. knew of Torres Arias's activities but did not react until agents found he also dealt in guns for Salvadoran leftist guerrillas and for Sandinistas.

A day after LeMoyne's piece, the Los Angeles Times reported that "Reagan administration officials" suspected Honduran-armed-forces commander General Humberto Regalado Hernandez of protecting Colombian traffickers. An unnamed State Department official was quoted as saying, "We don't know the extent of the Honduran military's involvement in drugs, but our educated guess is that all of the senior officers have knowledge, many are involved. . .and they are all reaping the profits."

Administration officials seemed concerned less by the drugs than by the Colombians' ability to outbid them for Honduran loyalty. Honduran authorities reacted, predictably, with wounded surprise. U.S. Ambassador Everett Briggs wrote the foreign minister, ''My government shares. . . concern over false and

baseless speculation that implicates Honduran officialdom in illegal narcotics traffic." Hardly anyone noticed when Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state for Latin-American affairs, told a radio interviewer that ''without a doubt" some Honduran officers were involved in drugs.

The outward signs were clear enough. Customs officers at the Miami airport poked into an arriving passenger's unusually large stock of coffee. Most of it was high-grade coke. The passenger was the Honduran ambassador to Panama and the half-brother of armed-forces commander General Regalado Hernandez. A routine highway check in Colombia picked up Jorge Ochoa, the Medellin cocaine prince, in a Porsche Turbo convertible worth $260,000 in Colombia. It belonged to the Honduran military attache to Bogota, whose declared income was a modest colonel's salary. This anecdote, among others, was recounted by Jose Blandon, a former Noriega aide who is a principal witness against the Panamanian leader. He had a lot to say about corrupt Honduran officers—to anyone who wanted to listen.

I made two trips to Honduras to investigate the extent of drug trafficking— and U.S. knowledge of it. The first, in the fall of 1988, started in Miami. A few disgruntled contra commanders had just arrived there, and I suspected they would know about drugs. They did.

Some had obvious scores to settle, but each said Honduran officers trafficked in cocaine, and each agreed that C.I.A. field agents knew who was doing what. One gave me specifics. We sat outside his bare apartment near Miami International Airport, under a broad-leafed tropical tree towering over banana plants and jungle flowers, as he carefully copied out names and numbers from a battered notebook. I was ready for a firsthand look.

Noriega's old pal Torres Arias regularly dropped thousands a night at the Hotel Maya casino.

Tegucigalpa looks the way its name sounds: half exotic, half ludicrous, bumpy, and oddly put together. Since it's outside the earthquake zone, it has kept enough moldy old structures to suggest colonial Spanish charm. Flowering bushes and pocket gardens provide splashes of color. Though the city is low-slung and impoverished-looking, a few sleek buildings accent its modest skyline. It is dominated by a giant sign, on a steep hill visible from any direction, with a simple message: COCA-COLA.

Honduras means ''the depths," just a hair short of ''the pits." In Latin America, only Haiti is poorer, and not by much. Even at wholesale rates, cocaine is too pricey to be a street problem. Instead, kids sniff a cheap glue called Resistol. On school days in Tegucigalpa, the riverbank is thick with seven-yearold resistoleros, noses in cardboard tubes, poaching their brains. ''It's easy to explain," an aid-worker friend told me. ''That way they don't have to eat."

The original banana republic, Honduras still relies on Chiquita and Uncle Sam to keep it afloat. Presidents are elected, but military men run the country, down to the comer cop. Nothing important—certainly nothing lucrative—happens without their O.K. A tight brotherhood binds officers together; misconduct may be punished, but seldom in public.

Still, a fierce pride infuses many of Honduras's 4.7 million inhabitants, and this drug business troubles them. I talked to a number of Hondurans, as well as Spanish and French intelligence sources. No one had any doubt that senior Honduran military officers were deeply involved in transiting cocaine shipments, as Molina had testified in Lubbock, or that the C.I.A. knew most of the details.

Speaking privately, Americans in Honduras and neighboring countries said the same thing. D.E.A. agents in the region said that Honduran cocaine transshipments at the time could be surpassing three tons a month. One source close to the Honduran Cabinet remarked, "Anyone who knows the first thing about this country knows that drugs cannot move as they do without the connivance of the military. Not all officers are involved, obviously, but no one is prepared to object, not even the highestranking people, for fear of endangering their command."

David Romero was more specific. Romero works for Radio America, an independent radio station. He is one of those reporters a small spooky place like Honduras produces, determined to dig deep but constrained to live close by the people he covers. In January 1988, he read on the air the names of six ranking Honduran army and navy officers he said were on a list of presumed traffickers prepared by the U.S. State Department. He did it, he said, because he knew the list was accurate, if incomplete.

One name was Noriega's old pal Torres Arias, the intelligence chief. Since retired, he is regularly found dropping up to $10,000 a night at the Hotel Maya casino. Another was Colonel Roberto Nunez Montes, who also served as head of intelligence and whose lavish lifestyle has spurred at least one U.S. official to demand in embassy meetings that something be done about him.

At the American Embassy, an official who cannot be named disavowed the list and said he had heard only "rumors." There was no evidence. On the contrary, he said, Honduran officers had invited the D.E.A. to reopen a Tegucigalpa office, and they had handed over Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, a notorious smuggler wanted in the murder of a D.E.A. agent in Mexico. I pointed out that Matta was a civilian, not part of the protected brotherhood, and in any case was captured secretly over the bitter objections of some military officers.

That night, I met a ranking American officer who dealt regularly with his Honduran counterparts and also with the people who applied U.S. policy. He knew about C.I.A. and military intelligence. "Drugs," he said, throwing up his hands. "That's the D.E.A. 's problem. We got enough to do." He snorted when I mentioned the embassy's protestations of ignorance.

"Of course we know what's going on," he said. "And as long as they support the contras, we're not going to touch them."

When I got back to Tegucigalpa in late 1989, little had changed. We approached peace with the headquarters of the Evil Empire but not with its far-flung outpost of Nicaragua. And Honduras was still our only reliable aircraft carrier in the region.

D.E.A. experts in Washington were guessing that only a fifth of America's cocaine was passing through Honduranmilitary hands. But Honduran sources said the D.E.A. didn't know the half of it. I found one Honduran in a position to know. For health reasons, he asked not to be named. Someone had recently redecorated his apartment with C-4 explosive. Drug seizures were diminishing, he said, because traffickers were getting smarter. A rotten core of officers was rapidly contaminating the entire armed forces. Then he sent me to the horse's mouth—a top-ranking Honduran officer who agreed to fill me in.

As the D.E.A. reported, smuggling began in 1981. Ships from Colombia brought cocaine to the Miskito Coast, a remote jungle no-man 's-land in the Southeast, and other points. It then moved to Puerto Cortes, under navy protection, and to isolated airfields. Some left for the United States from military bases, but big loads were smuggled across the Gulf of Mexico. Money was laundered in Panama.

The House Committee on Crime got no further. "We were snookered on Honduras," says the chief investigator.

Routes and methods changed with the times. Much of it now transits Mexico, and some goes through Guatemala. Banana containers are growing popular, my source said, and some officers have started a company that ships frozen shrimp, using a favorite ploy of foiling dope dogs by chilling their noses. Smugglers are branching out, to the Bahamas and to the Ivory Coast for relay to Europe, bringing old routes back into vogue. Tons are stockpiled for when the heat eases up.

The traffic, my source concluded, is still controlled by a tight group of officers with a nucleus in military intelligence and the navy. I repeated the line often used by U.S. officials: the problem is corrupt individuals, not institutional corruption. "What's the difference?'' he asked. "It has nearly corrupted the institution. While it is still individuals, they can be isolated and stopped. But only the Americans can do it.''

Curiously enough, Molina made the same point.

I searched for him in Tegucigalpa until he found me. Honduran friends had given me some background. He is the forty-six-year-old son of a rich lawyer and land developer. His brother, a lawyer, had owned part of SETCO, an aircharter service that was used by the contras and partially financed, according to the Kerry report, by drug money. Molina's sister-in-law had worked at the U.S. Consulate since the time when it harbored a C.I.A. recruiting office.

I drove past his house, a rambling white, iron-grilled job of Bel-Air proportions high on the expensive hill above military-security headquarters. That evening he showed up at my hotel, cool, collected, a fish in familiar water. With a pleasant smile, he asked what I wanted. I told him, and he artfully masked the oh-shit look which darted across his face.

In Tegucigalpa, the Lubbock incident had made only a paragraph inside the paper on a busy Saturday. Molina first tried a few dodges, hoping that was all I knew. Then he kicked in the charm. He was in danger, he said, glancing around nervously as we spoke. He wanted to get out of the spy business anyway. I could help him by revealing the truth. But he would have to think about it. He promised to come back the next day at two o'clock.

Molina returned on schedule, with a single condition: we would level with each other. Fine, I said, and I asked if Lubbock had been his first brush with the law. Of course, he replied. His steady, warm gaze might have convinced me. But I had spent the morning examining his criminal record, for repeated fraud, at the Primer Juzgado.

The court file noted he had lied about being an engineer, serious business in a place where "Ing.'' before a name is like "Prof." or "Father." It said that Molina had dabbled in various businesses. Prior to leasing construction equipment, he sold organic fertilizer. Once, he was arrested for paying a debt to an old friend with bad U.S. checks.

He told me more about Lubbock. "The D.E.A. stumbled onto a C.I.A. operation," he said. "Stupid, stupid, stupid." When he was arrested he called his wife, who phoned the U.S. Embassy with a code he gave her. Pressed, Molina admitted his drug involvement was not a C.I.A. operation. He had advised his handler, he said, that he could link their Honduran allies to drugs, but was told to butt out. He went ahead, he claimed, because cocaine was staining his nation's honor. That was why he helped America, Molina added. "It's an old idealistic dream of mine, from childhood, when I thought I could do something for what is right," he said, chuckling a little. "I'm playing."

As we talked, the word "slippery" kept coming to mind. He was the kind of witness you could stir-fry on the stand. Still, I remembered Judge Wamick's observation in Lubbock: "You can't go into Sunday school to find people to testify. You got to get the guy who was in the bar when the shooting took place." Molina's information rang true, and he went into more detail than the court transcript provided.

I did not ask for names or places, because he feared reprisals, but he maintained that Honduran officers sneaked drugs onto the same aircraft that brought guns from the United States. Americans, not directly involved, minded their own business. I asked him about David Romero's State Department list. "They've had the list for years, but they won't do anything about it," he said. "It is destroying my country. If they let this go on, you can rain down dollars and send all the soldiers you have and you won't hold this place. There are so many obvious signs, only a mental retard would not believe it. The Americans can't hide it. They cannot deny sunlight."

Yet the U.S. Embassy still had its shades drawn. That same day I had gone there for a standard off-the-record briefing. A huge new annex was going up. Its ugly gray perimeter looked like the Berlin wall, except it had no holes in it. Inside, the answers were the same. Yes, yes, they had heard the rumors. But where was the evidence? This was a Honduran matter. But the sunlight was getting hard to deny. Privately, some embassy people spoke of military involvement as established fact. One, outraged, told me, "It's those slimy bastards who have to flaunt it that get me."

Molina and I had a third meeting. He wanted the record straight. Given his results on the frankness test, I was having real trouble. But he fixed me with those Oliver North eyes and spoke of patriotism. We parted with a warm handshake. And I told him what flight I was taking.

The next morning, as I waited in the departure lounge for my plane to Miami, immigration officers called my name. One led me to a small room, posted a guard, and disappeared. Eventually, I had a brief word with the chief. "Sit down," he said. "I have my orders." He nodded to the phone, indicating this was no routine airport check. Hours passed and my plane left, the last flight that day. An intelligence officer swept in and huddled with the immigration agents. My luggage went in for a thorough search.

I could only guess at what was happening. Molina had repeatedly dropped names—military-intelligence people. Was this serious or just a warning? Was this Molina at all? But one thing was clear: in Honduras, as in Panama, one shadowy class gained wealth and power by knowing whom to call. A smaller class did it by being the ones who were called. Eventually, someone returned with my passport and no explanation. Some mechanical problem had delayed a plane, and, if I wanted, I could go to Houston. A few hours later, the Molina story ended where it started, in Texas.

"The Pentagon made it clear we were in the way," a drug-enforcement agent said.

"They had more important business."

As for the Honduras story, there was no end in sight. When I pressed for official American answers, I got numbers. Since estimates of drug traffic said Honduras was slipping behind Mexico, and even Guatemala, as a country to worry about, why was I concerned? When I suggested this was about principle, not numbers, I got silence.

But the subject of principle arose time and again when I interviewed Latin Americans about their reluctance to make sacrifices on Washington's account. Mateo Magarinos de Mello, the grand old man of Uruguayan diplomacy, summed it up: "There is this whole gray area involved. You think you're going to solve the drug problem like that? If this sort of corruption goes on in the United States, what do you expect from poor countries?" That is, a bad cop is in no position to give lectures on morality.

Congress, charged with oversight, has unequivocally stated in a bipartisan report that "elements of the military in Honduras are involved in drug-related corruption." But Senator Kerry's committee has finished its work. Jonathan Winer, a Kerry staff investigator, said time ran out before the committee could probe indications that cocaine moved north from Palmerola. Kerry never got hold of those repeated references to drugs in North's notebooks. Donald Gregg, who as Bush's national-security adviser oversaw covert Central American operations, sailed through Senate hearings on his way to be ambassador to South Korea. Summing it up, Winer shrugged. In the end, the U.S. administration would not prosecute corrupt allies it depended upon. To cover for them, officials had only to deny knowledge. "The denials still ring louder than the facts," Winer said. "The system isn't designed very well for dealing with people who are lying to you."

The House Committee on Crime got no further. "We were snookered on Honduras," said Hayden Gregory, chief investigator for the committee. Gregory flew to Tegucigalpa, but ran into what congressional aides called obstruction by the U.S. Embassy. Nonetheless, he found tracks of "a tremendous amount of cocaine through Honduras." He added, "Certainly we have extensive reports of complicity on the part of the Honduran military, some of which have been proven. Those four tons in Florida go right to the doorstep of the Honduran military." In one case, he said, federal agents taped an incriminating offer. But his hearings are also over.

That leaves the U.S. Attorney's Office in south Florida, the people who indicted Noriega. But Richard Gregorie, the crusading chief assistant U.S. attorney, has resigned. "You could definitely get the evidence," he said when I asked about Honduras. "But there is no priority to get the evidence." In the end, everyone is waiting for the D.E.A. But among the wide range of agents who spoke their minds to me, every last one was frustrated as hell. I found one who took part in the decision to close the Tegucigalpa office. "The Pentagon made it clear that we were in the way," he said. "They had more important business."

My best D.E.A. source told me the Miami U.S. Attorney's Office had targeted the Honduran military; the D.E.A. and the prosecutors wanted action in the worst way. But no one wanted to repeat the Noriega experience. For solid, comprehensive indictments, they needed help from the State Department, the Pentagon, and the C.I.A. In Honduras, and on every other major battlefield in the war on drugs, the impetus has to come from that tight little circle who had not wanted to hear General Bueso Rosa's songs. Or Molina's.

The D.E.A., I realized, had the same problem I had. Anyone could see what was going on. Plenty of steps could be taken. But someone would have to decide to take them. U.S. officials had undercut the war on drugs for so long, and exposes had dribbled out so sporadically, that public outrage never reached critical mass. It is like what happens when you take too little of an antibiotic for too long. You grow immune to the medicine, and the infection goes on forever. Or kills you.

Three years after the Iran-contra scandal broke, the stone wall is still there. Foreign policy depends upon reliable allies in the region. Nicaragua remains enslaved, and those menacing Communist hordes are still, as Ronald Reagan warned, only a couple of days south of Harlingen, Texas. Basic questions hang: Why is Noriega so much worse than the others? Why are Nicaraguan and Cuban traffickers more evil for doing less of what our own allies do? If American officials admit privately that our allies run drugs, why don't they act? Or at least speak out?

Stepping back, there is a bigger question. If Americans are ready to sacrifice constitutional rights to fight drugs, and if they applaud an invasion that killed hundreds of people, by what special circumstances do traffickers elsewhere get off the hook? In Honduras, American officials said they could not meddle in internal matters. After Panama, that is hardly an answer.

By coincidence, D.E.A. Administrator John Lawn turned up in Paris, where I was finishing this account. Honduras, he acknowledged, is still a sore point. Authorities there offer little help. "With our limited resources," he said, "we've got to go to the countries surrounding Honduras where we are getting some cooperation." It was the same old story. Washington had to pick its war: drugs or Communist Sandinistas. Regardless of what polls showed most Americans felt, the choice had been made.