WASHINGTON – The United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has been transformed into a global intelligence organisation 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.
Created in 1973, the DEA has steadily built its international turf, an expansion primarily driven by the multinational nature of the drug trade but also by forces within the agency seeking a larger mandate.
In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to some news organisations, offer glimpses of DEA 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 DEA 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 son of the President, and diplomats discovered that before the police were able to destroy a huge narcotics seizure, the drugs had been replaced by flour.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 US sanctions, describe the drug agency's informants reporting both on how the military junta enriches itself with drug money as well as on the political activities of the junta's opponents.
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 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has become something more than a drug agency.
The DEA now has 87 offices in 63 countries and close partnerships with governments that keep the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at arm's length.
Because of the ubiquity of the drug scourge, today's DEA has access to foreign governments, including those, like Nicaragua's and Venezuela's, that have strained diplomatic relations with the US. Many are eager to take advantage of the agency's drug detection and wiretapping technologies.
In some countries, the collaboration appears to work well, although victories have come at a high price, with scores of DEA informants as well as a handful of agents killed in Mexico and Afghanistan. The New York Times
