♪♪
On "America's War on Drugs"...
Interpreter: Cocaine is the atom bomb of Latin America.
Wainwright: He was given a cellmate with whom
he would go on to change the drug world.
Lehder: I could get us enough coke to get the whole world high.
[ All cheering ]
Pablo Escobar had tremendous political ambitions.
If you're gonna mess with Pablo, you know, Pablo will kill you.
I must speak to you tonight about a mounting danger
in Central America.
This is an outlaw regime.
Parenti: There's lying, secret shipments of weapons down,
and then coming back with cocaine.
Levine: I'm going after the drug dealers
that they were protecting.
We were really playing Russian roulette with our lives.
Castillo: I knew it went all the way to the White House.
I do not deny that I engaged in shredding on November 21st.
Moran: You basically have a secret CIA operation laid bare.
Ross: It's really hard for me to fantasize that something
so small could be so valuable.
Pots big enough to cook me in.
It was like, this is what I was made for.
♪♪
Wright: It's important to think about cocaine
almost not as a drug.
But what it really was was a currency.
Any valuable currency has an inherent power to it.
And cocaine became that currency.
Narrator: Two years after Richard Nixon
declares the War on Drugs,
the Watergate scandal rocks the nation.
Nixon's on his way out.
And drug use is on the rise.
Wright: In the early to mid-'70s,
because Nixon had been obsessed with marijuana and heroin,
nobody talked that much about cocaine.
And within a very short period of time,
it became one of the biggest moneymakers
in drug smuggling in the world.
And it caught everyone by surprise.
Narrator: The story of how cocaine
took America by storm starts here
in a Connecticut federal prison
where this man is doing time for car theft --
Carlos Lehder.
Son of a German father and Colombian mother,
Carlos Lehder is a man of contradictions.
He worships Hitler and John Lennon.
Stratton: He was a car thief in the beginning.
He used a lot of coke himself, he had delusions of grandeur.
He was crazy in many ways, but also he was a visionary.
Wainwright: At a fairly young age,
he went to jail in Danbury in Connecticut,
and that might have been the end of his criminal career,
but it wasn't.
He was given a cellmate with whom he would go on
to change the drug world.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
Narrator: Lehder's cell mate is an American
with a passion for aviation.
♪♪
George Jung, a hippie misfit, who specializes in smuggling
marijuana from Mexico into the U.S. on small planes.
Jung had been importing cannabis from Mexico to the United States
using a light aircraft.
He'd never thought of importing anything else.
Wright: These relatively unknown criminals hooked up together
and became partners.
It was this match made in heaven
because Jung had experience with airplanes
and with smuggling marijuana
and Lehder had experience with cocaine.
Wainwright: The combination of these two guys resulted in the conclusion
to revolutionize the cocaine trade in the United States.
♪♪
Man: Camila!
[ Indistinct conversations ]
Narrator: Medellin is the center
of Colombia's burgeoning cocaine underworld,
and the home of the man with whom
Carlos Lehder and George Jung
will revolutionize the cocaine trade.
Senorita!
Pablo Escobar Gaviria --
As a teenager was already a petty thief,
allegedly stealing gravestones
and then sanding them down to be resold.
He sells contraband cigarettes on the Colombian black market.
Then he moves on to cocaine.
♪♪
Wright: Pablo Escobar was sort of like
if you founded a company,
you need a chief of operations.
Escobar's job was to help manage this network
of cocaine processing labs,
and then to help manage the smuggling
of the cocaine product into North America.
What's wrong?
Narrator: And Escobar is looking for a better product
to compete in the North American market.
♪♪
Escobar's meeting with a Chilean chemist
who just fled a bloody coup.
♪♪
Narrator: In the early '70s, Chile, not Colombia,
is the center of the cocaine trade.
Chile's also a Cold War hotspot,
where the U.S. is worried a left-wing government
will turn Communist.
On September 11, 1973,
a CIA-backed coup overthrows
the democratically-elected government.
An American ally,
Augusto Pinochet begins cracking down
on criminals and those he considers
to be enemies of the state.
Stratton: The best chemists in the world
for making cocaine from coca were in Chile.
When they cracked down on them, they split and left
and went to Colombia.
America's attempts to foster the replacement
of left-leaning governments with governments
that were more friendly to the United States backfire.
That, ultimately, was the beginning.
♪♪
[ Speaking Spanish ]
Narrator: With help from the Chilean chemists,
Escobar and his partners in Medellin
are soon making some of the best cocaine in the world.
Farah: There was a lack of attention initially paid
to drug trafficking in Colombia
by the U.S. intelligence services
because they weren't communists.
The basic policy was capitalism is good.
Become capitalists and everything will be okay.
But that was exactly what the narcos were doing, right?
♪♪
Narrator: Carlos Lehder is out of prison,
and he has convinced Pablo Escobar to allow him
to distribute his cocaine in the U.S.
Inside his luggage is 50 kilograms
of Pablo Escobar's nearly-pure cocaine.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
It will be worth more than $2 million
if Lehder's old cellmate George Jung
can get it out of the airport.
Man: Against the wall, by the escalator.
♪♪
Excuse me.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
♪♪
Using his old marijuana connections,
Jung tests the market of L.A.'s party circuit.
George Jung came out to California with cocaine
and found himself at the head
of this party and nightclub scene.
Cocaine was the drug of doctors and lawyers
and famous people were using it in discotheques.
Jung and people like him selling cocaine,
distributing it, they became rock stars.
[ Laughter ]
Narrator: Cocaine inhaled as crystalline powder
causes a buildup of dopamine,
the feel-good neurotransmitters that kick in
when you're eating chocolate or having sex.
Grim: Jimmy Carter's top drug-policy official
was a cocaine user and said there is just as much reason
to legalize cocaine as there is to legalize marijuana.
Greed and pleasure were on the rise
and the consciousness expansion of the late '60s were waning.
♪♪
Narrator: George Jung quickly unloads his entire 50 kilogram stash.
In just two weeks, he makes $2.2 million dollars --
worth over $9 million in today's money.
Stratton: It's like a light bulb goes off
in his head and he's like, "Oh my God,
this is the business that I need to be in."
But whenever I got involved with anybody
who was in the cocaine business,
bad stuff happened every single time.
♪♪
Narrator: George Jung delivers the cash to his old cellmate
Carlos Lehder.
His successful trip to L.A. just proved that demand
for cocaine in the U.S. far outstrips supply,
and they'll soon become Pablo Escobar's
main U.S. distributors.
But there's a weak link -- transportation.
Stewardesses and other civilians are being used to smuggle coke
in luggage on commercial flights,
but it's not enough.
Large amounts of cocaine
are also snuck in on cargo ships,
hidden inside wood or other merchandise.
But ships are easy targets.
It's all about logistics.
It's all about moving the product
from one place to another.
Anybody who can figure out how to get it there,
that's what it really comes down to.
Narrator: Carlos Lehder is about to make
one of the most audacious moves
in the history of the war on drugs.
Jung has convinced him that small planes hold the key
to their takeover of the American cocaine market.
Carlos Lehder was a visionary when it came to logistics.
The man who figured out the best smuggling routes
into the United States.
The round trip flight from Colombia to Florida
is too far for a small aircraft to make without refueling.
So Lehder finds a small Bahamian Island with a long runway.
It's called Norman's Cay.
Wright: Norman's Cay was a stroke of genius
because nobody was watching planes laden with cocaine
flying from Colombia into Norman's Cay.
He buys up half the properties on the island in cash
and then threatens to kill anyone who won't leave.
Carlos Lehder took over and threw all the normal people
who were living there out and brought his boys in,
and it became just a completely insane situation.
Man #1: All right. I will consult you.
Drop 500. You're coming in too slow.
Man #2: Clear.
Check. 8-4-0.
Narrator: The Medellin Cartel now has their own island.
[ Laughing ] Sí.
Planes land and take off around the clock,
carrying hundreds of kilos of cocaine
destined for Florida.
Lehder is bringing in $20 million a month.
Stratton: It was nuts, it was crazy.
They were bringing women in there.
There were orgies.
It was party central.
Party central with a lot of cocaine.
♪♪
[ Woman speaking in Spanish ]
He was getting high on his own supply, but hugely so.
I mean, these guys would party for days.
It became nuts, completely insane.
Carlos Lehder is so coked up at that time,
he was getting really paranoid.
George Jung, the guy who really got him started
in this whole thing, kicks him off the island.
Narrator: Despite the madness, Carlos Lehder is now
head of logistics for Pablo Escobar.
Carlos Lehder went on to really pioneer the explosion
of cocaine traffic in the U.S.
But few people at the time realize Lehder and Escobar
are just middlemen
in a much larger cocaine production network
allegedly protected by the highest level
of the American government.
I'm going after the drug dealers
that they were protecting for Central Intelligence.
We were really playing Russian roulette with our lives.
Aah!
♪♪
Narrator: The foothills of the Andes --
one of the only places in the world
where the coca plant grows.
♪♪
The greatest drug lord no one knows is about to launch
a revolution in the war on drugs.
Roberto Suárez, a descendant of the rubber baron of Bolivia,
his family's plantations
were more than four times the size of New Jersey.
Roberto Suárez was a handsome, very charismatic leader.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
The Bolivian people,
among the poorest people on earth, loved him.
Why? Because Roberto feeds the people.
Narrator: In the mid-'70s, Suárez switches his empire
to a more lucrative crop -- coca.
♪♪
He was a rancher in the Beni region of Bolivia
where I happened to live for many years.
He began buying up large quantities of land,
began mass producing the huge labs in the jungles.
They had air strips hidden under the jungle canopy.
Levine: Roberto Suárez was in control of 60%-80%
of the global cocaine market.
Pablo Escobar was just a customer of Roberto Suárez.
Narrator: DEA agent Michael Levine
is based in South America,
working undercover on some of the biggest cases
in the growing cocaine trade.
I was part of an undercover team
that had penetrated the Roberto Suárez organization.
Posing as a half-Sicilian, half-Puerto Rican Mafia don
from the U.S., I had made deals
face to face with, uh, Roberto Suárez and company.
We were in position to take them down.
Enter American special interest
in the form of the CIA.
Narrator: By the mid-'70s, South America
is not only the center of the cocaine underworld,
it's also become a Cold War hotspot.
The Cold War brought a conscious fear,
on the part of our leadership,
of the encroachment of communism.
The U.S. backs right-wing dictatorships
against a perceived communist threat.
Farah: In the Cold War, everything was viewed through
who could take advantage of what.
If we didn't do this, would the Soviets taking advantage?
So we propped up dictators across the hemisphere.
♪♪
[ People chanting in native language ]
And it's here in Bolivia the U.S. worries
a leftist president is leaning toward the communist side.
Roberto Suárez began realizing that this access to money
gave him political power.
And so he offered to pay off all of Bolivia's debt,
and the government said no.
Narrator: Roberto Suárez
decides to take over the country himself.
But he needs muscle to do it,
so he turns to one of the 20th century's
most notorious war criminals --
Klaus Barbie,
one of Hitler's top Gestapo officers
in occupied France --
known as the "Butcher of Lyon."
After the war, Barbie becomes a U.S. intelligence asset,
and like many high-ranking Nazis,
he flees to South America.
Living under an assumed name in Bolivia,
he's part of Operation Condor,
the CIA-connected covert plan
to eliminate communists across South America.
♪♪
Barbie's now working for Roberto Suárez.
[ Speaking Spanish ]
His team of Nazi mercenaries known as the Fiancés of Death
help capture and torture Suárez's enemies --
other drug lords, anyone in the way.
Levine: They were all serial killers.
[ Coughing ]
They were part of the Bolivian bloody revolution,
they were killing, they were torturing.
♪♪
They're working for a guy who is powerful enough
to take over his country that CIA is helping him.
What do I do with it? Who do I turn to?
[ Crying ] No lo sé.
[ Speaking Spanish ]
♪♪
Levine: Roberto Suárez overthrows
the Bolivian government with the help of CIA assets.
[ Horns honking ]
I'm going after the drug dealers that they were protecting
for Central Intelligence.
They were playing Russian roulette with our lives.
People in the Bolivian government were murdered,
raped, exiled.
I would look up to heaven and say,
"Is anybody keeping track of this [bleep]?"
♪♪
Narrator: Suárez installs his own president
and cocaine production goes into high gear.
Farah: It was a seminal moment because it showed
that these guys could actually take control of a country.
Roberto Suárez essentially turned Bolivia into the first
fully functional narco state.
♪♪
Narrator: Suárez plies children with cocaine cigarettes
to stomp the coca leaves.
Kerosene is used to isolate the active ingredients of cocaine.
♪♪
Once in a hard paste,
Suárez uses Bolivian Air Force planes
to fly it by the ton across the border
and into the hands of Pablo Escobar and his partners.
They needed a huge supply of cocaine,
so when the coup takes place in Bolivia,
perfect timing for them.
Now they've got access to huge amounts of cocaine
that they could then smuggle into the United States.
♪♪
[ Helicopter blades whirring ]
Narrator: The Medellin Cartel is now out to take control
of South Florida's drug trade
from the Cubans and the Mafia,
and one of their own is on the ground
doing their dirty work.
Griselda Blanco,
raised in the slums of Medellin,
she made a name for herself designing
and manufacturing undergarments to smuggle cocaine.
July 4, 1976 --
when over 1,000 ships from around the world
fill New York Harbor
to celebrate America's Bicentennial,
Blanco reportedly slips 6 kilos onto a ship
sent by the Colombian Navy.
♪♪
She earns the nickname, the Black Widow,
for allegedly killing two of her husbands.
Levine: Griselda Blanco, from all my experience with her
and her group, was an animal.
Narrator: Blanco engineers a wave of violence across Miami.
♪♪
[ Woman screams ]
[ Sirens wailing ]
[ Police radio chatter ]
Two men are dead,
the shop clerk wounded,
bullets are everywhere.
Investigators make an alarming discovery
when they inspect the van the shooters leave behind.
The van's a killing machine --
armor-plated siding for protection,
specially designed window slats for sniper fire,
bulletproof vests, and an arsenal
of high-caliber automatic weapons.
Ovalle: The Dadeland shooting really jarred the public consciousness
in Miami and the rest of the United States.
[ Police radio chatter ]
Levine: Anytime you've got that massive amount
of drugs flowing into one geographical area,
you're going to have war.
♪♪
[ Helicopter blades whirring ]
Narrator: While the cocaine cowboy war body count
mounts in Miami,
so does the money.
The cocaine trade is now worth four times more
than Florida's orange harvest.
Grim: Miami's booming.
It's just cash just flowing through that city
like nothing you've ever seen.
Wright: It's important to think about cocaine not as a drug.
But what it really was was a currency.
It's easily transportable, easily smuggled,
and you can trade it for dollars anywhere in the world.
It's one of the most universally convertible currencies
that exists in the world.
Any valuable currency has an inherent power to it.
And cocaine became that currency.
Narrator: But their new wealth and fame
has made the drug lords into targets.
Farah: A private island, enormous mansions,
unlimited amounts of women and booze and coke.
You can't do that and not attract notice.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
Narrator: Deep in the jungle,
leftist rebels known as M-19
are desperate to finance their war
against the Colombian government.
They hatch a risky plot --
kidnap Martha Ochoa,
the sister of three of the Medellin Cartel leaders.
The rebels demand $12 million for her safe return.
[ Man speaking Spanish ]
♪♪
Stratton: When Martha Ochoa gets kidnapped,
the cartel guys get together and make things happen
that even the government of Colombia couldn't do.
Narrator: The Cartel leaders respond by putting together
a team of assassins they call Death to Kidnappers.
Cartel hit men hunt down and execute M-19 rebels one by one.
When they can't find one, they kill their families.
The brutality is shocking even by Colombian standards.
Wright: When the Colombians had a grudge,
they would break into the house,
they would kill the guy they wanted,
they would kill his family,
they would kill the maid, they would kill the dog,
they would even kill the fish.
Narrator: The rebels finally back down
and a deal is brokered.
Martha Ochoa is set free unharmed.
The kidnapping of Martha Ochoa
also brings the cartel leaders together.
♪♪
[ Bird chirping ]
[ All conversing in Spanish ]
Narrator: Faced with the common threat of kidnapping,
the Medellin Cartel leaders
call a meeting with their main rivals,
the cartel from the city of Cali.
♪♪
[ Paper rustling ]
They sit down and they carve up the United States
and they say, okay, you'll get Chicago and that area.
We'll take New York City and the East Coast.
Narrator: Cali will get New York.
Medellin will get Florida and the Southern states.
California is left up for grabs.
Cartels generally don't make peace with each other.
They're usually at war. But in some cases,
they get together and decide
that they've got more to gain
by a cease-fire.
[ All speaking Spanish ]
♪♪
Narrator: With the cartels aligned,
cocaine distribution reaches new highs.
♪♪
Blanco has pushed the violence too far.
Police say she might be responsible
for more than 200 murders.
Ovalle: Griselda, being the bloodthirsty person
that she became also pioneered the methods of violence
that really wreaked havoc in South Florida.
Narrator: Blanco was known for repopularizing
an old mob technique...
♪♪
...the drive-by shooting.
[ Police radio chatter ]
Narrator: The steady flow of cocaine coming into the city
has turned it into the murder capital of America.
By 1981, Miami really is a paradise lost,
the burgeoning hot zone for the drug wars.
Narrator: Over the last year,
the murder rates reached an all-time high.
By the end of July, the Medical Examiner's Office
is forced to rent a refrigeration truck
from a local Ryder.
The morgue is overflowing
and the public is in a state of panic.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Ovalle: When President Reagan takes office, this is a crisis.
These types of things don't happen in the United States.
You don't have bloodshed in the middle of the streets.
Ronald: All the agencies and law enforcement
will be brought together in a comprehensive attack
on drug trafficking and organized crime.
O0 C1♪♪
♪♪
[ Sirens wailing ]
Man #1: What kind of shape is this guy in?
Man #2: He was hit once here in the groin area
and another one down on the...
Narrator: As cocaine trafficking and murder rates soar
in South Florida,
the new president is forced to confront
a growing crisis.
Parenti: Nixon, the '70s, that's the first stage.
That kinda plateaus.
In the 1980s, Reagan initiates a second war on drugs.
One of the most critical duties that we faced upon taking office
was controlling the influx of illegal drugs
into this country.
Narrator: Ronald Reagan -- a former actor
who goes on to become the governor of California.
As president, he promises to restore the crumbling economy,
fight the communist threat,
and relaunch Nixon's forgotten War on Drugs.
This is the "Miami Vice" era
of drugs running pretty freely
between the Caribbean and Florida.
And so President Reagan put George Bush in charge of it
and told him to do his best.
Narrator: George H.W. Bush,
the blue-blood son of a powerful U.S. Senator.
George Bush was a fighter pilot.
Parenti: He later gets into the oil business
and in the '70s under Gerald Ford
is made head of Central Intelligence.
Now Vice President Bush is put in charge
of a special task force
to stop the flow of cocaine into South Florida.
Reporter: Those who have been asking for a fight
are now going to get one.
Now the war will be fought with a brain trust of expertise,
with federal, state, and local resources
pitted against the criminals
and drug traffickers and hired assassins.
Bush: It's a young task force,
a task force that has just begun the battle
of the drug war in South Florida.
♪♪
Narrator: Bush has elements of the Army, Air Force,
Navy, DEA, FBI, Coast Guard
and local police under his command.
-Police force! -Put your hands up, man!
Almost overnight, Miami starts to look like
a military occupation.
But the real battle will be fought in the shallow waters
of the Caribbean.
Wright: When Carlos Lehder bought Norman's Cay
and was flying cocaine from Colombia into his island,
a lot of that cocaine moved out into Florida via airplane.
A lot of it also went by boats.
♪♪
Narrator: The Coast Guard's being outrun by the smugglers' speed boats,
so Bush turns to an old friend for help.
George Bush had a fascination with boats, you know,
that sort of blue-blood Connecticut lifestyle.
And Don Aronow was the boat guy.
Narrator: Don Aronow, a legend in South Florida.
He builds some of the fastest speed boats in the world,
popular with Miami's elite, Hollywood stars...
We have Cary Grant running one of our Cigarettes, you know?
[ Laughter ]
...and increasingly, cocaine smugglers.
Wright: Don Aronow was the premiere race boat builder.
He built race boats that George Bush enjoyed.
They were fast, they could make round trips
between Miami and the Bahamas in a matter of hours.
And so all of the drug smugglers were gravitating to the fastest,
most badass boats on the water,
and these were built by Don Aronow.
Narrator: Bush asks Aronow to build him a fleet of chase boats
faster than the smugglers'.
Aronow calls the boats Blue Thunder,
and outfits them with two 650 horsepower engines,
promising Bush they are the state of the art
in pursuit watercraft.
Reporter: When you want to look tough on drugs,
having your picture snapped aboard Blue Thunder
is one way to do it.
♪♪
Man: Recommended course -- 3-0 degrees.
-Speed -- 20. -Side 8-4-0.
Narrator: The Blue Thunder fleet is dispatched
from the first-ever command center
built exclusively for the War on Drugs.
We have an unidentified vessel just west of West End,
Grand Bahama.
A state-of-the-art radar monitoring system
tracks suspected smugglers.
♪♪
There's definitely a lot of stuff on the boat.
Looks like he might be dumping some more stuff here, yep.
And he's changing course.
Man #2: This guy's going to beach here
pretty soon I think.
The Coast Guard soon realizes they have a problem.
Wright: Don Aronow had two sets of customers then.
He was selling to both the federal government
that was trying to interdict drugs
and he was selling to the dopers
who were bringing the drugs in.
Narrator: While the Blue Thunder boats
fly over the calm waters of Miami harbor,
their wide hull design slows them down in the open ocean.
The cigarette boats Aronow sells the narcos beat them every time.
Ovalle: Was the flaw in Blue Thunder
something that was intentional,
to help sort of the other customer base,
or was it something that was unintentional
and just pure happenstance
that ended up putting a crimp in law enforcement efforts?
It was just so Miami
because here was this rich, colorful figure,
seemingly playing both sides in law enforcement
and with the dopers bringing in cocaine.
Reporter: Don Aronow was gunned down near his boat yard
in North Miami.
Witnesses said a man in a Lincoln
pulled alongside Aronow's Mercedes
and shot him five times.
Don Aronow ended up getting murdered
and many of those questions that we may have about Blue Thunder,
and sort of what was going on ended up,
you know, dying with him.
I am the first to admit that we have not shut down
the drug smuggling into South Florida.
But nobody denies that we've made it much more difficult
for these smugglers to do business.
Narrator: But with the heat on in South Florida,
the Colombians look to find other routes
to bring cocaine into the United States.
♪♪
A small plane has just crossed the Arkansas state border
and a new era in the drug war is about to begin.
Man: Logging the 316 delta bravo flight at 2:00.
Narrator: The flight's manifest says the pilot
took a pleasure trip to Florida for the weekend.
See the lakes down there?
He did in fact have fun,
but he wasn't in Florida.
♪ Reset your world
♪ Count to 10
♪ Replace the Zen
♪ You're ready for it
♪ Refloat the world, start again ♪
-Come on, come on! -Aaaah!
♪ Start again, my old friend
Narrator: Barry Seal -- a legend in the world of drug smuggling.
Seal becomes the youngest pilot ever for TWA,
until he is arrested for attempting to smuggle explosives
to anti-Castro Cubans, but he's never charged.
Wright: Barry Seal had a long history of both
working for the CIA, working as a commercial airline pilot,
and also for smuggling drugs.
He would fly weapons for the CIA.
He would fly drugs for cartels. It didn't matter what.
The exciting thing in life to me is to get into
a life-threatening situation.
Now, that's excitement.
♪♪
Narrator: In Colombia, Seal makes a deal with Pablo Escobar
and the Medellin Cartel.
Missed you last night, huh? [ Chuckles ]
You should have come, man. Those chicas,
they were fantastic.
I can't thank you enough.
♪♪
It's hard to come up with a more colorful character
than Barry Seal when it comes to smuggling.
Narrator: With the Cartel looking to bypass South Florida,
Barry Seal provides an answer using a small airport
in the tiny city of Mena, Arkansas,
where Bill Clinton's governor.
Seal pilots his own plane to Colombia 500 times
to ferry drugs to the United States,
earning an average of $1.5 million a trip.
♪♪
With demand for cocaine growing across the country...
[ Man speaking Spanish ]
...the U.S. government decides to take the fight
directly to the source.
Flying fast and low over the jungle,
Colombian National Police
narrow in on a remote drug lab
called Tranquilandia.
It's the size of a small town.
It's owned by Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel.
On one of its first major international raids is the DEA.
[ Gunfire ]
Wright: The DEA is part of the Department of Justice,
sort of like international FBI agents
trying to catch people that are breaking the law
by smuggling or facilitating the illegal drug trade.
Follis: The DEA is the only agency in the world
that can enter into hostile zones
and develop an investigation and a prosecution.
Man: Patrol to all units. Please be advised.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
♪♪
[ People screaming ]
Narrator: The DEA and the Colombian National Police
have carried out a raid on Pablo Escobar's
jungle cocaine labs with deadly effect.
♪♪
11 are dead, 40 are arrested, including an American pilot.
And they begin destroying the labs.
Farah: The take down of the Tranquilandia drug labs,
by far the biggest anyone had seen.
It was a significant blow to the actual production of cocaine
on a on a worldwide level.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
That just pissed Pablo off.
Narrator: The DEA's growing role in Colombia's war on drugs
is largely thanks to the country's Minister of Justice,
Rodrigo Lara Bonilla --
a fearless crusader against the cartels.
He's teamed up with American law enforcement to arrest
and extradite cartel leaders to the U.S.
Farah: Lara Bonilla grasped the magnitude
of what Colombia was facing in ways
that most of the political elite didn't or simply didn't care to.
Stratton: He was a brave guy who took on the cartels,
took on Pablo Escobar,
and everybody knew that the cartels were going to get him.
[ Horns honking ]
[ Indistinct conversations ]
[ Sirens wailing ]
♪♪
Narrator: Less than two months after the Tranquilandia raid,
Lara Bonilla's car is ambushed.
He's shot seven times and dies instantly.
♪♪
The young shooter arrested at the scene
tells police Pablo Escobar promised him a payment
of 2 million Colombian pesos --
the equivalent of just $650.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
Farah: Killing the attorney general of the country,
that was unprecedented.
It showed if you're going to mess with Pablo,
you know, Pablo will kill you,
and it doesn't matter really who you are.
It doesn't matter if you're in Downtown Bogotá,
doesn't matter if you have bodyguards,
doesn't matter if you have an armed car.
We're going to get you.
And that was a powerful message to the elites
in ways that terrified them.
Levine: There's no limits to which these guys won't go.
And they have the money, they have the power,
they have the weapons.
So you either play along with them
or you're gonna die.
I actually met with Pablo Escobar Jr. years later.
He went back to Colombia and met with Lara Bonilla's son
to apologize for that murder, which is a pretty amazing story.
Narrator: As the country mourns Lara Bonilla's death,
the Colombian government doesn't back down,
forming an alliance with the Americans
to begin extraditing drug lords
for trial in the United States.
The United States decided that it wanted
to begin extraditing people out of these countries
because it was clear that the judicial systems
of those countries couldn't handle the pressure.
But it became a really hated by the narcos.
♪♪
[ Indistinct conversations ]
Narrator: Escobar and the other cartel leaders
band together, launching a public campaign
against extradition.
Stratton: There was so much power within this group of guys.
Pablo Escobar had tremendous political ambitions.
He he put together a group of drug dealers
that were going to pay off the national debt of Colombia
if they would agree to block any extradition
of Colombian drug lords to the United States.
Narrator: Escobar's head of logistics,
Carlos Lehder, even starts his own political party
and eventually runs for office.
Stratton: Carlos Lehder began to hate the United States
and became psychotic.
[ Speaking Spanish ]
Interpreter: Cocaine is the atom bomb of Latin America.
Stratton: He ultimately saw cocaine as a way of destroying
the society in the United States.
Colombia could have been taken over by Escobar and his people.
[ Gunfire, sirens wailing ]
[ Explosion ]
♪♪
Narrator: 30 gunmen have launched an attack
on the Colombian Supreme Court,
and have taken 300 hostages.
[ Gunshot ]
The attackers are left-wing M-19 guerrillas...
[ Machine-gun fire ]
...the same group who kidnapped the sister
of Pablo Escobar's partners.
Now they're fighting for the cartel.
Escobar has allegedly paid them $2 million to wage war
on the Colombian government.
[ People screaming, shouting indistinctly ]
[ Explosion ]
[ Sirens wailing ]
[ Fire roaring ]
[ Whistle blowing ]
Narrator: When the battle's over, more than 100 are dead,
including 11 judges.
And the court building is in flames --
along with all the evidence the government had compiled
to extradite the cartel leaders.
Farah: All of those documents were destroyed.
That probably made Pablo Escobar
and the Medellin Cartel extremely happy.
Narrator: But before the government can retaliate,
the cartel leaders flee the country.
Carlos Lehder finds sanctuary in Nicaragua
where the M-19 rebels have connected him
to their allies, the communist Sandinistas.
Escobar goes to Panama,
where he has long been laundering his money
with the corrupt president Manuel Noriega.
Central America
increasingly becomes the cartel's transit hub.
And Barry Seal is now one of the cartel's most trusted pilots.
Wright: It was very easy for Barry Seal
to fly drugs into North America
throughout Central America for narco traffickers.
That was one aspect of his life only.
Narrator: What Pablo Escobar doesn't know
is Seal has another, even more powerful, employer --
the United States Government.
♪♪
[ Siren wails, police radio chatter ]
Narrator: At home, President Reagan is waging
a reinvigorated War on Drugs.
[ Barking ]
Narrator: Abroad, the administration's
main focus is the communist threat.
And Central America is the new battleground
for Cold War covert operations.
Moran: Central America in the early '80s
is basically a hot mess.
We've got atrocities, we've got insurgencies,
counterinsurgencies,
all kinds of nefarious groups with different motives,
and we get elbow-deep in all of that.
[ Birds chirping ]
Narrator: Nicaragua is run by the Sandinistas,
Marxist rebels who overthrew
an American-backed dictator in 1979.
Moran: Reagan almost immediately starts painting
for the American public, a very vivid
and very ominous picture --
this idea that if the Soviets gain influence
in Central America and Nicaragua,
a week from today, they could be on the -- the beaches in Texas.
♪♪
Narrator: The White House is eager to paint
Nicaragua's communist leaders as drug traffickers.
And they enlist an unlikely accomplice -- Barry Seal.
The cartel smuggler has been busted
and is now a government informant.
♪♪
Wright: One of the strangest missions that Barry Seal ever flew
occurred when the Reagan Administration
sent Barry Seal into Nicaragua
in an airplane that had cameras,
where he could film Nicaraguans handling cocaine
that was being shipped to the U.S.
Get those in the back, okay?
The purpose of Barry Seal's mission was to frame
the Nicaraguan government as narco traffickers.
Schou: Barry Seal became a very important part of this
because he claimed to have knowledge
that Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel
were actually supplying the Sandinistas with cocaine.
Narrator: The CIA outfits a military transport plane
with hidden cameras,
and Seal takes off to record a deal
with Sandinista officials and Pablo Escobar himself.
♪♪
Man: 10 seconds. Stand by, please, sir.
My fellow Americans, I must speak to you tonight
about a mounting danger in Central America
that threatens the security of the United States.
The communist government of Nicaragua
has launched a campaign to subvert and topple
its democratic neighbors.
The Sandinistas have even involved themselves
in the international drug trade.
This picture, secretly taken
at a military airfield outside Managua,
shows Federico Vaughan,
a top aide to one of the nine comandantes
who rule Nicaragua,
loading an aircraft with illegal narcotics
bound for the United States.
No, there seems to be no crime
to which the Sandinistas will not stoop.
This is an outlaw regime.
Moran: They return to some of the original tactics of the CIA.
We can back insurgency groups that are against our enemies.
We can give them money. We can give them training.
We can get them to conduct the dirty war.
Narrator: The CIA starts training and funding
a secret army to take back the country from communism.
They're called the Contras.
Moran: The Contras were people who had been disenfranchised.
A lot of these people were elites, people with money,
people with connections, sometimes people
with a high level of corruption.
Things start to go awry.
It starts to emerge that they're committing
a number of atrocities -- mining harbors,
torturing people.
Narrator: When the brutality of the Contras is made public,
Congress passes the Boland Amendment.
Parenti: The Boland Amendment says the U.S. can only give
humanitarian, non-lethal support to the Contras.
So, what develops out of this
is an effort to covertly raise money
to buy military supplies.
Moran: Yet again, the Agency finds itself
in that moral quagmire.
"We need to find other ways to fund these operations."
♪♪
Narrator: Ilopango Air Base in El Salvador --
the American military's hub for its battle
against communism across Central America.
Arriving in this plane is an undercover DEA agent...
Celerino Castillo --
a second generation combat veteran from South Texas.
He earns a Bronze Star in Vietnam,
then joins the DEA in New York
and goes undercover as a trafficker,
but when his fellow cops pocket seized drug money,
Castillo refuses.
Supervisor came up and says, "Look,
everybody gets a handful."
And, and I says, "I can't do that, man,
because if I do that, then I am just like them."
♪♪
Narrator: Working undercover, Castillo infiltrates the base,
where he's heard rumors of large-scale cocaine trafficking.
The Ilopango airport in El Salvador
was like the O'Hare Airport.
The traffic was enormous, crisscrossing.
People would land with permission, without permission,
some of them crash-landed.
The safe houses were all over the place.
The girls were everywhere, the partying was huge.
[ People cheering ]
I had an informant, who I paid a lot of money,
who actually believed in what I was doing.
He was the tower controller at Ilopango,
and he was able to give me the tail numbers of the planes
that were coming in with the drugs.
Narrator: Castillo starts photographing the planes
the tower controllers identified.
Castillo: We started to identify the pilots.
He identifies one of the pilots as Barry Seal,
the cartel smuggler.
Barry Seal could fly his fleet of planes
without being questioned at all.
He was very well known.
He was just one of many American pilots
that were running out of Ilopango.
Narrator: When Castillo begins to identify
other known cocaine smugglers, he alerts his superiors.
When I got all the intelligence,
I went to see the U.S. ambassador.
"Ambassador, this is what we have.
You have a guy here in Salvador
who's running large amounts of drugs into the U.S."
Gave him the guy's name.
He says, "He works for Félix Rodríguez."
Narrator: Félix Rodríguez --
His family was forced to flee Cuba after the revolution.
Rodríguez has devoted his life to killing communists.
He fights at the Bay of Pigs,
and helps in the hunt to kill Che Guevara.
He's on the front lines in Southeast Asia,
and now Central America.
♪♪
Many of the characters who had shown up in Southeast Asia,
like Félix Rodríguez, now appear in Central America.
[ Engines rumbling ]
Narrator: But Castillo begins to suspect Rodríguez
is part of a larger covert operation.
♪♪
Castillo: He went around bragging that he was connected
to the Vice President, George H.W. Bush,
and that he only answered to him.
♪♪
Narrator: Castillo develops a source close to Rodríguez.
Castillo: The best places to get my intelligence
were the whorehouses where Sandra worked.
♪♪
Sandra was Félix's regular girlfriend.
Narrator: Sandra allegedly tells Castillo
when Rodríguez leaves town and when he returns.
♪♪
He compares Rodríguez's travel with the flights
of suspected cocaine smugglers.
Castillo: The pilots were running drugs all the way
from Colombia into Central America.
Ilopango turned out to be the trampoline.
The drugs coming in, they bounce right there
and go to every part of the United States.
Narrator: Castillo believes he's discovered something shocking.
Some CIA contract pilots illegally arming the Contras
in violation of the Boland Amendment
are also smuggling cocaine to help the cause.
Castillo believes much of the operation
is under the command of Félix Rodríguez.
It turned out to be arms coming south
and cocaine going north in the C-130s.
Parenti: In a shadowy war, you're moving supplies
and personnel into these theaters of war,
so you're establishing smuggling routes.
And you have a group of armed men
who are ready to do illegal and dangerous things,
so layering drugs on top of that is very easy.
I started getting intelligence from U.S. Customs.
They were getting the same information.
We were sharing information.
The FBI was doing the same thing.
And when I questioned the CIA, they would say,
"It's a covert operation being run by the White House."
Narrator: According to Castillo, his superiors refuse
to follow up on his allegations about Ilopango.
And to this day, Rodríguez denies any involvement
with drug trafficking at the base.
My supervisor says, "Don't get involved, man,
because we got orders to stay away from it."
I say, "This is not what I signed up for.
I became a federal agent because I was gonna fight.
I don't care who's involved."
I was in Guatemala at the ambassador's cocktail party.
I didn't want to go because I'm not that type of guy
to mingle with people like that.
Narrator: But when the guest of honor arrives,
Castillo sees the opportunity to reveal what he's uncovered
to highest level of the American government.
Castillo: I was standing there, and he comes up to me.
And he says, "So what do you do here?"
And I explained to him that I was a DEA agent
assigned to Central America.
And he says, "Well, that's good for you."
And I say, "By the way, we have received intelligence
that the Contras are heavily involved in the drug trade."
And he smiled at me and just walked away from me.
It was right there and then that I knew that it went
all the way to the White House.
♪♪
Narrator: By the mid-1980s,
cocaine has spread from Miami
and is now flooding America's inner cities.
[ Siren chirps ]
In South Central Los Angeles,
an up-and-coming cocaine dealer
is about to make a deal that will change his life
and the war on drugs forever.
♪♪
Rick Ross --
also known as "Freeway Rick."
Raised in the projects, he was a teenage tennis prodigy.
Ross: My dream was to go to a four-year university.
[ Chuckles ]
It's crazy how somebody can fool themselves
into believing that they're going to a four-year university
when they can't read or write,
so I found myself on the streets.
Narrator: And it's there where a friend first introduces Ross
to a drug few in his neighborhood had ever seen.
I couldn't believe...
a small amount of cocaine,
it was probably about the size of a match head,
and he was telling me that it was worth 50 bucks,
and it was really hard for me to fantasize
that something so small could be so valuable.
It was like, this is what I was made for.
♪♪
Narrator: Ross finds he is a natural at selling cocaine,
and soon business is booming.
♪♪
His only problem --
getting his hands on enough supply.
♪♪
Schou: Everybody liked Freeway Rick.
He was someone that didn't have to rely on violence
in order to sell his product.
It was just relationships that he had.
Narrator: Ross is meeting with a man he only knows by the name Danilo.
I would always see Danilo lurking around,
you know, kinda like, in the shadows.
Every now and then, he would give me a nod.
I've heard good things about you, too.
Narrator: He offers to sell Ross large quantities
of high-quality cocaine at a heavy discount.
I got like a $2,000 discount per kilo,
which for me was, like, unheard of.
You know, my profit margin just -- just skyrocketed.
♪♪
Narrator: Ross soon realizes he can make even more profit
if he uses a new way of processing cocaine
that is increasingly popular on the streets.
Ross: I run into a guy who was a pimp.
What he was doing is he was making it into
what we call rock form.
Narrator: Rock, or what will soon be known as crack,
is a mixture of baking soda and powder cocaine
that delivers an instantaneous and euphoric high.
♪♪
[ Thunder rumbling ]
But the high wears off quickly
and soon the user needs another hit.
Powder cocaine. It's the cocaine base
along with a hydrochloride group attached to it.
Remove that hydrochloride group that's attached,
then that's just the cocaine base.
That's the freeing of the base.
You can smoke that.
Narrator: Crack changes the economics of cocaine ---
crack rocks are sold for as little as $10 a hit.
Cheap to produce and cheap to distribute, cheap to purchase.
It also created, in some ways, more of an addiction
because it wasn't really strong enough
to get you high for very long,
so you needed more of it.
[ Horns honking ]
Narrator: Thanks to his source's cut-rate cocaine,
and rising demand on the streets,
Ross expands his operation,
building industrial-size labs to cook crack.
We cookin' in pots big enough to cook me in.
[ Laughs ]
It became kind of like an assembly line of production.
♪♪
The demand just kept coming, kept coming, kept coming.
Narrator: His cooks are capable of making 50-kilogram rocks at a time.
Hm.
It takes a pickaxe to break them up.
We went from $300 a day, next thing you know,
we're making a million dollars a day,
sometimes $3 million dollars.
And the rest is history.
Schou: He became the most successful coke dealer
in South Central Los Angeles.
Everybody wanted to be Rick Ross.
Everybody wanted to be this big baller.
You know, something that you dream of becoming.
Narrator: But what no one at the time in L.A. knows,
including Ross himself,
is that his main supplier has a dark secret.
His full name -- Oscar Danilo Blandón.
He's a former Nicaraguan government official,
who's now part of the CIA-backed Contra war effort
to overthrow the communist Sandinista government.
Danilo Blandón ended up in California
as part of the political wing of the Contras.
It was very difficult for the organizers
of the political wing of the Contras
to get any type of support for their cause.
And so some of these guys resorted
to very controversial means.
Ross: Danilo had connections all over the country.
It was kind of like this whole
little Nicaraguan connect, you know?
Blandón told me that money
that he made went toward fighting this war.
They wanted this war to be won.
That was as far as I went with it.
The less you know about somebody, the better.
And Blandón starts offering Ross more than just coke.
He started bringing Uzis and MAC-10s and Thompsons,
AKs, and just an arsenal of weapons,
that that we had never saw before.
Okay, but the real surprise -- this.
Narrator: Blandón even provides Ross
sophisticated police radio scanners.
You know when they're coming,
where they're coming from, how many.
So Rick and his henchmen, any time the police
started closing in on his network,
he was able to find out about it.
And every time they did a raid, there was nothing there.
Narrator: By 1986, crack has spread across the country
and Freeway Rick Ross is running a drug empire
that stretches across 20 states --
with an alleged income of $900 million.
Well, the thing that made Freeway Ricky Ross
such a successful crack kingpin
is the fact that he had a very reliable supply
of cheap cocaine.
He was selling everything that he was getting
as quickly as he got it.
Narrator: And thanks to Blandón's never-ending supply
of discount cocaine,
Ross helps change the demographics of the drug --
from a rich man's party favor to a cheap street high.
[ Coughs ]
♪♪
Sherrills: For many of us who fell through the cracks
of society, crack was a way out.
But it had a devastating effect.
It was more like a bomb that was dropped on the black community.
Hands behind your back!
That drug destroyed families, communities,
and eventually it destroyed part of the black race.
Wright: The people that were most involved
in cocaine trafficking in the early 1980s to mid-1980s
were the very same people that the CIA was employing
to help channel weapons to the Contras
and support those operations.
Jordan: We had three or four cases where we arrested
CIA contract workers with cocaine,
and I get a phone call that the charges have been dismissed.
You know, we are risking our lives,
making cases against significant drug traffickers.
Then on the other hand, you got another government agency
allowing the drugs to come in.
And we're not talking about 100 pounds,
we're talking about tons.
I don't care if you call it national security or whatever.
That introduction
of white powder
was killing black people.
♪♪
♪ Oooooohh, yeah, haah-ah!
♪ Say no, oh, oh!
Narrator: As the crack cocaine epidemic spreads,
the White House creates one of the most memorable
public-relations campaigns in history.
What should you do when someone offers you drugs?
Children: Just say no!
Grim: Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" symbolized
the kind of zero tolerance,
puritanical approach that America has always taken.
America is not good doing nuance.
We don't do grays.
Narrator: Hollywood also gets involved,
with celebrities joining the anti-crack chorus.
This is crack -- rock cocaine.
It isn't glamorous or cool or kid's stuff.
It's the most addictive kind of cocaine, and it can kill you.
What will you do when someone offers you drugs?
Children: Just say no!
Nancy: I can't hear you! Louder!
Children: Just say no!
Nancy: [ Chuckles ] That's wonderful.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Moran: What's really ironic is the fact that Nancy Reagan
was waging this huge just say no to drugs campaign
and making drug use a national moral issue,
at the same time that her husband's administration
was elbow-deep in the drug trade.
Man: Down with dope. Up with hope.
Down with dope.
Dr. Hart: Fast forward into the summer of 1986...
Len Bias, the basketball player,
the second overall draft pick of the 1986 draft dies.
Initial reports were that Len Bias
had taken crack cocaine.
And so the reports were, "This drug is so unpredictable
and so addictive that it killed this athlete
at the height of his powers."
Then a week later, Don Rogers,
a Cleveland Brown, dies.
In both cases, it was powder cocaine,
but it didn't matter.
In the American people's conscience, it was crack.
And crack was so unpredictable and so addictive
that it took down these two great athletes
at the peak of their powers.
Jesse Jackson gives the eulogy at Len Bias's funeral.
He says that crack has killed more black people
than Klu Klux Klan ropes.
Congressman in Harlem, Charlie Rangel,
was on President Reagan about not doing enough for drugs.
All of these forces are coming together.
And so Congress did the only thing that they could do
and President signed the legislation,
and that's the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act.
Well, today it gives me great pleasure to sign legislation
that reflects the total commitment
of the American people and their government
to fight the evil of drugs.[ Applause ]
Narrator: Under these new sentencing guidelines,
five grams of crack cocaine,
often sold by and to African-Americans,
carries a mandatory five-year sentence.
For powder cocaine, often sold by and to white Americans,
it would take 100 times that amount for the same sentence.
♪♪
[ Police radio chatter ]
Stratton: All of a sudden, they just started locking up
basically these kids.
These guys were coming in for small amounts of crack
and getting more time than a guy who's busted
with a kilo of pure cocaine.
[ Siren wailing ]
Dr. Hart: Removing them from the community, what does that do?
Now you don't have the people who are bread winners
to support families.
The protectors of the communities, they're gone.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
Parenti: What does the Reagan War on Drugs do?
Well, consider this -- in 1980,
African-Americans are 12% of the American population,
and they constitute 23% of people arrested for drugs.
10 years later, they're still 12% of the overall population,
but now they constitute 40%
of everyone arrested for drugs,
and 60% of everyone convicted.
♪♪
[ Helicopter blades whirring ]
[ Beeping ]
Reporter: Authorities believe last night's machine-gun killing
of top drug informant Barry Seal
was ordered by drug bosses in Medellin, Colombia,
who sent five men to Baton Rouge to kill Seal.
Wright: Barry Seal met an ignoble end.
He was gunned-down in the streets.
Questions linger over exactly who killed him.
Reporter: Seal was a tough-guy pilot
who became one of the most important and daring
undercover operatives infiltrating
the top Colombian drug operations.
Barry Seal was supposed to be a highly protected witness
at the time of his death
and yet, the gunmen were very easily able to find him
and shoot him down in public.
Reporter: It was Seal who posed as a smuggler
and flew into Nicaragua and took these pictures
showing Colombian drug dealers and Sandinista officials
loading cocaine on his plane.
Seal was scheduled to be the key witness
against this man -- Jorge Ochoa,
the top Colombian drug boss
responsible for the assassination
of Colombia's attorney general and now the murder in Louisiana.
There were a number of people that Seal
had begun to infuriate.
Barry Seal began telling people that he was flying weapons
for the Central Intelligence Agency into Central America
in support of the Contras.
He also talked about Pablo Escobar,
and a lot of people believe that Barry Seal's death
was basically a collusion
between the U.S. government and the cartels.
What's interesting is that a year after Barry Seal's death,
the Contra operation unraveled.
[ Engine rumbling ]
Narrator: Deep in the jungles of Nicaragua,
Marxist Sandinistas soldiers
just shot down a military cargo plane.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
Parenti: Lo and behold, out of the jungle comes this guy.
♪♪
His plane has been shot down,
the two other crew members are killed,
and a 17-year-old Sandinista soldier
has him bound by the hands
and is leading him out of the forest
with a rifle over his shoulder.
And from that totally spectacular
and unexpected moment,
a whole series of revelations unfolds.
Narrator: The lone survivor of the crash,
Eugene Hasenfus, is no stranger to covert operations.
He's a veteran of Air America,
the CIA airline that allegedly helped fuel the heroin trade
during the Vietnam War.
If you told the average person that there were Americans
who had fought in a secret war in Laos
doing the same thing in Central America,
most people would've thought you were crazy.
[ Man shouting commands in Spanish ]
Schou: The very same allegations ended up surfacing
that not only were weapons being brought down to Central America
to secret bases that the CIA had involvement
with protecting and controlling,
but also these flights
were returning to military bases
and drugs were being brought into the country.
It probably would've been better if I would've been...
if I wouldn't of made it out of that plane.
-Why? -Dead people don't talk.
♪♪
Narrator: In the wreckage, the Sandinistas find evidence
linking the plane to the illegal operation
to arm the CIA backed right-wing Contra army.
Congress very plainly stated to the Reagan administration,
"You can't send weapons to the Contras."
[ Indistinct conversations ]
But this plane's loaded with weapons,
and it began to expose the Contra operation.
The plane actually had a more interesting history than that.
The very same plane that had been shot down over Nicaragua
carrying weapons for the CIA
was the plane that had belonged to Barry Seal.
♪♪
This was an unprecedented event in American history,
where you basically have a secret CIA operation
laid bare for everyone to look at and to dissect
and to criticize.
♪♪
Reporter" Today, Colonel Oliver North's
the key witness in the Iran arms scandal,
is due to give evidence in public for the first time.
♪♪
Narrator: Congressional hearings are called,
and the illegal operation to arm the Contras
is revealed to be part of a larger conspiracy.
The Iran-Contra scandal
is one of the most complicated scandals
in the history of American politics.
It's not just one scandal.
It's several scandals wrapped into one.
On the one hand, a secret war in Nicaragua,
but on the other hand, America's arch enemy, Iran,
actually receiving missiles from the U.S. government,
the profits of which were used to purchase supplies
for the war in Nicaragua.
Narrator: The elaborate operation is run
by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North --
A highly-decorated platoon commander in Vietnam,
now a National Security Council staffer
for the Reagan White House.
Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was a nobody effectively
at the beginning of the Contra war.
Man: It's with great pleasure that I present to you
Oliver North.[ Applause ]
Schou: But he got very lucky because he was known
by a select group of superiors in the National Security Council
as a guy that would pretty much do anything
and not ask any questions whatsoever.
And so there's, literally, a very narrow chain of command
from the highest levels of power out of the vice-president office
down to one guy, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North,
that was given free license
to run a secret war in Nicaragua.
The National Security Council during the Reagan administration
was very powerful.
-Okay, well, let me ask you -- -I don't have a comment.
Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was really the one directing
a lot of these CIA operations.
♪♪
Narrator: The nation is transfixed
when North is forced to testify.
You had the spectacle of this ramrod,
straight patriotic American --
true believer, boy-scout Oliver North raising his hand.
When I saw Oliver North raise his hand to be sworn in,
you know, he hadn't worn the uniform in 10 years,
and that day, he put it on
to make it look like he was a patriot.
[ Camera shutters clicking ]
Narrator: While North denies working with or protecting drug traffickers,
he admits to shredding classified documents.
I do not deny that I engaged in shredding on November 21st.
I will also tell this committee that I engaged in shredding
almost every day that I had a shredder.
But some of his diary entries survive,
including several in which North appears to be aware
the Contras were involved in cocaine trafficking.
North ended up taking the fall
for a lot of the things that happened,
but there were people higher-up that were never prosecuted.
Narrator: Vice President Bush
denies he knew about any Contra drug trafficking.
When Bush is elected president,
he pardons six high-ranking officials --
including the Secretary of Defense
and the CIA's head of covert operations --
over their involvement in illegal arms sales.
When North is convicted of lying to Congress,
he never spends a day in prison.
♪♪
But beneath the Iran-Contra affair lies a deeper scandal.
What you ultimately had was a very dark chapter
in the United States involvement
with drug trafficking.
Castillo: The Iran-Contra investigation
has really, really never been told.
You have the bipartisan investigations,
people will read, and then they'll forget.
They know that nothing's going to happen,
and you saw it with Oliver North.
He got indicted, he was convicted, and they let him go.
Parenti: It was in no way hidden that this mercenary force
that was being funded with U.S. tax money
was also, apparently, importing drugs to the U.S.
That fact was established even as it was quickly brushed aside.
♪♪
Narrator: Luck has finally run out for the man
who helped Pablo Escobar revolutionize the cocaine trade.
Carlos Lehder is captured by the Columbian National Police
and extradited to the United States.
He's convicted of drug smuggling
and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
plus an additional 135 years.
After testifying against
Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega,
his sentence is reduced to 55 years.
Lehder also tells the government that the Medellin Cartel
had given $10 million to the CIA-backed Contra Army
in Nicaragua.
It's the first public indication that the cartel was connected
to the CIA's secret war.
♪♪
The hearing will come to order, please?
What is the definition of national security
which permits us to sacrifice the war on illegal drugs
to support the illegal war of Contras?
Narrator: After the Iran-Contra hearings,
Senator John Kerry conducts a separate
and often secret investigation of the government's involvement
with drug smugglers during the 1980s.
Schou: Right on the heels of the Iran-Contra scandal,
you had John Kerry -- the lone politician
willing to try to take this on.
In testimony before this committee last year,
we heard how it's possible
to literally rent an island overnight
so that drug planes can land, unload,
and transfer their drugs to boats that come into Florida.
We will hear testimony about the destabilization
of whole countries, regions, the support for terrorism,
and the subversion of our own laws and institutions.
Narrator: Contra pilots testify under oath.
After the guns were unloaded,
was something loaded into the airplane?
Uh, yes. I loaded about 17 duffel bags
and, uh, five or six boxes.
And what was in the duffel bags?
Coke -- cocaine.
And in the boxes?
Cocaine.
Anybody explain to you what you were loading or did you know?
I knew.
So we stand in recess for 10 minutes.
Narrator: Despite the admission Contra pilots
were running drugs to finance an illegal CIA war,
few in the media pick up on the story.
In 1992,
Contra supporter Danilo Blandón
is charged with cocaine distribution,
but to reduce his sentence,
he agrees to help the government in a sting operation
to bring down his old customer Rick Ross.
♪♪
I just need to keep staring right into the thing, right?
Narrator: It's not until 1996
that a little known reporter named Gary Webb
will expose Blandón's Contra connections.
We've got all the DEA undercover tapes,
we got the FBI reports.
What we found that it was connected
to this Nicaraguan cocaine pipeline.
♪♪
Narrator: With controversy swirling,
the CIA director himself, John Deutch,
agrees to a town hall meeting
with the citizens of South Central L.A.
You, the President, and everybody else
should be highly upset and say,
"How did this cancer get here?
How did it happen?"
Parenti: The African-American community really picked it up
and felt that this was confirmation
of what they had been suffering,
through the war on drugs and the epidemic of addiction.
The drugs have been coming in this country
and they have been sanctioned by our government.
[ Cheers and applause ]Thank you.
Narrator: Rick Ross' co-defendant
confronts the CIA director.
Rick lookin' at life.
My first offense, I'm looking at 20.
And Blandón is out of jail and you paid him $166,000.
[ Cheers and applause ]
The co-defendant of Ricky Ross.
Ricky Ross is doing George Bush's time.
[ Cheers and applause ]
The purpose of the investigation
that I described to you was exactly to find out
whether CIA officers allowed that kind of trafficking
take place knowingly or conspired to do so.
That is the purpose of the investigation.
If we find anybody who did it, we will bring them to justice.
[ People clamoring ]
Narrator: After the town hall,
the CIA's Inspector General
launches an internal investigation.
He finds numerous allegations that CIA-backed Contras
were involved in cocaine trafficking,
but he concludes the operations were never sanctioned.
♪♪
The U.S. media just completely ignored this story.
It portrayed Kerry as a conspiracy theorist.
Gary Webb loses his job and then his career
over the backlash to his story
and later commits suicide.
♪♪
Rick Ross serves 16 1/2 years in prison.
Ross: I'm sitting in prison, and here they are saying
that I was connected to the CIA.
How can I be tied to the CIA, you know,
little old me, Ricky Ross.
It was just a crazy situation to find myself in.
♪♪
Grim: Cocaine lives parallel lives throughout the 1980s.
It starts this fun player drug in the early 1980s,
and by the end of the 1980s,
it's a fun player drug for a lot of fun players
who mostly happen to be white and rich.
Wright: The Reagan War on Drugs had really been dominated
by the idea of these foreign bogeymen
who were harming America,
even though there's this long history
since the very beginning of the CIA,
of operating in countries
where they ally themselves with people
that are involved in drugs.
Levine: If you took every single cartel leader --
Pablo Escobar, Carlos Lehder,
line them up on the walls and you killed them,
there would be a line tomorrow
of a hundred deep to replace each one.
Castillo: There has never been and there will never be a War on Drugs
because America is more addicted
to drug money than they are to drugs.
♪♪
O0 C1♪♪
Narrator: As America's War On Drugs
enters its third decade...
Stratton: He was owned lock, stock, and barrel
by drug dealers.
Gates: Do you know who is supporting the enemy?
The casual drug user.
Parenti: The militarization begins in Los Angeles.
Is it good?
Arnold: We had been partying like a week straight.
I've got FBI, I've got DEA, I said "Where's AC/DC at?"
Clinton: I experimented with marijuana a time or two
and I didn't like it.
St. Pierre: The perfect answer became "I didn't inhale."
De La Cruz: Drugs is big money and NAFTA was big money.
Carrillo: El futuro es la frontera.
Clinton: Let us stick with the strategy that's working
and keep the crime rate coming down.