A CIA anti-drug program in Venezuela shipped a ton of nearly pure cocaine to the United States in 1990, government officials said Friday.
No criminal charges have been brought in the matter, which the officials said appeared to have been a serious accident rather than an intentional conspiracy. But officials say the cocaine wound up being sold on the streets in the United States.One CIA officer has resigned, a second has been disciplined and a federal grand jury in Miami is investigating.
The agency, made aware of a "60 Minutes" investigation of the matter scheduled for broadcast Sunday, issued a statement Friday calling the affair "a most regrettable incident" involving "instances of poor judgment and management on the part of several CIA officers."
The case involves the same program under which the agency created a Haitian intelligence service whose officers became involved in drug trafficking and acts of political terror.
Its exposure comes amid growing congressional skepticism about the role of the CIA in the war on drugs.
In the mid-1980s, under orders from President Ronald Reagan, the agency began to set up anti-drug programs in the major cocaine-producing and trafficking capitals of Central and South America.
In Venezuela, it worked with the country's National Guard, a paramilitary force that controls the highways and borders.
Government officials said the joint CIA-Venezuelan force was headed by Gen. Ramon Guillen Davila and that the ranking CIA officer was Mark McFarlin, who had worked with anti-guerrilla forces in El Salvador in the 1980s.
The mission was to infiltrate the Colombian gangs that ship cocaine to the United States.
In December 1989, officials of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency said, McFarlin and the CIA chief of station in Venezuela, Jim Campbell, met with the drug agency's attache in Venezuela, Annabelle Grimm, to discuss a proposal to allow hundreds of pounds of cocaine to be shipped to the United States through Venezuela in an operation intended to win the confidence of the Colombian traf-fick-ers.
Unlike so-called "controlled shipments" that take place in criminal investigations, shipments that end with arrests and the confiscation of the drugs, these were to be "uncontrolled shipments," officials of the drug agency said.
The cocaine would enter the United States without being seized, so as to allay all suspicion. The idea was to gather as much intelligence as possible on members of the drug gangs.
The drug agency refused to take part in the operation and said it should be called off. In a transcript of the "60 Minutes" broadcast supplied to The New York Times, Grimm said McFarlin and Guillen had gone ahead anyway.
"I really take great exception to the fact that 1,000 kilos came in, funded by U.S. taxpayer money," Grimm said, according to the transcript. "I found that particularly appalling."
DEA officers and other government officials said the CIA-Venezuelan force accumulated more than 3,000 pounds of cocaine delivered to its undercover agents by Colombian traffickers and stored the cocaine in a truck at the intelligence agency's counter-narcotics center in Caracas. Most of the cocaine was flown to the United States in a series of shipments during 1990.