The Never Ending Drug War: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA

This never-ending war has been a phony contest, an arm wrestle between two arms of the US state: the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Routinely, the DEA’s attempts at prosecuting major traffickers in US courts were dismissed on national security grounds, because the traffickers were CIA assets. As CIA director George Bush explained in 1976, these cover-ups were legal under a 1954 agreement between the CIA and the Justice Department, which gave the CIA the right to block prosecutions and to keep its crimes secret in the name of national security. The “de-facto” immunity from prosecution enabled CIA assets to brazenly deal drugs, knowing they were ‘protected’.

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