Former Mexican Officials Working Undercover for DEA

December 19, 2011

Breitbart
December 19, 2011

At least 80 former Mexican government officials are currently working as informants for US intelligence agencies, the daily La Jornada reported, citing senior Mexican officials.

Most of them are gathering information for the US Drug Enforcement Agency, the prestigious daily reported.

Senior officials in the attorney general’s office and the interior ministry said that those informants work as spies, gather and analyze information, and follow cases on request.

“We have not dismissed the possibility that current government employees are also working for the Americans in combination with their ex-colleagues,” a senior government official who has participated in counternarcotics meetings with US officials told the newspaper.

The spying case came to light during a probe into whether the DEA has laundered drug money seized from criminal groups in Mexican territory, La Jornada reported.

On December 4, The New York Times reported that undercover US counternarcotics agents have laundered or smuggled millions of dollars in drug proceeds to see how the system works and use the information against Mexican drug cartels.

Some 45,000 people have been killed in Mexico since 2006, when its government launched a major military crackdown against the powerful drug cartels.

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$352 Billion in Drug Cartel Money Rescued Banks in 1998

November 23, 2011 2 Comments

by Anatoly Miranovsky
Pravda
November 23, 2011

The War on Drugs is a sham. Drug Cartels money is such a part of the global economy, that a complete crack down of these transnational organizations would mean an assured collapse.

Drug cartels rule Mexico. Those criminal structures are like transnational corporations. They produce and distribute drugs in Mexico and enjoy their undivided reign in the country. Los Zetas cartel is a special phenomenon in Mexico. The cartel was literally created and developed by US special services.

The unique criminal group originally appeared as a military structure. The group appeared to support the activities of Cartel del Golfo. During the 1990s, Golfo was luring military men and officers of special police units of the country – GAFE (Groupo Aeromovil de Fuerzas Especiales) and BFP airborne brigade of the Mexican army.

All the deserters, who made the core of Los Zetas, were trained at the bases of the USA’s CIA and then at the so-called School of South America (Escuela de las Americas) of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. The institute trains military elite for the US-controlled regimes in Latin America, stressing out the suppression of guerrilla movements and the struggle against the distribution of drugs.

The servicemen from the special forces of Guatemala, also the CIA-trained men, joined the group of former military men later. After the USA did away with Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar, the logistics of drug shipments changed considerably. The Mexicans took the command of the group. They used to send the Colombian cocaine to the United States, but then they began to dictate their conditions to Colombian drug makers.

Cartels were developing, but the leaders of the international drug business did not want to unite into one supercartel or alliance. They eventually decided to use an old-fashioned way of struggling with rats on board. They established the rat-eater. Zetas, whose members were trained in the US commando-training centers, became the rat-eater that would destroy both cartels and the remnants of the Mexican state structure to please the master.

In 1999, after the arrest of the leader of Cartel del Golfo, Zetas showed that they were capable of running business alone. They used brutal methods in struggling with their competitors. Beheading people and then dumping the decapitated and dismembered bodies in public places was a common thing for them to do. One may find videos of such blood-chilling executions on the Internet. They cut people’s heads either fast – with the help of a chainsaw – or slowly – with a machete.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared a war on the drug mafia. As many as 45,000 people have been killed in the clashes between Mexican cartels and government troops. Another war between Zetas and Golfo started in the beginning of 2010 in the north of Mexico.

The structure of Zetas is a very complicated one. They say that the cartel has several levels, but they virtually represent various formats of the ground forces – the lowest combat mass of the cartel. They are Los Halcones (the Falcons) – local civilian followers of the cartel who observe the situation in the territories of their control. The Falcons are commanded by the Cobras, also civil personnel.

The so-called New Zetas are the groups of military men from other countries, for example Guatemala, who started working for the cartel. The Old Zetas are those who joined the cartel from GAFE at the end of the 1990s.

These groups make the core of the organization. There are separate regional special groups like the Scorpions, created by local cartel comandante. As a matter of fact, the structure of the cartel is much more complicated. It consists of multiple autonomous groups. The failure or destruction of one of those groups does not affect the work of other links.

“Money, honor and respect are most important for us. We run drug business, and we urge the Mexican and US authorities not to put obstacles for our business. You will not be able to destroy us for one reason. Los Zetas knows everything about the work of police and special services. Special services and police know nothing about the activities of Los Zetas,” Arturo Desena, the founder of Los Zetas, a former lieutenant, said.

It appears that Washington will never struggle with the drug business because it destabilizes the financial system of the United States. The system is based on multi-billion “drug investments” from all over the world. Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said several years ago that it was drug cartels that rescued many banks during the crisis of 1998. World’s largest drug cartels transferred $352 billion to banks during the hardest period of the crisis, the official said.

The proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse in 1998. “Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities… There were signs that some banks were rescued that way,” Costa told Observer in 2009. A majority of the $352 billion of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result, he added.

According to Costa, drug cartels rescued the banks of Great Britain, the USA, Switzerland and Italy.

Drugs became a national disaster for the United States a long time ago. It also seems to be a good way to control the population. As many as ten million Americans take cocaine on a regular basis (daily), according to official stats. Up to 40 million more people do cocaine less frequently. If their doses are taken away from them, the country will plunge into chaos.

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Eric Holder up to his eye balls on Fast & Furious Scandal

October 5, 2011

Attorney General Eric Holder was briefed in July 2010 about gun-running operation headed by ATF.

CBS.com
September 5, 2011

New documents obtained by CBS News show Attorney General Eric Holder was sent briefings on the controversial Fast and Furious operation as far back as July 2010. That directly contradicts his statement to Congress.

On May 3, 2011, Holder told a Judiciary Committee hearing, “I’m not sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.”

Yet internal Justice Department documents show that at least ten months before that hearing, Holder began receiving frequent memos discussing Fast and Furious.

Read the new documents

Read the July 5, 2010 memo Read the “It’s a tricky case” email Read the memo to AG Holder from Asst. AG Lanny A. Breuer

The documents came from the head of the National Drug Intelligence Center and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer.

In Fast and Furious, ATF agents allegedly allowed thousands of weapons to cross the border and fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

Gunwalking scandal uncovered at ATF

It’s called letting guns “walk,” and it remained secret to the public until Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered last December. Two guns from Fast and Furious were found at the scene, and ATF agent John Dodson blew the whistle on the operation.

Agent: I was ordered to let guns “walk” into Mexico

Ever since, the Justice Department has publicly tried to distance itself. But the new documents leave no doubt that high level Justice officials knew guns were being “walked.”

Two Justice Department officials mulled it over in an email exchange Oct. 18, 2010. “It’s a tricky case given the number of guns that have walked but is a significant set of prosecutions,” says Jason Weinstein, Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division. Deputy Chief of the National Gang Unit James Trusty replies “I’m not sure how much grief we get for ‘guns walking.’ It may be more like, “Finally they’re going after people who sent guns down there.”

The Justice Department told CBS News that the officials in those emails were talking about a different case started before Eric Holder became Attorney General. And tonight they tell CBS News, Holder misunderstood that question from the committee – he did know about Fast and Furious – just not the details.

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U.S. government admits arming Mexican drug gangs

July 8, 2011

by Mike Adams
NaturalNews.com
July 8, 2011

It is now a widely-reported fact that under the Obama administration, U.S. federal agents actively placed over 30,000 fully-functional weapons into the hands of Mexican drug gangs, then halted all surveillance and tracking activities of where those weapons were going.

This is not a conspiracy theory, nor a piece of fiction. It is now an openly-admitted fact that this was pulled off by the BATFE (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, more commonly called “ATF”) under orders from Washington. The program was called “Fast and Furious.”

Even Reuters is now covering the news and reporting how members of Congress are outraged to learn that this happened (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011…).

Details are also starting to leak about the cover-up inside ATF, which was led by the U.S. Attorney in Arizona, Dennis Burke, an Obama appointee

(http://dailycaller.com/2011/07/06/i…). The engineering of the illegal gun running went right up the chain of command to the director of the ATF, Kenneth Melson, who is now expected to resign. The real planning of this event went even higher up the chain of command in Washington, possibly all the way to Attorney General Eric Holder (http://dailycaller.com/2011/06/21/i…).

Among the firearms sold to the Mexican drug gangs were AK-47s, thousands of pistols and, remarkably, .50-caliber rifles which are typically used to disable vehicles or carry out sniper-based assassinations at extremely long ranges (up to two miles). The mainstream media is now reporting that these weapons are turning up in violent crimes being committed in Phoenix, Arizona. As an ABC news affiliate reports:

“According to the testimony of three Phoenix ATF agents, including Dodson, hundreds of weapons are now on the streets in the United States and Mexico, possibly in the hands of criminals. Dodson estimated the number could be as many as 1,800 weapons. He estimated agents in the Phoenix field division facilitated the sale of approximately 2,500 weapons to straw purchasers. A few hundred have been recovered.”

How the “Fast and Furious” program put thousands of weapons directly into the hands of Mexican drug gangs

Here’s how “Fast and Furious” worked: Under orders from Washington, ATF agents were specifically told to acquire these weapons using “straw” buyers in the USA, find new buyers in Mexican drug gangs, then sell the weapons and “lose track” of them. Although some agents raised concerns about the insanity, they were overruled by the higher-ups in Washington who wanted to pursue this policy for their own reasons. “It made no sense to us either, it was just what we were ordered to do, and every time we questioned that order there was punitive action,” said Phoenix Special Agent John Dodson.

But what could be the reasons for Washington initiating such a program in the first place? Why would the Obama administration actively send 30,000 sniper rifles, assault weapons and firearms into Mexico even while claiming to follow an anti-gun stance back in the USA?

To answer that question, you need to understand P.R.S — Problem, Reaction, Solution. It is the “playbook” that governments use to get what they want, which usually involves: 1) Disarming their populations, 2) Taking away all their rights and freedoms, and then 3) Ruling over their people as tyrants with complete power.

Precisely such an effort is now underway in the United States, led by the Obama administration which has repeatedly demonstrated itself to be an enemy of the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights.

How Problem, Reaction, Solution really works

If you’re the U.S. government, you can’t just announce a new program to disarm the country, end the Bill of Rights and install yourself as the King. People won’t go for it if you try to sell it that way. Instead, you need to find a way to get people to BEG you to do all that.

So you need a way to put people in a state of mind where they are terrified of drugs, terrified of guns and terrified of the border violence — to the point where they insist that somebody in Washington do something about it.

Therefore, you first need a way to cause the problem that results in all the violence that people react to. You effectively need to create violence and then wait for people to beg you to stop it.

This is where the Obama administration’s program to send 30,000 firearms into Mexico comes into play. If you want to cause gun violence and drug war violence, what better way to accomplish it than to just arm all the bad guys?

Think about it: 30,000 weapons in the hands of drug criminals! Then all you have to do is sit back and wait for all the violence to kick in. And it has kicked in — in huge numbers. Shootings on the border, kidnappings, armed conflict across the border with U.S. border agents, and so on. Violent crimes in Arizona are now being committed with these very same weapons the ATF trafficked into the hands of Mexican drug gangs.

As Judicial Watch president Tim Fitton explains, his belief is that Operation Fast and Furious was purely an anti-gun political ploy from the Obama administration, designed to put more guns into the hands of criminals as a justification for confiscating guns from all citizens. He adds, “I think another major part of this story is that the narrative of the Obama administration and the ATF is that, ‘wouldn’t it be great if we could tie guns, as part of our anti-gun agenda, to the Mexican civil war, as opposed to, you know, our lack of enforcement of the drug laws or failure to protect the borders.’” (http://dailycaller.com/2011/06/21/i…)

And here’s the real kicker: Of all the weapons now being confiscated by police in Mexico, an astonishing 70 percent came from the United States. So now you have a situation where the USA is actually arming the criminals in Mexico and destabilizing that country’s entire system of law and order. The drug gangs are at war with the police there, and thanks to thinks like U.S.-supplies AK-47s and .50-caliber sniper rifles, the drug gangs are winning!

ATF can now demand more power and bigger budgets

Getting back to the U.S. issue, if you’re the DEA or the ATF, you now have 30,000 more reasons to have your own budgets increased. There’s a wave of violence coming across the border! The drug gangs are out of control! They’re shooting back!

Well gee, I wonder why? It’s because the ATF actually sold them these 30,000 rifles under orders from Washington.

And now the Obama administration is, predictably, saying there’s so much “gun violence” in the Southern USA that new laws are needed to curb gun sales there.

Seriously? New laws? What about the 30,000 guns the ATF openly and admittedly sold to the Mexican drug gangs? Wasn’t that already a violation of law?

It all comes back to Problem, Reaction, Solution, you see. Want to keep the useless War on Drugs going a little longer? Just dump a few thousand pounds of cocaine into the hands of criminals and let ‘em run loose with it. Want to beef up the budgets of the ATF? Just distribute 30,000 illegal weapons into the hands of drug gangs and then sit back and wait for people to beg for your help. Want to justify a war on “terror” in the Middle East? Dream up some stupid story about Weapons of Mass Destruction and then launch a war.

For every power-hungry tyrannical agenda in Washington, there’s a false flag operation that will make it come true.

If the U.S. government would actively arm drug gangs, in what other ways might it betray the American people?

Now that you know the truth about how Washington put 30,000 guns into the hands of Mexican drug gangs, it naturally makes you start to wonder about the government’s involvement with things like vaccines.

Want to make people so afraid of infectious disease that they beg for vaccines? Just release an infectious disease into the population yourself! It’s a simple matter, really.

Want to get the public to beg for new food safety regulations? Just release e.coli into the food supply and then wait for the deaths to be reported in the news. All of a sudden people are demanding more food safety regulations.

Want to justify military imperialism and expansion? Just stage your own terrorist attack against your own country! Then magically find the passports of some terrorists at the scene of the crime and blame the whole thing on them.

When theory becomes fact

You see, all this used to exist solely in the realm of conspiracy theory. A few years ago, if you even suggested this kind of thing was going on, you were called a kook. But now it’s an established fact being reported by Reuters, Washington Post and other major news outlets. Now the U.S. government has been forced to admit that yes, it actively delivered 30,000 firearms into the hands of Mexican drug gangs and then intentionally stopped tracking where they went.

This is no longer conspiracy theory. It’s conspiracy FACT. And similar types of operations are being planned right now for other agendas the government has in mind: Taking away your Fourth Amendment rights, for example. How do you accomplish that? Just stage an airport terrorism attack, just like the one the TSA was caught rehearsing in Minnesota

(http://www.naturalnews.com/032458_T…).

Want to take away peoples’ Second Amendment rights? Just brainwash some low-IQ psychopath to walk into a shopping mall and start blazing away with fully automatic weapons that were provided to him by the ATF!

It’s simple, you see. Pick a topic, choose an agenda, then cause the problem yourself. Then sit back and wait for the reaction. Works every time.

The CDC pulled the same stunt back in the 1980′s with AIDS. At a time when the CDC was facing severe budget cuts, it actually hyped up the whole AIDS epidemic and started releasing complete scientific fictions as if they were fact. The disease mongering by the CDC caused widespread fear and panic across the country, earning it huge budget increases from the U.S. government.

This is all fully documented in the movie House of Numbers, by the way, using recorded video interviews from many of the key scientists involved in the whole fiasco who finally went on record to tell the truth. Almost everything you’ve been fed about AIDS is a fabrication or a distortion of the scientific truth. Watch these astonishing videos to see for yourself:

http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=D35F0…
http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=BE507…
http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=4FE73…

The American government is working AGAINST you, not for you

The point in all this is that much of what you see happening in the world today in terms of terrorism, the drug war, infectious disease and health care are just fabricated, staged events actually pulled off by the very people who stand to benefit from the reaction!

Suckers and sheeple always believe the mainstream news at face value. They believe we’re under attack from terrorists who bring down tall buildings, or we’re being assaulted by Mexican drug gangs on the border, or we’re threatened by the Swine Flu. That’s what suckers are supposed to believe, you see: That your government is never working against you… it’s always working FOR you, right?

But intelligent people know the opposite is true: Your government is usually plotting against you and trying to figure out how to expand its power, expand its reach, reduce your freedoms and control your life. This is accomplished by unleashing the very problems that the government claims to be fighting to prevent.

The government, for example, says it’s trying to solve our nation’s economic problems. And how does it accomplish that? By generating trillions of dollars in new fiat currency and handing it over to the criminals running Wall Street. This has the net effect of stealing money from everybody else through dollar devaluation.

How does the government solve our national health care crisis? By enacting Obamacare, which mandates that more people buy into a system that has utterly failed to serve the health interests of the American people in the first place!

So at the very same time the government says it’s working to improve the economy, it’s actually stealing from you behind your back. At the very same time the government says it’s trying to stop cancer, its own health-related agencies (National Cancer Institute, for example) are openly engaged in massive disinformation campaigns that spread false information about sunlight being “dangerous” to your health (while conveniently ignoring the truth about vitamin D and its cancer preventive properties).

The government says it wants to make your food safer, and yet the USDA keeps approving genetically modified foods that are essentially massive biological experiments that cause widespread infertility and disease.

The same story goes on and on… with fluoride in the water, mercury in dental fillings, aspartame in diet sodas, pesticide use in agriculture and so on. At nearly every turn, the government itself is actively plotting against the People to keep them financially enslaved, biologically diseased and mentally ignorant.

Shipping guns into Mexico, you see, is just a tiny part of the big picture that’s going on today in the USA. The same process — Problem, Reaction, Solution — is in use almost everywhere in government at both the state and federal level.

Big Government is the enemy of peace and freedom

Bureaucrats hate to lose their jobs, and if there’s a way to stage something that makes them suddenly look more important, they won’t hesitate to roll it out. The U.S. government, just so you know, has been actively engaged in weapons trafficking, drug running and counterfeiting for decades. If you or I did what our own government does every single day, we’d be arrested as felony criminals. But when the government runs guns into Mexico, or traffics in cocaine, or prints counterfeit dollar bills that have no backing with real value, somehow it’s all okay.

Amazing how our own government has now turned into the very criminals that it claims to be protecting us against, isn’t it? Who are the real terrorists in America? The ATF agents running guns into the hands of Mexican drug gangs, of course. And the FBI agents who set up Arab-looking patsies to try to set off fake bombs that the FBI actually assembled for them!

By the way, Alex Jones (www.PrisonPlanet.com) has been covering all this for years. He’s been saying this all along, and time and time again, he’s been proven right. I realize his presentation style may seem a little intense to some people, but at the end of the day, Alex Jones is far more accurate at decoding what’s really going on behind the scenes than any mainstream news channel or newspaper. Here’s an article from InfoWars on this very topic:http://www.infowars.com/obama-admin…

I’m scheduled to host the Alex Jones show next week and will likely be discussing more about the ATF’s gun-running activities in Mexico. In the mean time, stay tuned to NaturalNews.com for more stories that aren’t afraid to report the truth about what’s really happening in our world today.

 

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D.E.A., the Intelligence Agency

December 27, 2010

Cables Portray Expanded Reach of Drug Agency

NYT

The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization 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.

In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to some news organizations, offer glimpses of drug 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 D.E.A. 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 president’s son, and diplomats discovered that before the police destroyed 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 United States sanctions, describe the drug agency informants’ reporting both on how the military junta enriches itself with drug money and on the political activities of the junta’s opponents.

Officials of the D.E.A. and the State Department declined to discuss what they said was information that should never have been made public.

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 F.B.I. has become something more than a drug agency. The D.E.A. now has 87 offices in 63 countries and close partnerships with governments that keep the Central Intelligence Agency at arm’s length.

Because of the ubiquity of the drug scourge, today’s D.E.A. has access to foreign governments, including those, like Nicaragua’s and Venezuela’s, that have strained diplomatic relations with the United States. Many are eager to take advantage of the agency’s drug detection and wiretapping technologies.

In some countries, the collaboration appears to work well, with the drug agency providing intelligence that has helped bring down traffickers, and even entire cartels. But the victories can come at a high price, according to the cables, which describe scores of D.E.A. informants and a handful of agents who have been killed in Mexico and Afghanistan.

In Venezuela, the local intelligence service turned the tables on the D.E.A., infiltrating its operations, sabotaging equipment and hiring a computer hacker to intercept American Embassy e-mails, the cables report.

And as the drug agency has expanded its eavesdropping operations to keep up with cartels, it has faced repeated pressure to redirect its counternarcotics surveillance to local concerns, provoking tensions with some of Washington’s closest allies.

Sticky Situations

Cables written in February by American diplomats in Paraguay, for example, described the D.E.A.’s pushing back against requests from that country’s government to help spy on an insurgent group, known as the Paraguayan People’s Army, or the EPP, the initials of its name in Spanish. The leftist group, suspected of having ties to the Colombian rebel group FARC, had conducted several high-profile kidnappings and was making a small fortune in ransoms.

When American diplomats refused to give Paraguay access to the drug agency’s wiretapping system, Interior Minister Rafael Filizzola threatened to shut it down, saying: “Counternarcotics are important, but won’t topple our government. The EPP could.”

The D.E.A. faced even more intense pressure last year from Panama, whose right-leaning president, Ricardo Martinelli, demanded that the agency allow him to use its wiretapping program — known as Matador — to spy on leftist political enemies he believed were plotting to kill him.

The United States, according to the cables, worried that Mr. Martinelli, a supermarket magnate, “made no distinction between legitimate security targets and political enemies,” refused, igniting tensions that went on for months.

Mr. Martinelli, who the cables said possessed a “penchant for bullying and blackmail,” retaliated by proposing a law that would have ended the D.E.A.’s work with specially vetted police units. Then he tried to subvert the drug agency’s control over the program by assigning nonvetted officers to the counternarcotics unit.

And when the United States pushed back against those attempts — moving the Matador system into the offices of the politically independent attorney general — Mr. Martinelli threatened to expel the drug agency from the country altogether, saying other countries, like Israel, would be happy to comply with his intelligence requests.

Eventually, according to the cables, American diplomats began wondering about Mr. Martinelli’s motivations. Did he really want the D.E.A. to disrupt plots by his adversaries, or was he trying to keep the agency from learning about corruption among his relatives and friends?

One cable asserted that Mr. Martinelli’s cousin helped smuggle tens of millions of dollars in drug proceeds through Panama’s main airport every month. Another noted, “There is no reason to believe there will be fewer acts of corruption in this government than in any past government.”

As the standoff continued, the cables indicate that the United States proposed suspending the Matador program, rather than submitting to Mr. Martinelli’s demands. (American officials say the program was suspended, but the British took over the wiretapping program and have shared the intelligence with the United States.)

In a statement on Saturday, the government of Panama said that it regretted “the bad interpretation by United States authorities of a request for help made to directly confront crime and drug trafficking.” It said that Panama would continue its efforts to stop organized crime and emphasized that Panama continued to have “excellent relations with the United States.”

Meanwhile in Paraguay, according to the cables, the United States acquiesced, agreeing to allow the authorities there to use D.E.A. wiretaps for antikidnapping investigations, as long as they were approved by Paraguay’s Supreme Court.

“We have carefully navigated this very sensitive and politically sticky situation,” one cable said. “It appears that we have no other viable choice.”

A Larger Mandate

Created in 1973, the D.E.A. 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. Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the agency’s leaders have cited what they describe as an expanding nexus between drugs and terrorism in further building its overseas presence.

In Afghanistan, for example, “DEA officials have become convinced that ‘no daylight’ exists between drug traffickers at the highest level and Taliban insurgents,” Karen Tandy, then the agency’s administrator, told European Union officials in a 2007 briefing, according to a cable from Brussels.

Ms. Tandy described an agency informant’s recording of a meeting in Nangarhar Province between 9 Taliban members and 11 drug traffickers to coordinate their financial support for the insurgency, and she said the agency was trying to put a “security belt” around Afghanistan to block the import of chemicals for heroin processing. The agency was embedding its officers in military units around Afghanistan, she said. In 2007 alone, the D.E.A. opened new bureaus in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, as well as in three Mexican cities.

Cables describe lengthy negotiations over the extradition to the United States of the two notorious arms dealers wanted by the D.E.A. as it reached beyond pure counternarcotics cases: Monzer al-Kassar, a Syrian arrested in Spain, and Viktor Bout, a Russian arrested in Thailand. Both men were charged with agreeing to illegal arms sales to informants posing as weapons buyers for Colombian rebels. Notably, neither man was charged with violating narcotics laws.

Late last year in a D.E.A. case, three men from Mali accused of plotting to transport tons of cocaine across northwest Africa were charged under a narco-terrorism statute added to the law in 2006, and they were linked to both Al Qaeda and its North African affiliate, called Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

The men themselves had claimed the terrorism link, according to the D.E.A., though officials told The New York Times that they had no independent corroboration of the Qaeda connections. Experts on the desert regions of North Africa, long a route for smuggling between Africa and Europe, are divided about whether Al Qaeda operatives play a significant role in the drug trade, and some skeptics note that adding “terrorism” to any case can draw additional investigative resources and impress a jury.

New Routes for Graft

Most times, however, the agency’s expansion seems driven more by external forces than internal ones, with traffickers opening new routes to accommodate new markets. As Mexican cartels take control of drug shipments from South America to the United States, Colombian cartels have begun moving cocaine through West Africa to Europe.

The cables offer a portrait of the staggering effect on Mali, whose deserts have been littered with abandoned airplanes — including at least one Boeing 727 — and Ghana, where traffickers easily smuggle drugs through an airport’s “VVIP (Very Very Important Person) lounge.”

Top-to-bottom corruption in many West African countries made it hard for diplomats to know whom to trust. In one 2008 case in Sierra Leone, President Ernest Bai Koroma moved to prosecute and extradite three South American traffickers seized with about 1,500 pounds of cocaine, while his attorney general was accused of offering to release them for $2.5 million in bribes.

In Nigeria, the D.E.A. reported a couple of years earlier that diplomats at the Liberian Embassy were using official vehicles to transport drugs across the border because they were not getting paid by their war-torn government and “had to fend for themselves.”

A May 2008 cable from Guinea described a kind of heart-to-heart conversation about the drug trade between the American ambassador, Phillip Carter III, and Guinea’s prime minister, Lansana Kouyaté. At one point, the cable said, Mr. Kouyaté “visibly slumped in his chair” and acknowledged that Guinea’s most powerful drug trafficker was Ousmane Conté, the son of Lansana Conté, then the president. (After the death of his father, Mr. Conté went to prison.)

A few days later, diplomats reported evidence that the corruption ran much deeper inside the Guinean government than the president’s son. In a colorfully written cable — with chapters titled “Excuses, Excuses, Excuses” and “Theatrical Production” — diplomats described attending what was billed as a drug bonfire that had been staged by the Guinean government to demonstrate its commitment to combating the drug trade.

Senior Guinean officials, including the country’s drug czar, the chief of police and the justice minister, watched as officers set fire to what the government claimed was about 350 pounds of marijuana and 860 pounds of cocaine, valued at $6.5 million.

In reality, American diplomats wrote, the whole incineration was a sham. Informants had previously told the embassy that Guinean authorities replaced the cocaine with manioc flour, proving, the diplomats wrote, “that narco-corruption has contaminated” the government of Guinea “at the highest levels.”

And it did not take the D.E.A.’s sophisticated intelligence techniques to figure out the truth. The cable reported that even the ambassador’s driver sniffed out a hoax.

“I know the smell of burning marijuana,” the driver said. “And I didn’t smell anything.”

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