In 1999, during
President Clinton’s administration, the FBI was investigating a case where
the Cuban government was directly involved in drug trafficking.
It definitely was, and the ring leader was Cuban General Ramiro Valdes Menendez, a
“Hero of the Cuban Revolution,” a loyal ally of Fidel
Castro since 1953 when he was a member of Castro’s insurgents who
attacked the Cuban Army’s Moncada Barracks. That loyalty has endured over
60 years, and the Castro brothers have rewarded Valdes with many
high-level positions in the Cuban government, to include Minister of
Interior, the powerful overlord of the Cuban internal security
services. He’s been a member of the Cuban Communist Party’s Politburo
since 1965.
Ramiro Valdes and Fidel Castro: In 2000, a highly
credible FBI cooperating witness (CW), a foreign national (name and
nationality are known, but omitted) thoroughly vetted by the FBI, was
an eyewitness to a one-on-one meeting between Valdes and Colombian Cali Cartel
chief Miguel Rodriguez Abadia in Havana, Cuba and the CW provided
convincing reporting on the Cuban government’s complicity in international drug
trafficking. Valdes was in the uniform pictured above during the
meeting. After the CW watched Valdes and Rodriguez meet in a public
setting (exact place and date known, but omitted), Rodriguez returned to
the CW’s table and later that day offered the following information tied
to the Cali Cartel’s drug shipments through Cuba.
Here are some details.
(There’s a simple explanation of WHY Rodriguez gave this information to
the CW. He fully trusted the CW as a confidant because they both
were planning a multi-ton shipment of cocaine to the U.S. through Mexico.
The name of the Mexican organization and some of the Mexicans involved are
known, but omitted.)
Cali drug shipments were originally
sent to Cuba via fishing vessels, but now most of the shipments were flown into
Cuba by DC-3 cargo aircraft departing air strips in Venezuela. Valdes
dictated these terms to Rodriguez Abadia. Note: Castro ally
Hugo Chavez was president of Venezuela at the time.
Ramiro Valdes and Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez
Valdes is paid 20% of the value of
each shipment on a strict cash-only basis (note: type of currency not
reported, but presumably dollars for the cash-strapped, heavily
indebted Castro regime). This expense covered securing and
offloading the drug shipment upon arrival, transporting it to the port of
departure, usually Havana or Matanzas, and onloading the
drugs on departing ships. Destination ports were chiefly in
Europe, with the Netherlands and Spain topping the list. No
drugs transiting Cuba were shipped to the U.S.
No drugs would remain on the
island or sold in Cuba.
Valdes controlled the quantity of
drugs flown into Cuba, which Rodriguez said was 1,000 to 1,700 kilos
of cocaine per shipment, normally sent to Cuba every 10-15
days. Using the least frequent figures provided by Rodriguez to
the CW – 1,000 kilos every 15 days would mean that a minimum of
24 metric tons of Cali Cartel cocaine were moving through
Cuba annually. At an $18,000/kilo wholesale price, Valdes’s
demand for 20% of the value of the drug shipments for handling
charges would generate a minimum of over $86 million in cash of
untraceable annual revenue to the Cuban government.
Because of
the potential nature of this case (the CW’s direct access to the
leader of the Cali Cartel, with conclusive evidence such as phone
conversations between the two taped by the FBI), its progress was
briefed to FBI Director Louis Freeh and Clinton’s Attorney General,
Janet Reno. It is highly likely that this particular portion of the
case, the eyewitness account of the meeting between Valdes and Rodriguez,
was brought to the attention of President Clinton because of the possible broad
political impact on foreign policy between the U.S. and Cuba.
A few words about Cali Cartel chief
William Rodriguez Abadia, pictured here. Pretty nerdy looking guy,
eh? He’s a well-educated lawyer, and, although he claims he
never murdered anyone or ordered any murders, it is probably not
true. Who admits to murder in a media interview, which is when he
made this claim? But his father, Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, murdered
and his uncle, Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, did also. Plus Jose Santacruz
Londono. Those three men were the founders of the Cali Cartel, the
world’s most powerful and wealthy criminal organization in the 1980s and
1990s. After his father, uncle, and Santacruz were wrapped up
by the Colombian National Police, William took the reins in 1995. In his
own words to a U.S. reporter, “I wanted the power.”
He got just that. And
more. A year later, in May 1996, he was the target of a vicious hit job
during a luncheon in Cali that killed 6 people, but William survived his critical
wounds. 5 years later, in 2001, he went into hiding, which coincides with
his last contact with the CW (exact date known, but omitted). 5 years
after that, in 2006, he surrendered to U.S. authorities, pleaded guilty to
certain charges, and cooperated to reduce his sentence to 5 years
instead of 20.
Something important happened shortly
BEFORE that meeting in Havana between General Valdes and Miguel Rodriguez in
2000. A young Cuban child named Elian Gonzalez arrived in the U.S. in
1999 after his mother and 13 other Cubans tried to flee Cuba. Storms sank
the boat they were in, Elian’s mother drowned, but Elian and one other
survived, were rescued and brought to the U.S. Via court order, Elian
Gonzalez was returned to the Cuban government on June 28, 2000. Who
can forget this frightening picture when Elian was forcibly taken at
gunpoint from his relatives in Florida and later flown to Cuba?
If the meeting between Valdes and
Rodriguez had taken place BEFORE the Gonzalez case was decided, one can imagine
that MAYBE Clinton and Reno would have taken a completely different
legal path on the Elian Gonzalez case. But even more importantly, both
Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright might have moved to
a much more hardline approach to relations with Cuba. Might
have. Both of them knew, from intelligence information and much publicly
available information, that the Cuban government was dead broke and the Cuban
economy was in shambles. It would make sense that a desperate Castro
would turn to drug trafficking to raise much needed money. And Castro did
just that, through his trusted friend and loyal ally, Ramiro Valdes.
Unfortunately, Clinton did nothing
for several possible reasons. In the presidential campaign season of
the summer of 2000, his second administration was coming to an end in a few
months, and he had more important political business to
attend, helping Vice President Al Gore get elected. Then
there is the fact that in 1999 he eased travel restrictions to Cuba for
“cultural exchanges” and approved a 2-game exhibition in Cuba between the
Baltimore Orioles and Cuba’s national baseball team. A pivot to a harder
line policy on Cuba would have amounted to a rebuke of his own and
the Democrat Party’s longstanding efforts to improve relations with Cuba,
which started with President Carter’s establishment of mutual “interest
sections” in Havana and Washington DC in 1977 and ended with President Obama’s
approval of formal diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2015.
Post 9/11, there is additional
reporting that this case was transferred from the lead FBI field office in
the southern US (specific field office is known, but omitted) to the
FBI’s field office in Manhattan. Later, the Southern
District of New York, which includes Manhattan, issued an indictment for
William Rodriguez Abadia on November 12, 2002.
The Cuban aspect of the
case was explosive, and the best way to ignore or bury the Cuban angle was
to send the case to an FBI office swamped with 9/11 terrorist investigations
and turn it over to friendly prosecutors who would focus on leads
solely based on U.S – Cali Cartel ties. As noted above, the Cuban
government was helping to send the cocaine to Europe, not the
U.S. Smart move by the Cubans. No U.S. laws were broken.
At the time of the case
transfer, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York was
either Mary Jo White (appointed by President Clinton in 1993 and served
until January 2, 2002) or James Comey (appointed by President Bush and served January
7, 2002 to December 15, 2003). Comey was the U.S. Attorney when William
Rodriguez was indicted. He was Director of the FBI and responsible for
the highly controversial decision on the FBI’s investigation of Hillary
Clinton. Mary Jo White was chairman of the Securities and Exchange
Commission. Both were appointees of President Obama.
Today we are left with an
international outlaw regime in Cuba, recognized as legitimate by the U.S.
government, that has undermined our allies in Europe by helping to send huge
shipments of drugs to their countries. Some very important people in
our government knew this and said nothing. That is not how a
friend treats friends.
No comments:
Post a Comment