Bush's claim aroused suspicion in Michael Isikoff, an NBC correspondent, who doubted that crack was being sold in Lafayette Square, an urban park north of the White House. Through contacts at the DEA, Isikoff learned the truth. Bush's speech writers had decided that a prop would enhance the president's rhetoric, so they wrote the Lafayette Square crack story into the script before it had happened. After Bush approved the idea, the DEA was told to make a drug purchase near the White House in order to fit the script.
.
.
The assignment ended up with Special Agent Sam Gaye, who was asked by his boss, "Can you make a drug buy around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Can you call any defendants you've been buying from?" In court, Gaye testified, "I had twenty-four hours to buy three ounces of crack."
.
.
Using informers, Gaye set up a purchase, which fell through after the dealer didn't show up in the park. During the second attempt, the agent's body microphone malfunctioned, and the cameraman about to film the transaction was assaulted by a homeless person.
.
.
Finally, an informant contacted an amenable low-level dealer, Keith Jackson, an eighteen-year-old high-school student who lived across town. Gaye asked Keith to meet him in the park.
.
.
"Where's Lafayette Park?" Keith said.
.
.
"It's across the street from the White House."
.
.
"Where the fuck is the White House?" Keith said.
.
.
"We had to manipulate him to get him down there," said William McMullan, assistant special agent in charge of the DEA's Washington field office. "It wasn't easy."
.
.
When the DEA video tape was played in court, the jury laughed. It showed Gaye waiting on Pennsylvania Avenue with the White House and tourists behind him. Before Jackson and an informant arrived by car, an irate woman sprung up from below the camera's vision, and yelling was heard as an altercation unfolded.
.
.
"There was this lady," Gaye said, "who got up off the ground and said, 'Don't take my photo! Don't take my photo!'"
.
.
For the White House transaction, as well as three earlier sales, Keith ended up facing ten years to life without parole even though he had no previous convictions. The first trial was a mistrial, but on retrial he was convicted of three counts with two being dropped, including the Lafayette Park sale. The judge sentenced him to ten years due to the mandatory minimums for selling crack near a school, but suggested that he seek clemency, which was never granted.
.
.
A teenager had been sacrificed to improve Bush's ratings.
.
.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and with the Soviet Union contracting, the US was rapidly running out of Communists to fight. Bush needed enemies to maintain his popularity at the voting
booths and to keep the war machine in business. Pablo was ideal.
.
.
In November 1990, Bush signed a bill that coerced the states into suspending the driver's licenses and revoking government permits and benefits (including college loans) of those convicted of drug crimes. He advocated the heavy use of forfeiture or confiscation of property that the government believed to be drug related. It was primarily used to take cars and currency, and the money was recycled back into the state and federal government. These laws operated under presumed guilt, which did not require a trial or even a conviction.
.
.
By 1992, there were more people in federal prisons for drug charges than there were for all crimes in 1980, with the burden overwhelmingly falling on black people. Twice as many people were arrested
for possession than supplying. Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, said there were too many arrests. New York City jails filled to breaking point, and jail boats had to be opened. Bush's policies did nothing to stop people from buying and selling drugs.
.
.
That the US government was simultaneously waging a War on Drugs while facilitating their importation via the CIA is hard for some people to swallow. But it must be probed further to understand why Pablo was taken down.
.
.
In 1985, Retired US Navy Lieutenant Commander Al Martin had dinner with George HW Bush, Jeb Bush and a CIA veteran Felix Rodriguez, who'd taken $10 million from the Medellin Cartel for the Nicaraguan rebels (as detailed in Chapter 4). Over food, George HW Bush boasted that he operated on the Big Lie principle, whereby big lies would be believed because the public couldn't conceive that their leader was capable of bending the truth that far, such as a president railing against drugs while overseeing drug trafficking worth billions.
.
.
Anyone who tried to blow the whistle on Bush's phoney War on Drugs ended up paying a price. Former DEA agent Cele Castillo wrote Powder-burns: Cocaine, Contras & the Drug war (1998), in which he detailed a meeting with George HW Bush. Assigned to El Salvador in 1986 to investigate a pilot who stored his plane at the llopango airbase, Castillo had discovered that the Nicaraguan rebels were smuggling cocaine to the US, using the same pilots, planes and hangers as the ClA and NSC (National Security Council), under the direction of Bush's frontman Oliver North. At llopango, he often saw Bush's buddy, Felix Rodriguez, whom Castillo described as an American terrorist. Bewildered, he told his bosses about the cocaine smuggling. They instructed him to use the word "alleged" in his reports instead of stating things as factual.
.
.
Castillo reported that a CIA agent was requesting a US Visa for a Nicaraguan-rebel drug smuggler who was flying cocaine from Costa Rica to anti-Castro Cubans in Miami. The cocaine in Costa Rica was picked up from the ranch of an American, John Hull, who, by the admission of the CIA's station chief in Costa Rica, was working with the CIA on military supply and other operations on behalf of the Nicaraguan rebels, and was being paid $110,000 a month by Oliver North.
.
.
After Castillo blew the whistle, Vice President Bush met him briefly during a visit to Guatemala City on January 14, 1986, at a cocktail party at the
ambassador's residence. Protected by a retinue of Secret Service agents, Bush was talking to embassy personnel and Guatemalan dignitaries. Bush approached Castillo and read the tag on his lapel, which identified him as a member of the US embassy. Shaking hands, Bush asked what he did.
.
.
"I'm a DEA agent assigned to Guatemala."
.
.
"Well, what do you do?"
.
.
"There's some funny things going on with the Contras in El Salvador,"
.
.
Without uttering a response, Bush smiled and walked away. Castillo realised that Bush was in on the drug trafficking.
.
.
Following the party at the ambassador's house, the US Ambassador to El Salvador sent a back-channel cable to the State Department. A few days later, the DEA closed down Castillo's investigation. The reports he'd filed disappeared into what Castillo called a black hole at DEA headquarters. In February 1987, DEA investigators found "no credible information" to indicate that traffickers were part of any political organisation, including the Nicaraguan rebels and the government of Nicaragua. Castillo received so much harassment that he ended up quitting the DEA in 1990.
.
.
Presidential candidate and billionaire, Ross Perot, hired Bo Gritz, a Green Beret who'd earned multiple medals for bravery, to find American POWs imprisoned in Asia decades after the Vietnam War. While on his mission, Gritz came across General Khun Sa, a Burmese drug lord, who offered to identify US government officials he claimed had been trafficking in heroin for over twenty years. Having uncovered CIA drug trafficking in Asia, Perot and Gritz were shocked.
.
.
Perot requested a meeting with George HW Bush, so that he could present his evidence. Bush told Perot to go to the proper authorities and refused to help any further.
.
.
Here are extracts from a letter Gritz wrote to Bush:
.
.
Sir:~
.
.
Why does it seem that you are saying "YES" to illegal narcotics in America?
.
.
I turned over video tapes to your NSC staff assistant, Tom Harvey, January 1987, wherein General KHUN SA, overlord of Asia's "Golden Triangle" offered to stop 900 tons of heroin/opium from entering the free world in 1987. Harvey told me, "…there is no interest here in doing that."
.
.
.