DEA agents Hector Berrellez and Mike Holm step forward to give interviews in Esquire Magazine in 1998.

Berrellez worked on the Enrique Camerena murder case as a Supervisory Agent and was present for the os Angeles raids on the Blandon rganiza on men oned in Dark Alliance. He ordered a criminal inves ga on of the C A years efore the Dark Alliance series as his drug inves ga ons were eing interfered with. He re red a er eing transferred to ashington DC and eing assigned a lank schedule for one year.

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Hector Berrellez, twenty-four years in the DEA, known as the agency's Eliot Ness. As he read a out Gary e , he thought, This shit is true.

v m .B m m . His army of informants was constantly repor ng strange for ed ases sca ered around Me ico, ut they were not Me ican military ases, and, his informants told him, the planes were shipping drugs. Camps in Durango, Sinaloa, Baja, Veracruz, all over Me ico. Hector wrote up these camps and the informa on he was ge ng on ig drug shipments. And each month, he would go to Me ico City to meet with his DEA superiors and American-em assy sta , and he started men oning these reports. He was told, Stay away from those ases; they're our training camps, special opera ons. He thought, hat the hell is this 'm here to enforce the drug laws, and 'm eing told to do nothing.

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.B . . . He egan to dou t that there was a real commitment to win this war on drugs. He saw his government winking at too many narco cs connec ons. He took iki Camarena's murder personally, ecause as agents they were mirror images -- gung-ho, commi ed drug usters. And impediments to his inves ga on pissed Hector o . So in 1992, four years efore Gary e sprang "Dark Alliance" on the world, Hector Berrellez sat down in his federal oce in os Angeles and picked up the phone and recommended ac on to the DEA. Things had come to his a en on, and he thought, Some ody's go a inves gate this crap. n fact, he hoped to e that inves gator.

Hector Berrellez wanted a criminal inves ga on of the Central ntelligence Agency. His million snitch udget had rought in an unseemly harvest, report a er report from informants that in the eigh es C A-leased aircra were ying cocaine into places like the air-force ase in Homestead, lorida, and the air eld north of Tucson long elieved to e a C A ase. And that these planes were

ying guns south. ne of his witnesses in the Camarena case told him a out ying in a U.S. military plane loaded with drugs from Guadalajara to Homestead. ther informants told him that major drug gures, including Rafael Caro Quintero, the man nally imprisoned for the Camarena murder, were ge ng guns delivered through C A connec ons. Everywhere he turned, he ran into dope guys who had C A connec ons, and to a narc this didn't look right. " can't elieve," he told his superiors, "that the C A is handling all this shit and doesn't know what these pilots are doing." His superiors asked if he had hard evidence of actual C A case ocers moving dope, and he said no, just lots of people they employed. All intelligence services use the fa led cutouts to separate themselves from their gru y work.

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Hector's Camarena work had urrowed deep, very deep, inside the Me ican government and found endless rot. ith the vote on NA TA in the air in the fall of 199 , his inves ga on started to get pressure, then his udget was cut. By 199 , a er Jus ce Department ocials had een in Me ico City, he was told, "Don't report that crap anymore." t was clear to Hector that the Me ican government wanted this Camarena inves ga on reined in. n early 199 , he learned of his future in a curious way. ne of Hector's informants in Me ico City called another one of his informants in os Angeles and said, Hector's ge ng transferred to ashington. The guy in os Angeles said, No, no Hector's s ll here. Two months later, in April 199 , Berrellez was transferred to ashington, D.C. ver the years, Hector had ecome used to a certain amount of duplicity in the DEA. Some of his fellow agents, he had come to elieve, were actually mem ers of the C A. The DEA had een penetrated. At headquarters, Hector sat in an oce with nothing to do. "There ain't no fucking drug war," he says now. " was even called un-American. No ody cares a out this shit." He started going a li le crazy. Each day, he checked into a lank schedule. So he caught a lot of dou le features. n Septem er 199 , he re red. He had had enough. The most decorated soldier in the war on drugs kind of faded out at the movies.

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H f m m m f m. H v m f . n 1997, he was interviewed y Jus ce Department ocials a out those unseemly drug ledgers and contra materials he saw during the raid on the fourteen Blandon stash houses ack in 198 . His interviewers wanted par cularly to know whether anyone esides Hector had seen them. They then told Hector that they couldn't nd the seized material anymore. B f H .H f m f O B m m . 27 f 8 . f mm v .H m m v v I f f f f q ; .H . v L f R

f m m m m v v . All those reports he wrote for years while in Me ico and then later running the Camarena case, those detailed reports of how he kept stum ling into dope deals done y C A assets, never produced any results or even a su stan ve response. H H H v B B m f . z f f f . H m f m z m -m m z ff H .H ; .H m .P m -f m m .

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-- ollowing the release of "Dark Alliance," Senator John erry told The ashington Post, "There is no ques on in my mind that people aliated with, on the payroll of, and carrying the creden als of, the C A were involved in drug tracking while involved in support of the contras." hy has the massive erry report een ignored to this day -- O mm 8 . L f v m f I . v v v F P. H z I m . f H I

Representa ve Norman Dicks of ashington then asked, "Did any of these allega ons involve tracking in the United States " "Yes," Hitz answered.

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In the end the objective of unseating the Sandinistas appears to have taken precedence over dealing properly with potentially serious allegations against those with whom the agency was working, CIA Inspector General Britt Snider said in classified testimony on May 25, 1999. He conceded that the CIA did not treat the drug allegations in a consistent, reasoned or justifiable manner.