CIA Won't Release Contra Report

JOHN DIAMOND Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Despite a senator's argument that much information in a CIA report is already public, the agency has no plans to release its findings that U.S. intelligence in the 1980s worked with suspected drug traffickers fighting Nicaragua's communist regime.

A classified CIA inspector general report found that the agency was less than vigilant in investigating drug allegations against some of its paid informants among the Nicaraguan Contras.

While many of the report's details have been aired as long ago as 1987, a U.S. intelligence official said Friday that because the report contains so much information about agency sources and methods, it may be impossible to declassify in any intelligible form.

The House and Senate Intelligence Committees have received the report, but CIA Director George Tenet has not made a decision on whether to release a declassified version. The report is so filled with sensitive material, the intelligence official said, that a redacted version ``may look like Swiss cheese.''

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote Tenet Thursday urging release of the report titled ``Allegations of Connections Between CIA and the Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the United States.''

``I have read portions of the report and know that much of this information is already in the public domain,'' wrote Kerry, who chaired a 1987 Senate investigation that detailed drug activities by Contra rebels and their supporters and showed links between some of these individuals and the CIA. The material that has not been previously published, Kerry said, ``does not merit being withheld from public analysis.''

The 500-page inspector general report is the second volume of a CIA study that grew out of a hotly disputed newspaper account about the spread of crack cocaine in American cities. The second volume confirms conclusions reached in the first report, portions of which were made public in January, that there was no evidence any CIA officials engaged in drug trafficking with Contra rebels. The first volume also included the finding that the CIA was aware of alleged drug activity by some of its Contra contacts, but the latest installment goes into more detail.

The New York Times reported on the second volume of the CIA report in Friday's editions.

The CIA inquiry stemmed from a 1996 series in The San Jose Mercury-News that alleged a ``dark alliance'' between the CIA and Contra-connected drug dealers. The series created an uproar, particularly in black communities, over the suggestion that the CIA allowed its Contra contacts to engineer the spread of crack cocaine in poor urban neighborhoods.

The newspaper later stated that the series was flawed and reassigned the reporter.

CIA officials in the early 1980s occasionally received reports and allegations, some of them originating in newspapers sympathetic to the Nicaraguan Sandinista government, of drug trafficking by Contra rebels or supporters. In all, 50 of these people came under suspicion and the agency continued to work with about two dozen of them, the report concluded.

The inspector general's report criticizes the CIA for poor record-keeping; the report was unable to determine how many of the 50 individuals were further investigated by the CIA after allegations surfaced. The report also notes that more recent CIA regulations governing dealings with potentially unsavory sources would require such inquiries and better record-keeping.

The intelligence official said no one should be surprised that some of the guerrilla operators with whom the CIA had to deal in Central America in the early 1980s were unsavory.

Despite frequent criticism about some of its sources and contacts, the CIA insists, as a matter of policy, on the right to gain information from potential or even known lawbreakers.