Carlos Cabezas

Carlos Augusto Cabezas Ramirez was a Nicaraguan exile in San Francisco who was arrested on February 15, 1983 in the "Frogman Case," cooperated, testified against his former brother-in-law Julio Zavala, and received a ten-year sentence.¹ After his conviction he said that part of what he sold went to the Contras through the Nicaraguan exiles Horacio Pereira and Troilo Sánchez in Costa Rica, and that a Central Intelligence Agency man called "Iván Gómez" watched over the arrangement; Gary Webb treated the account as the earliest documented Contra cocaine pipeline.² The Justice Department's Inspector General found that Cabezas was the only person who claimed to have trafficked for the Contras, that his accounts changed over time and that no one else supported them; the CIA's Inspector General found no CIA relationship with him or Zavala.¹³⁴

Nicaragua and San Francisco

Webb wrote that Cabezas helped his mother support nine siblings by age fourteen, studied in the United States from 1970 to 1974 to become a commercial pilot while working nights as a janitor, returned to join the Nicaraguan National Guard and fly for Somoza's army while running a crop-dusting company, earned an accounting degree at the National University, worked at the Bank of America and became head of the foreign division of its Managua branch, took a law degree in 1978 and practiced in Managua; that he took part in the bombing of Masaya late in the war; and that on July 15, 1979, four days before the shooting ended, he caught the last flight out of Managua.² In San Francisco, Webb wrote, his wife, three daughters, mother and siblings were already living; he sold insurance for Lincoln Insurance Company, which named him Sales Agent of the Year in 1980, worked nights as a janitor at the San Francisco Hilton, and by 1981 had a $10,000 down payment on a row house in Daly City. Needing money to attend law school so he could be admitted to the California bar, he approached Zavala for a loan.² The CIA's Inspector General recorded that he was a lawyer in Nicaragua at the time of its report.⁴

The Frogman Case

In January 1982 the FBI's San Francisco division began an investigation, run with the DEA and the Customs Service, that became the country's first Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force case. The case agent was David Alba, Assistant U.S. Attorney James Lassart supervised the investigation and Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Zanides prosecuted; a six-month wiretap led to more than 50 convictions and the seizure of about 555 pounds of cocaine, fourteen vehicles, about $300,000 and about $100,000 in jewelry. On January 17, 1983 twelve people, some in wet suits, were arrested bringing 430 pounds of cocaine ashore from a Colombian freighter in San Francisco Bay, and on February 15, 1983 agents arrested Zavala, Cabezas and others on warrants for twenty-two further defendants.⁵ Webb wrote that agents placed at least four informants inside the group and monitored more than 13,000 telephone conversations; the U.S. Attorney, Joseph Russoniello, wrote in 1986 of 11,000 intercepted calls and the case agent recalled about 10,000.²⁶⁴

Webb wrote that Zavala offered Cabezas $500 per kilo delivered plus a percentage of collected debts and said some of the profits would help the Contras, and that within weeks DEA agent Sandra Smith saw Cabezas pick up two Los Angeles dealers at the airport and drive them to his Daly City house.² The Inspector General found that on November 12, 1981 Smith followed the Los Angeles dealer Julio Bermudez to Cabezas's house in Dale City and then to the house of Norwin Meneses's nephew Jairo Meneses; Smith's surveillance report says Cabezas lived there. Zavala's and Cabezas's source of supply, according to the prosecutors, was the Colombian Alvaro Carvajal Minota and his mother; the FBI's November 8, 1982 teletype named Pereira, Troilo Sánchez and Fernando Sánchez as a second source, and added that the DEA had called Pereira "the major source of cocaine smuggling from Costa Rica to the United States" but had been unable to penetrate his "extremely closely knit organization." Pereira and Troilo Sánchez were never charged for lack of evidence.⁷³⁸

Cabezas's account

Cabezas has described the arrangement in five forms. At Zavala's trial in November 1984 he testified that he and Zavala imported ten or eleven kilograms from Pereira between November 1981 and September 1982 and split the profits with him, and that Pereira said he was helping the "Contra Revolution"; he did not mention the CIA. In the March 16, 1986 San Francisco Examiner article he said the proceeds "belonged to the contra revolution." In an October 8, 1987 interview with FBI agent Fred Fresques he said they imported 18 or 19 kilos, that Pereira and Troilo Sánchez asked him to handle the Contra cocaine because "they did not trust Julio Zavala," and that he stopped over losses, the Contras' insistence on a fixed price of $54,000 a kilo and a wish to quit; again there was no mention of the CIA. To the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee's staff in March 1988 he said he moved 25 to 30 kilos and $1.5 million. In Webb's account, and in interviews with the CIA's and the Justice Department's inspectors in 1997, he said that at a December 1981 meeting at a San José hotel Pereira and Sánchez proposed raising money for the Contras by selling cocaine; that Peruvian cocaine was packed into hollow reeds woven into baskets and carried by "Contra mules," typically airline flight attendants, one kilogram at a time; that he carried one such basket himself, unaware at first of its contents; and that he made about twenty trips with an average of $64,000, once with about $250,000, to Pereira and Sánchez in Honduras and Costa Rica and, two or three times, $40,000 to $50,000 to Aristides Sánchez at the Contras' Miami office. He told the CIA's inspectors that he saw Pereira give money to a Contra named Joaquín Vega near Danlí, Honduras to feed troops and their families, and said Zavala at first handled the baskets and later skimmed the money, so that Pereira and Sánchez gave the collection to him.¹³⁸²⁴

Webb wrote that Pereira told Cabezas he represented UDN-FARN and the FDN, that the CIA would control delivery of the money, and that Cabezas took over the Contra side on a fifty-fifty split with Zavala; that Cabezas carried twelve kilos in the first part of 1982, earning about $17,000; and that he delivered money to the Contras' Miami office in a shopping center near the airport.² Webb described Cabezas's meeting in Costa Rica with the man called Iván Gómez: Pereira and Troilo Sánchez introduced him in April or May 1982 as "the CIA's man in Costa Rica," who said he was there "to ensure that the profits from the cocaine went to the Contras and not into someone's pocket," and Cabezas saw him once more, in late summer, at the San José airport, where Gómez said nothing.²

What the inspectors found

The Justice Department's inspectors compared the account with the records. The ledger the FBI seized at Cabezas's arrest begins in August 1982 and does not separate two organizations or two suppliers; it appears to show seven or eight kilograms imported, not the 10 or 11, 18 or 19, or 25 to 30 he gave on different occasions; it shows no trip carrying $100,000 and no deliveries of $40,000 to $50,000 to Miami; its entry "Envio con CC 56.000 = 100882" appears to record a payment of $56,000 leaving a balance of $100,882 owed for cocaine. Cabezas said different things about whether Zavala or he ran the Contra enterprise, about when the Gómez meetings occurred (early and mid-1981 to the Justice Department, April or May and late summer 1982 to the CIA), and about how he learned that Gómez worked for the CIA, saying in one interview that Gómez said so and in another that Pereira and Sánchez did. At the end of his Justice Department interview he said he "did not believe the United States was involved in the 'Contra cocaine' network." He could not name the Contra group, describing it as the former National Guard and "not Eden Pastora's group."¹³

The CIA's inspectors confirmed that an independent contractor used the alias "Ivan Gomez" in Costa Rica in the 1980s, but he was shorter and slighter than the man Cabezas described, CIA records placed him in the United States in April and May 1982, and he denied meeting Cabezas, Zavala, Sánchez or Pereira. Shown sixteen photographs, which included two of the contractor, one in operational disguise, Cabezas became visibly shaken and picked two other men as "possibilities," both with no relationship to the CIA. The inspectors noted that on August 8, 1984 a Nicaraguan newspaper had printed a photograph captioned "Ivan Gomez," described as working for the CIA.⁴³ Zavala, who recalled a meeting in a San José hotel in late 1981 or early 1982, said no one there claimed CIA affiliation; Zavala told the INS agent Michael Hardman after his 1996 arrest that Cabezas lied to "scam his way out of prison"; Zavala's wife Doris Salomon said she did not recall the men meeting and called Cabezas "a liar to me"; Troilo and Fernando Sánchez denied the arrangement; Troilo Sánchez said he knew of a "Roberto," introduced by Meneses in 1987, who claimed CIA work.¹⁴ An FBI informant in the case, "Source 1," told the inspectors he heard Cabezas and Zavala say the money went to the Contras but that no one had mentioned the CIA; his FBI file contained no such reporting, and the Inspector General noted in a footnote that he had been a CIA asset before he worked for the FBI, that the FBI asked the CIA in March 1982 to debrief him about Zavala and that the CIA ended its use of him in 1982.¹

Prosecutors and agents described Cabezas differently. Lassart called him a "jolly BS-er" and "Mr. Hyperbole," Zanides said he could fabricate a story in his interest, and Alba called him a "BS-er." Fresques, who interviewed him in 1987, said he respected him and thought he dealt in only a couple of kilograms with part of the proceeds meant for the Contras.³ The CIA's inspectors recorded that a different FBI agent, who dealt with Cabezas after his 1984 conviction and release from prison in 1992, said he told him in 1987 that he sold cocaine for the Contras but provided few details. The inspectors found no information to support the claim that Cabezas gave financial help to the Contras from his trafficking, and the Justice Department's inspectors wrote that it appeared likely that Cabezas and Zavala got some of their cocaine from Pereira and Sánchez but that there was no clear or sufficient evidence the cocaine was handled for the Contras.⁴³

The money returned to Zavala

When agents arrested Zavala they seized $36,020 from his bedroom. In 1984 his lawyer Judd Iversen asked to depose two men in Costa Rica, Francisco Aviles Saenz and Vicente Rappaccioli, who he said would show that the money belonged to Contra groups; documents on the letterhead of the Conservative Party of Nicaraguans in Exile and of UDN-FARN said Zavala had been given $45,000 in San José in January 1983. Cabezas told the Justice Department's inspectors that the money was drug proceeds a co-defendant had received from a customer the night before the arrests, and that Salomon obtained the letters to "minimize" Zavala's crimes. The CIA's station in Costa Rica believed Rappaccioli was a former CIA asset, which was a mistake, and an August 24, 1984 cable from headquarters said the CIA's Office of General Counsel had asked the San Francisco U.S. Attorney's office and "at CIA OGC request, the U.S. Attorney has agreed to return the money to Zavala"; the depositions were cancelled and a check for $36,800 issued in September 1984. The former U.S. Attorney Joseph Russoniello and his deputies said the money went back because Costa Rica depositions were too expensive; only Zanides remembered the CIA's contact, and the Inspector General concluded it was unresolved which reason governed. The Inspector General judged that the claim the money was Contra money was most likely a ploy to keep drug proceeds.⁵⁶ The CIA recorded in 1986 that Aviles was expelled from UDN-FARN after the Examiner article and that its leader Fernando "El Negro" Chamorro and his staff had never met Cabezas, Zavala, Pereira or Salomon.⁴

Later statements

Cabezas pleaded guilty in 1984 to conspiracy to import cocaine and importation, was convicted of continuing criminal enterprise on stipulated facts and received ten years.¹ Webb wrote that Cabezas testified under oath at the trial that profits went to the Contras and that pages from his ledger showing transactions with Fernando Sánchez were introduced, and that no reporter covered the trial; the Inspector General's account of the trial testimony contains neither claim.²¹ In 1987, Webb wrote, Cabezas wrote to the Los Angeles Times reporter Doyle McManus, who had reported "no supporting evidence" for Contra drug allegations, saying there was such evidence "hidden by the government," described his Costa Rica trip with $250,000 and said the FBI tape-recorded conversations between Fernando Sánchez, Troilo Sánchez and himself; McManus asked him to substantiate and he sent documents and heard nothing more.⁹ In December 1996 the journalist Georg Hodel located Cabezas in Managua, and Webb wrote that Cabezas said on the record that he had delivered millions of dollars to the Contras and named Gómez.⁹ The Kerry subcommittee's staff interviewed Cabezas in March 1988; its report found that Zavala and Cabezas had a second source of supply in Nicaraguans living in Costa Rica, whom FBI documents identified as Pereira, Troilo Sánchez and Fernando Sánchez, and the Inspector General read it as reaching no conclusion on the validity of their Contra claims.⁸