Enrique Miranda

Enrique Miranda Jaime was a former Sandinista intelligence officer who became a double agent for the Central Intelligence Agency during the Contra war and later worked as a DEA informant. From 1989 to 1991, he served as Norwin Meneses's emissary to the cartels of Colombia and as his right-hand man.¹

Testimony on the Ilopango Drug Pipeline

Miranda testified at the 1991 trial in Nicaragua that "Norwin was selling drugs and tunneled the benefits to the Contras with help of high-ranking military officials of the Salvadoran Army, especially with the help of the head of the Salvadoran Air Force and a Nicaraguan pilot named Marcos Aguado." Miranda said the cocaine brought from Colombia by Medellín cartel pilots arrived in Costa Rica in square twenty-five-kilo packages, was unloaded at various airstrips including one on CIA operative John Hull's farm, and was placed aboard Contra planes flown into Ilopango Air Force Base.¹

Once at Ilopango, Miranda said, Aguado and Meneses supervised loading the cocaine onto U.S.-bound aircraft owned by the Salvadoran Air Force and the Miami-based CIA contractor Southern Air Transport. Miranda said Meneses told him U.S. military hardware stockpiled at Ilopango was loaded onto Salvadoran transport planes and flown south, where guns were traded for cocaine and flown back.¹

Aguado's Cartel Operations

Miranda met CIA pilot Marcos Aguado for dinner at Meneses's mansion in Managua in 1991, where Aguado described flying for the Colombian cartels. Aguado claimed he once took a Salvadoran Air Force bomber and leveled a warehouse full of Medellín cartel cocaine on behalf of the rival Cali cartel. He also made plans to bomb the prison where Medellín cartel chief Pablo Escobar was briefly imprisoned. Aguado boasted of flying weapons from the Salvadoran military to the Colombian cartels, claims Miranda said he doubted until a Salvadoran Air Force colonel and associates were arrested in 1992 for selling bombs and high explosives to Colombian drug dealers.¹

Background

Miranda was arrested by former Nicaraguan antidrug czar Roger Mayorga. Miranda and Mayorga told Gary Webb that the U.S. air base where drugs from Ilopango were flown was near Fort Worth, Texas. Webb identified it as the now-closed Carswell Air Force Base, home of a Strategic Air Command bomber squadron, the only air force base near Fort Worth at the time, and reported that the Air Force told a 1997 Freedom of Information Act requester that flight records for Salvadoran military aircraft in the mid-1980s had been destroyed.¹

Justice Department Review of His Account

Miranda told DEA agent Jose Delgado about cocaine smuggling for the Sandinistas during debriefings as a confidential source in 1996, and did not raise Contra trafficking then. Interviewed by the Justice Department Inspector General's investigators in 1997, he described Contra trafficking through Ilopango and said he had heard it from Aguado, who claimed to fly Salvadoran military planes from Ilopango to a military airport in Texas. He said Meneses had invited him to watch the Texas operation and, when pressed, said he had not seen it occur. The Inspector General wrote: "The failure to report such important information in 1996 makes it difficult to credit Miranda's account in 1997." The same review records that the Sandinista government jailed him for treason in September 1985, that he was released in 1989 for health reasons, that he was arrested with Meneses in November 1991 in connection with the seizure of 764 kilograms of cocaine bound from Managua to the United States, and that he was sentenced to fourteen years in August 1992.² The CIA Inspector General's Volume II summarizes Miranda's claim that Aguado flew weapons to Medellín and returned with cocaine stored at Ilopango, and states: "No information has been found to support Miranda's allegations."³

Escape from Prison and DEA Recruitment

In early 1996, journalist Georg Hodel requested permission from the Nicaraguan Ministry of the Interior to interview Miranda, who had been moved to a prison in the city of Granada after Meneses allegedly hired someone to kill him. Miranda "escaped" the same day Hodel made his request, leaving on a weekend furlough and never returning. Prison officials called it "extremely out of character" for a model inmate nearing the end of his sentence. The police had not been notified of the escape, and Hodel's discovery became front-page news in Managua.⁴

Miranda was captured in Miami in December 1996, where he was living with his wife. He had entered the United States with a visa the U.S. Embassy in Managua issued him the day he escaped. Despite being listed in the State Department's computers as a convicted drug trafficker and therefore ineligible for a visa, the State Department claimed two simultaneous computer failures resulted in him "erroneously" receiving one. The DEA denied involvement but admitted Miranda was placed on the DEA payroll as an informant "soon after he came to Miami" and was sent to Central and South America to work drug cases. The DEA never informed Nicaraguan authorities it was harboring one of their fugitives.⁴