DEA administrator gets wired on Motorola

On the same day that the White House unveiled its $1.4 billion Plan Mexico, which will provide a Christmas list of training and equipment (including communications gear) to the Mexican government to battle “drug cartels,” the head of the DEA announced she is stepping down.

And where is Karen Tandy — heiress to the Tandy/Radio Shack fortune  — headed? To a major communications equipment manufacturer, of course: Motorola. She has accepted a job offer as the senior vice president of the Fortune 100 company’s Global Government Relations and Public Policy Division.

“Ms. Tandy will serve as Motorola's top public policy spokesperson on issues related to global telecom policy, trade, regulation, spectrum allocation, and country relations,” PRNewswire reports. And what a spectacular job of PR unfolded this week in the mainstream media’s coverage of Tandy’s departure from DEA. Nearly all of the reports were extremely thorough in picking up on the DEA talking points, such as this tidbit from the Associated Press:

Under Tandy, the DEA said it eliminated more than 65 percent of the nation's illicit methamphetamine labs.

When you read a statement like that, you have to assume DEA knows precisely how many meth labs exist — like they file taxes or something — and that it’s a fixed number. If that’s not the case, then somebody is selling us bad chorizo.  

But given that Plan Mexico is likely to pass through the bowels of Congress like an undercooked chorizo taco  (after the usual faux objections from the Democrats), you have to give Tandy credit for seizing the day.  

Plan Mexico’s $1.4 billion price tag will buy a lot of chorizo and telecommunications equipment for this new bi-national effort targeting those dastardly drug traffickers.

And with Tandy serving in a key “spectrum allocation” role with Motorola, we can all sleep easier at night. After all, Motorola has a track record of serving the communications needs of federal law enforcement agencies (see link) and Tandy has a record of heading a federal law enforcement agency with a big presence in Mexico. It’s a marriage made in heaven — or at least in a backroom in Washington — it would seem.

But given the reality of the Mexican government’s corrupt alliance with narco-traffickers, you also have to wonder if Motorola’s equipment — provided under any future Plan Mexico pact — might one day be used to increase the efficiencies of contraband transportation.

Guillermo Ramirez Peyro is a former Mexican cop who, while working as a U.S. government informant, participated in a series of drug-related murders in Juarez, Mexico (the House of Death). He described the tight relationship between the Mexican government and its narco-trafficking industry as follows while under oath in immigration court proceedings:

During the three years of working as a investigation [as a U.S. government informant infiltrating the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes (VCF) drug organization], I recorded and I showed that, that the [Mexican] police is under the order and to service the people from the cartel, inclusive this recordings were I would record the conversations that I would have with [VCF lieutenant] Santillan, and he would explain to me the arrangements that they would have with militaries with high executives, high-level government people.

… Well, the cartel [the VCF] had arrangements with people that were close to President Fox [of Mexico]. He explained to me that President Fox took, took the position to arrange, consult with the cartel from Juarez to — which it, which it means that he was going to attack the, the enemy cartels being from Tijuana and from the Gulf, and then the cartel from Juarez would be operating with this court, you know, without the government being … on top of them.

But then it doesn’t seem that Tandy paid too much attention to the cozy relationship between the Mexican government (at all levels) and the “drug cartels” while she was with DEA. At least that might explain why she worked to silence a DEA commander who sought to expose Ramirez and the U.S. government’s role in the House of Death murders — which led to the near assassination of a DEA agent and his family.

After that DEA commander, Sandy Gonzalez, revealed those connections in an internal memo that landed on the desk of U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton (a dear friend of President Bush), Tandy sprang into action at Sutton’s request. After all, Bush, Sutton and Tandy are all from Texas, and these Texans stand together when danger threatens — particularly when it is an extreme danger like the truth.

On March 5, 2004, DEA Administrator Tandy sent off an e-mail to high-ranking members of the Justice Department, including Catherine M. O’Neil, Associate Attorney General and head of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force; David Ayers, chief of staff to then Attorney General John Ashcroft; James B. Comey, the Deputy Attorney General; and Michele Leonhart, Deputy Administrator of DEA — who is now in line to succeed Tandy at DEA.

The email:

Subject: Re: Possible press involving the DEA Juarez /ICE informant issue

DEA HQ officials were not aware of our el paso SAC's [Gonzalez’] inexcusable letter until last evening - although a copy of the letter first landed in the foreign operations section sometime the day before. The SAC did not tell anyone at HQ that he was contemplating such a letter, and did not discuss it or share it with HQ until we received the copy as noted above, well after it was sent.

I apologized to Johnny Sutton last night and he and I agreed on a no comment to the press.

Mike Furgason, Chief of Operations, notified the El Paso SAC last night that he is not to speak to the press other than a no comment, that he is to desist writing anything regarding the Juárez matter and related case and defer to the joint management and threat assessment teams out of HQ — and he is to relay these directions to the rest of his El Paso Division.

The SAC, who reports to Michele [Leonhart], will be brought in next week for performance discussions to further address this officially.

The end result is that Gonzalez was given a black mark on his employment record, never again considered for a promotion and eventually forced to retire. He later filed an employment discrimination case against DEA, which he won via a jury verdict. In fact, Tandy was scheduled to testify for the government at Gonzalez’ trial, but at the last minute ducked out of that appearance.

The report by the “joint management and threat assessment teams,” referred to as the JAT report, to this day remains a controversial document that DEA has refused to release.  

But now that Tandy has moved on to the springboard of the private sector, that is not her concern. She has people to meet and deals to make — and no longer has to be bothered by pesky truth-telling DEA agents.

Tandy also has the distinction of heading DEA during the time that the now-infamous “Kent memo” was drafted in December 2004. That memo revealed a disturbing set of allegations linking DEA agents in Bogota, Colombia, to narco-traffickers.

Kent’s memorandum contains some of the most serious charges ever raised against U.S. antinarcotics officers: that DEA agents on the front lines of the drug war in Colombia are on drug traffickers’ payrolls, complicit in the murders of informants who knew too much, and, most startlingly, directly involved in helping Colombia’s infamous rightwing paramilitary death squads to launder drug money.

In the memo, Kent says his claims are supported by a number of DEA agents in Florida who the agency muzzled and retaliated against after they tried to expose the corruption.

And just like DEA Special Agent in Charge Gonzalez, Kent, who is a U.S. prosecutor, was silenced (transferred to another job) and the whole affair again covered up by DEA — despite documented evidence that has surfaced since then lending credence to Kent’s allegations.

Ironically, the individual to whom Kent wrote the memo — Justice Department Narcotic and Dangerous Drugs Section Chief Jodi L. Avergun, subsequently became Tandy’s chief of staff at DEA.

But then, why rain on the parade of a great public servant who is cashing in on her connections to sell phones to the Mexicans and other global trading partners — maybe even the Colombians?

And so it is best to conclude here on a patriotic note from the mouth of Tandy herself — from a Sept. 16, 2003, speech she made at her DEA swearing-in ceremony:

… We will hunt down the drug trade no matter where it seeks to hide and no matter where it spreads with a singular focus on achieving maximum impact of reducing our country's drug supply. President Bush and the American people expect real results, and we will hold ourselves accountable at DEA for measuring our true impact in reducing the drug supply and drug use, rather than simply the collection of empty statistics.

To say nothing of empty promises….