97 lines
13 KiB
Markdown
97 lines
13 KiB
Markdown
---
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created: 2026-10-05
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updated: 2026-10-14
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title: U.S. Customs
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aliases:
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- U.S. Customs
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- United States Customs Service
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- U.S. Customs Service
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- Customs Service
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- US Customs
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category: "U.S. Government"
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tags:
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- Organization
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- Government
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- UnitedStates
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- USCustoms
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- ContraWar
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- BCCI
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- IranContra
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- Stargate
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- 1980s
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summary: "The federal border and trade enforcement agency whose agents ran Operation C-Chase, employed Joseph Kelso as an informant, reviewed the Lister flowchart, and tasked an Army remote viewing unit to find a fugitive in 1989."
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location: "Washington, D.C."
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relations:
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- type: investigated
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with: "[[Bank of Credit and Commerce International]]"
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start: 1986
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end: 1988-10-08
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role: "undercover money laundering operation (Operation C-Chase)"
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fn: 8
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- type: investigated
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with: "[[Ronald Lister]]"
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start: 1986
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role: "Customs Special Agent James P. McShane reviewed a seized flow chart for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department"
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fn: 5
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- type: informant_for
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with: "[[Joseph Kelso]]"
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reverse: true
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role: "informant sent abroad for Customs; arrested in Costa Rica in 1986"
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fn: 4
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- type: informant_for
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with: "[[Richard Brenneke]]"
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reverse: true
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role: "offered himself as an informant after a Seattle airport stop; judged to have little to offer"
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fn: 3
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---
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The United States Customs Service (U.S. Customs) was the federal agency responsible for the inspection of goods and persons crossing the borders of the [[United States]] and for enforcement of the customs and export control laws; the successor bodies include [[U.S. Customs and Border Protection]]. In the records of this vault it appears as an investigator of the Contra supply networks, the employer of informants used in Central America, the lead agency in [[Operation C-Chase]], and the requester of a remote viewing task under the [[Stargate Project]].
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### Source of the DEA's Agents
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When the [[DEA]] was created on July 1, 1973, a contingent of Customs agents was merged with the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement.[^1]
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### Noriega, Morales and Frigorificos in the Senate Record
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The Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee report of December 1988 recorded that Customs Commissioner [[William von Raab]] testified that the Customs Service had evidence linking General [[Manuel Noriega]] to narcotics trafficking as early as 1983, which he said made Panamanian cooperation in drug seizures "virtually meaningless." A Customs document furnished to the subcommittee showed that the trafficker Jorge Morales entered the United States from the Bahamas on October 13, 1984, with the Contra pilot Marco Aguado, Octaviano Cesar and Adolfo "Popo" Chamorro, carrying $400,000 in cash and checks that were declared at Customs and returned to Morales after clearing. The subcommittee reported that despite the information held by the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation]], Customs and other agencies on Luis Rodriguez's narcotics and money-laundering involvement, the State Department used Rodriguez's firm [[Frigorificos de Puntarenas]] to deliver humanitarian funds to the Contras from late 1985.[^2]
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The same report described the arms dealer [[Richard Brenneke]] as a man who began telling stories of a secret life after Customs stopped him at the Seattle airport with a briefcase of references to arms deals; he offered to become a Customs informant. The subcommittee found that Customs undercover agents building the "Sam Evans" case in [[New York City]] had fed his business associates fabricated information about arms deals, that approaches Brenneke made through Marine Corps Intelligence, the State Department and the [[Department of Defense]] were passed to Customs, and that Customs agents interviewed him extensively and decided he had little to offer. The subcommittee separately recorded that a DC-6 returning from Central America was searched at Miami and that its operator protested that the search endangered navigation equipment installed for government operations, and that Customs officials were incredulous because they knew the pilot Palmer was under indictment in Detroit in a large narcotics case.[^3]
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### Joseph Kelso
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[[Joseph Kelso]] was, in [[Gary Webb]]'s account, a CIA informant who worked for Customs after being arrested by the service for trying to buy Harpoon missiles for Iraq, given a new identity as "Richard Williams," and sent worldwide for four years. In 1986 he gathered testimony in [[Costa Rica]] from six witnesses willing to testify that [[DEA]] agents were skimming cocaine, making counterfeit money and protecting cocaine labs on Contra bases. Webb wrote that a junior Customs agent mistakenly reported the findings to the DEA agents under investigation, that Kelso was arrested and threatened by DEA agent [[Robert Nieves]], and that after Kelso gave tapes of the witness interviews to his lawyer, Customs enforcement chief William Rosenblatt telephoned [[Oliver North]] "to find out whether Kelso/Williams was working with the intelligence community," with North sending [[Robert Owen]] to collect the tapes, which Owen threw away when the [[Iran-Contra Affair]] broke. Kelso was imprisoned for violating probation by going to Costa Rica.[^4]
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### The Lister Flow Chart
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Among documents seized from [[Ronald Lister]]'s home in the October 1986 Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department raids was a ten-page document that included, on its last page, a flow chart suggesting a flow of money. Sheriff's investigators asked Customs Special Agent James P. McShane of the [[Directorate of Defense Trade Controls|Office of Defense Trade Controls]] to review it. McShane reported that the chart could represent a legitimate transaction if a State Department license had been obtained; that the notation "% EUC" might indicate an end-use certificate being purchased, which would make the transaction illegal, since in a legitimate transaction one is provided free; and that routing funds through [[Hong Kong]] to "X Country" indicated an attempt to disguise the true destination and might be an illegal diversion of arms. The Justice Department Inspector General wrote that, whatever the legality, "nothing indicates that it shows the sale of arms to the Contras." A 1991 Customs report by the agent assigned to the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force case on [[Danilo Blandon]] recorded that a DEA source had described a project in [[El Salvador]] "to provide assistance to the Contras," which the Inspector General believed was Lister.[^5]
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### The Grasheim Case in El Salvador
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On October 30, 1986, Customs agent Richard Rivera and the DEA's [[Celerino Castillo]] briefed Ambassador [[Edwin Corr]] in [[San Salvador]] on the pilot Grasheim. Rivera told Corr that Customs had for several years investigated Grasheim for illegal export of "hi-tech" equipment and weapons to Central America. Castillo's November 5 report recorded that an embassy source said Grasheim had told a member of the U.S. military group that if he were arrested "everybody else was going to go down with him." On November 21, 1986, the DEA closed its case and recorded that its information had gone to Customs and the [[Internal Revenue Service]], who were conducting "an active investigation." The Inspector General noted that Corr asked that any investigation be "very discreet" and said the CIA had no records that Grasheim worked for it.[^6]
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### Operation C-Chase
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In 1986 Customs undercover agent [[Robert Mazur]] proposed the money laundering operation that became [[Operation C-Chase]], after nearly two and a half years of undercover work in Florida; Customs notified the Justice Department, which gave strategic and tactical assistance. The Kerry-Brown Senate report recorded that Mazur opened a [[Bank of Credit and Commerce International]] account because it was the only bank he knew with international branches, and that BCCI retained an investigative firm to investigate Mazur and the IRS affiant on the BCCI search warrants, work that Mazur testified ruined a citizen whose business had served as part of the government's cover.[^7]
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The report found that Customs "had information as far back as 1983" on the smuggling of the Jordanian arms merchant Munther Bilbeisi, a BCCI customer. It recorded that senior Customs officials let journalists have access to information about C-Chase before the sting ended and to the October 1988 take-down, which "potentially jeopardized the lives of the agents involved"; that Mazur and other Customs agents suspected the October date had been set for political reasons connected to the November elections while the Tampa prosecutor Mark Jackowski testified the date was set in February and the evidence was complete; and that in an April 11, 1989, memorandum Mazur wrote that "literally hundreds of important leads" remained to be pursued. After a January 1990 plea agreement, the Tampa prosecutors and Customs investigators stopped the grand jury, and the Justice Department took what agents called a "time-out." The report concluded that "there does not appear to have been anything sinister" in the decision and that the case was a Treasury investigation by Customs and IRS agents "without the involvement of the FBI."[^8]
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### Remote Viewing for a Fugitive, 1989
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The CIA's Stargate collection includes two [[Project Sun Streak]] reports under project number 8923, titled "Re: Fugitive from US Customs," by viewer 079 using the "WRV" method, dated July 5, 1989 (0900 to 0924) and August 14, 1989 (0930 to 0950). The July summary gives a physical description of the fugitive, a set of alias names that "surfaced phonetically," a location "near water in the warehouse district" of a suburban area identified as "Dent," Ohio, with the operator's comment that a Dent, Ohio, lies five to ten miles northwest of [[Cincinnati]], and a warning that he should be considered armed and dangerous. The August session used a map of Cincinnati to refine the location and records that an address given at the start of the session appears in the summary. The evaluation fields of both reports are blank.[^9]
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### Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Epstein Case
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In a July 2007 email to her superior Matthew Menchel, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ann Marie Villafana wrote that a plea offer being negotiated by the managers in [[Miami]] was "completely unacceptable to the FBI, ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], the victims, and me," and that it violated the Ashcroft memorandum and the U.S. Attorney's Manual.[^10]
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### Footnotes
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[^1]: Drug Enforcement Administration, "DEA History: The Early Years," https://www.dea.gov/es/node/1045
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[^2]: U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, *Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy*, S. Prt. 100-165 (December 1988), chapters on Panama, the Southern Front and the Contra supply network, https://archive.org/details/Kerry-Report-Drugs-Contras
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[^3]: U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, *Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy*, S. Prt. 100-165 (December 1988), section on Richard Brenneke and the chapter on the Contra supply network, https://archive.org/details/Kerry-Report-Drugs-Contras
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[^4]: Webb, Gary. *Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.* Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 17: "We're going to blow your fucking head off."
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[^5]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter V (Ronald Lister) and note 46, https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/special/9712/ch05p1.htm
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[^6]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, *The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy* (December 1997), Chapter X (Celerino Castillo), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/special/9712/ch10p2.htm
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[^7]: U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, *The BCCI Affair*, report by Senators John Kerry and Hank Brown (December 1992), sections on Operation C-Chase and on BCCI's intelligence and security operations, https://archive.org/details/thebcciaffair_202003
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[^8]: U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, *The BCCI Affair* (December 1992), findings on Customs and Justice handling of Operation C-Chase, https://archive.org/details/thebcciaffair_202003
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[^9]: Project Sun Streak reports, project 8923, sessions 01 (July 5, 1989) and 02 (August 14, 1989), viewer 079, CIA-RDP96-00789R003500530001-5, -0004-2 and -0005-1, https://archive.org/details/CIA-RDP96-00789R003500530001-5
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[^10]: U.S. Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility, *Investigation into the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida's Resolution of Its 2006-2008 Federal Criminal Investigation of Jeffrey Epstein* (November 2020), copy at https://archive.org/details/epsteindocs
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