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| category | created | updated | tags | summary | born | died | location | ||||
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| Law Enforcement & Legal | 2024-04-25 | 2026-10-12 |
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William French Smith was U.S. Attorney General from 1981 to 1985 under Reagan and signed the 1982 crimes-reporting Memorandum of Understanding with CIA director William J. Casey. | 1917-08-26 | 1990-10-29 | Wilton, New Hampshire |
William French Smith was the U.S. Attorney General under Ronald Reagan who signed the secret 1982 Memorandum of Understanding with Central Intelligence Agency director William J. Casey that exempted CIA assets from drug crimes reporting. The agreement, hammered out between the CIA and Justice Department, fundamentally altered the relationship between intelligence operations and law enforcement.1
The Secret 1982 Agreement
In early 1982, Smith and Casey signed a formal Memorandum of Understanding under which narcotics violations by non-employees were not on the list of crimes the CIA was required to report to the Justice Department.2 Crimes committed by people "acting for" an intelligence agency no longer needed to be reported either. Gary Webb, after quoting Inspector General Fred Hitz's March 1998 testimony that the arrangement had been "hammered out" in 1982, wrote that for thirteen years "the CIA and Justice had a gentleman's agreement to look the other way."3 In an interview for the PBS series Frontline, Hitz said: "We didn't find any evidence of an understanding that official Washington was going to look the other way with respect to allegations of drug trafficking."4 The agreement was signed just as the CIA was launching both the Contras project and operations in Afghanistan, timing that Robert Parry argued proved premeditation: "That could only have been done for one purpose. They were anticipating what eventually happened. They knew drugs were going to be sold." Civil rights lawyers later filed suit charging the agreement was illegal and led to policies protecting rather than stopping drug trafficking.3
Footnotes
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Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, 1998. Epilogue. ↩︎
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CIA Office of Inspector General, Report of Investigation: Allegations of Connections Between CIA and the Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the United States (96-0143-IG), Vol. II, The Contra Story. https://archive.org/details/nps56-111612-04 ↩︎
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Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, 1998. Epilogue. ↩︎
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PBS Frontline, Drug Wars, interview with Frederick P. Hitz, CIA Inspector General 1990 to 1998. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/special/hitz.html ↩︎