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STREET, CIA WALL AND THE GLOBAL DRUG TRADE Former Los Angeles policeman Mike Ruppert blows the whistle on Wall Street's role in laundering drug money for CIA enterprises, and warns that Colombia will be the centre of the next regional conflict. Please introduce yourself. I'm Mike Ruppert, and I'm the publisher of From The Wilderness newsletter and an ex- LAPD narc and general troublemaker fighting corrupting and evil influence around the world. When you created the newsletter, what were you responding to and what were your intentions? Well, in March of '98, it was about four months after I confronted CIA Director John Deutch at Locke High School on world television—he had come to Los Angeles to talk about allegations about CIA dealing drugs. I stood up on CNN and ABC Nightline and I said: "I am a former LAPD narcotics detective. I worked South Central and I can tell you, Director Deutch, that the Agency has dealt drugs in this country for a long time." And the room exploded, and what I saw at that time was there was a crying lack of knowl- edge in the body politic about how much evidence there really was about the criminal activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, specifically about dealing drugs. I said: "Wait a minute; I can pull out a little newsletter and say, 'If you look at this document, here's the proof for that.'". Because a lot of people were running around with the vague notion that maybe the CIA were bad guys and had done some things wrong, and they did- n't know how much actual proof there was. So that's been the mission: to present the real proof that's irrefutable about what goes on. Let's talk about your experience on the beat and what you confronted as a citizen trying to do right in the streets—must be pretty wild as it is. I haven't been a policeman now for a long time. I graduated from the LA Police Academy class of 11/73, hit the streets in January of '74 in South Central Los Angeles. It was a vastly different world then; there was no cocaine and we had six-shooters and straight batons and nobody had a radio that you carried around with you. But the world has changed enormously. I specialised in narcotics quickly, and heroin was the predomi- nant drug on the street in my area; it was Mexican brown heroin in those days. And what happened to me was that I met and fell in love with a woman who was a con- tract CIA agent, a career agent. Now, I come from a CIA family and they had tried to recruit me, so this was not unexpected to me, but I began to see that she was protecting drug shipments and that the Agency was actively involved in dealing drugs. This hap- pened with her in Hawaii, Mexico, Texas and New Orleans, and I kept saying I'm a narc, that I'm not going to overlook drug shipments. That's what basically set me on the irre- versible course of events that determined the rest of my life. That was 1977. An interview with Michael C. Ruppert by Guerrilla News Network © 2000 From the web page: www.guerrillanews.com/crack/ m_ruppert.html An interview with You imagine someone in the CIA as thinking about protecting the country, or at least imagine the intelligence community as something that's ordered around nation- al security. What do you think it is that triggers them to want to reconcile drug ship- ments in the country in line with that pursuit? Well, they don't even have to reconcile it. That's what took so long to figure out, but what we teach now with From The Wilderness is that it wasn't just CIA dealing some drugs to fund covert operations. It is that drug money is an inherent part of the American economy. It has always been so, as it was with the British in the 1600s when they intro- duced opium into China to fund the triangular trade with the British East India Company. From the web page: www.guerrillanews.com/crack/ m_ruppert.html NEXUS +35 Michael C. Ruppert OCTOBER — NOVEMBER 2001 www.nexusmagazine.com