Operation Pseudo Miranda

Operation Pseudo Miranda is a CIA covert operation fashioned by CIA Director Bill Casey in the early 1980’s as an instrument in the purported “War on Drugs.” This highly secretive, extremely compartmentalized operation would have been executed by the Directorate of Operations beginning in 1984. The operation was allegedly designed to stem the tide of cocaine coming into the United States by half vis-à-vis a cooperative agreement with the Colombian drug lords of the day; Don Fabio Ochoa, Pablo Escobar, Jose O’Campo, Carlos Lehder, et al. Kenneth C. Bucchi has described the Operation in Operation Pseudo Miranda: A Veteran of the CIA Drug Wars Tells All (2000), and writes that he was recruited by the CIA for this program in 1984 while attending Murray State University in Kentucky. It seems the CIA has denied that Bucchi was a former CIA agent, although the DEA remitted documents under the Freedom of Information Act which listed Operation Pseudo Miranda and Bucchi's involvement therein as a Top Secret program protected from public disclosure.

Description of the Operation

Ingenious in its design and simplistic in its execution, Pseudo Miranda (PM) sought to control the lion’s share of the cocaine market into a select cache of drug trafficker’s hands and, by design and agreement, get them to surrender half to the United States government without resistance. Before PM, the Colombian drug trade was decentralized and too unwieldy to control...anyone with a Cessna and a pint of chutzpa could fly a ton of coke across the U.S. southern border without fear of detection or retribution.

But PM changed all that. Using military intelligence and weapons, the US (CIA) was able to dissuade or eradicate the numerically larger number of smaller drug traffickers and place 95% of the market into the hands of these select drug lords...asking in return only that they allow the US to take up to 50% of their new market share. Having parlayed their previous market share tenfold via PM, the surrender of half still represented a significant increase in business. But more importantly, it also considerably limited the possibility that they and their families would ever face extradition to the US during this operation.

Long Range Navigation (LORaN) systems were placed in Panama’s Darien Region and at key locations on our southern border to facilitate long-distance, low-flying drug transports from Colombia to the US. Once inside this country, these planes were either forced by military aircraft flying scheduled sorties to drop their cargo along the glideslope signal created by mobile Instrument Landing Systems, where CIA contract agents were awaiting pickup; or to follow the military “shadow” aircraft to Mena, Arkansas, where the drug lord’s mules would ship the cargo to parts unknown.

The shadow aircraft that were flying a scheduled sortie would not draw any unwanted attention as it was handed off from airport tower to airport tower, and the drug plane would stay close enough to the military craft to avoid radar detection. The cargo that the planes were forced to drop represented a portion of the 50% owed to the US government, while those flights shadowed to Mena represented the 50% protected and escorted into the US by the US government at the behest of the Colombian drug lords. These operations were termed “interceptions” by the CIA, but it was another compartment of this operation, called “Interdictions,” that would lead to such unintended consequences as “Iran-Contra,” the rise of Manuel Antonio Noriega, and the ushering in of Crack cocaine (because there was less cocaine streaming across our borders as a result of this operation, the street dealers needed a way to curtail rising costs).

This compartment of PM was so treacherous, it was enforced by CIA Contract Agents euphemistically termed “Dixie Cups™.” These contract agents were protected by Non-official covers (NOC) and, because they were not “official,” it was said that the CIA considered them as disposable as Dixie Cups™.

Interdictions involved ferreting out coke labs in Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, etc. and disposing of half the cocaine found on the premises, so to speak. The ground rules for PM expressly prohibited retaliation for these interventions and, even though these hand-selected members were given highly classified, experimental training in Tonopah, NV and Harvey Point, NC, several would not return to the US.

Although there are plenty of references made to this operation on the internet and in non-fiction books within the genre, little is actually known about who the real players were and whether the program still exists today.
One of the rather fascinating stories connected to this operation that has circulated on many a conspiracy theory website is that two well-respected journalists, Danny Casolaro and Scott Shuger, were both said to be working on this story at the time of their mysterious and untimely deaths. What's even more fascinating is that both are reported to have been in close contact with Mr. Bucchi and on the precipice of breaking the story, just before their respective untimely demises. Carl Berstein and Sam Donaldson also investigated this mysterious operation, but were thwarted by the CIA at every turn.

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