Bush Discloses Directive Tying Drugs to Terror

Saying he hoped Americans would see a link between drugs and terrorism, Vice President George Bush on Saturday disclosed the existence of a secret presidential directive identifying drug trafficking as a national security threat.

Bush said the directive, signed by President Reagan two months ago, allows stepped-up use of military force to stop the narcotics flow across the U.S.-Mexico border.

The directive also states that drug control programs initiated by foreign governments will be considered by the Administration when it screens requests for foreign aid.

Tolerance ‘Is Over’

The vice president, in Houston for a briefing with the Gulf Coast Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force, said at a news conference that drugs and terrorism are often linked. He said: “Our tolerance for drugs is over.”

He charged the Sandinista government in Nicaragua with using money from illegal drugs to finance international terror, blamed Cuban President Fidel Castro for harboring airplanes used in drug smuggling and said that he was taking the unusual step of disclosing the directive to make “every American understand a very real link between drugs and terrorism.”

“Now we must convey that when you buy drugs you can also very well be subsidizing terrorist activities overseas,” he said.

Bush also alleged that there was a drug connection behind the 1985 assault on Colombia’s Palace of Justice by M19 guerrillas, in which 100 people were killed, including 12 Supreme Court justices. He said Colombian authorities discovered after the siege that the rebels had destroyed all U.S. extradition requests for Colombia’s major drug traffickers.

The National Security Decision Directive, issued April 8, had not been revealed before. Such documents are rare, generally deal with the highest national security problems and carry the highest secrecy classification.

Congress last year directed the military to take an expanded role in the nation’s war against drugs, but the new agency-wide directive “will officially authorize that use on a more formal basis and should increase it,” Marlin Fitzwater, Bush’s press secretary, said. Until now, the Coast Guard has had the primary military role in intercepting drug traffic, with the other services mostly providing communications and surveillance equipment for law enforcement officials, Fitzwater said.

But that limited role has led to some concerns that military involvement could be politicized, that there could be pressure for domestic surveillance of civilians and that military personnel data banks could be opened during court cases.

Need for Public Awareness

Fitzwater said the vice president released a declassified version of the directive in his role as chairman of the National Border Narcotics Interdiction System to “let the public know that the Administration considers drugs and terrorism part of the same problem.”

Among the military options the Administration is considering, Bush said, is the use of aerostat balloons, which are radar-equipped blimp-style balloons, to detect drug-running aircraft flying across the border.

He said that the military presence would be used to deter traffickers, but the military would not be used to make arrests. He noted that military officials have resisted using their forces to combat drugs, but emphasized that the use of the military previously in such roles has worked well.

“You do encounter a justifiable concern on the part of the military in terms of their readiness,” he said. “When we first started using military assets in the Bahamas, for example, or in the Florida area, there was some objection to it, that it might interfere with readiness. But we found a great esprit de corps in those military assets that are being used.”

Initiatives Made Public

The Administration has announced various initiatives on drug trafficking in the past, and the charges of Nicaraguan and Cuban involvement in the drug trade--which those governments have denied--are not new. But there has been division within the Administration over how strongly to link Managua to narcotics trafficking.

Charges that Colombian guerrillas who stormed the Palace of Justice were after drug records first appeared Nov. 8, shortly after the 27-hour kidnaping and siege. Senior officials in the government of President Belisario Betancur said then that the aim of the rebels was to destroy records in U.S. extradition requests against about 80 drug traffickers who may have funded the guerrillas.