Matta Ballesteros supplied the Guadalajara Cartel... his 1995 appeal claims PUBLIC DEFENSE, He was working for Contras/CIA
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/07/part-8-dark-alliancethis-guy-talks-to.html
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Owen, in 1989 court testimony, admitted that "there was a possibility that I might have gone with the CIA on contract."
But because Owen was a private citizen, Fernandez said, he couldn't legally send him out on intelligence-gathering missions. He could listen when Owen reported back but couldn't, in CIA jargon, "task" him. But that all changed once Owen began working for the NHAO, which probably explains North's insistence that Owen be hired. "When he did that, then we did have a much more operational relationship," Fernandez confirmed. "Because then he was a government employee, I did ask him to find out things."
NHAO director Robert Duemling and his aides couldn't figure out why they needed to have Rob Owen around, and initially they rebuffed North's suggestions. "I certainly didn't see the necessity for a middleman," Duemling testified in a once-secret deposition to the Iran-Contra committees. But North kept pushing. Duemling said North had Contra leaders write letters demanding Owen's hiring, and he lobbied Duemling's superior at the State Department, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, a fervent Contra supporter. After one stormy meeting with North and Abrams, Duemling said, "Elliott Abrams turned to me and said, 'Well, Bob, I suppose you probably ought to hire Owen.' Well, in bureaucratic terms the jig was up, since I was the only person who was speaking out against this."
Owen was given a $50,000 contract as a "facilitator," a job that mystified Duemling's aide, Chris Arcos. Arcos testified that no one was "sure what, in fact, Rob Owen could do or bring or offer to the office that we couldn't do. He didn't have much Spanish, he didn't have an expertise in medical or anything like that."
The minutes of that November 1985 meeting show that for some reason, Abrams and North were extremely concerned about the fallout if someone discovered Owen's involvement with the NHAO, and they began working on a cover story to explain his presence there in case it leaked. "Abrams and North agreed that Owen will be expendable if he becomes a political or diplomatic liability," the minutes state. If that happened, Congress would be told that he was "an experiment that hadn't worked out."
It was an experiment right out of Dr. Frankenstcin's lab.
Rob Owen's mission was to serve as the CIA's unofficial liaison to the drug traffickers and other undesirables who were helping the Contras in Costa Rica, people who were too dirty for the CIA to deal with directly. Like North, he was another "cutout." "He probably had the most extensive network of contacts among the resistance leaders," CIA station chief Fernandez testified in 1987, "including people with whom we did not want to have contact with and who, however, were involved with the Nicaraguan resistance." http://www.pinknoiz.com/covert/MOU.html
The untouchables Fernandez was referring to were the Cuban anti-Communists in Costa Rica—the rough mix of mercenaries, bombers, assassins, and drug dealers recruited in Miami by UDN-FARN commander Fernando "El Negro" Chamorro and CIA agent Ernesto Cruche. The agency, Fernandez testified, was "very leery of these people. However, Rob Owen had an entree to them."
And now, thanks to his NHAO job, he had an official entree—as an operational CIA asset. Owen's specific assignment, in fact, put him directly over the drug traffickers Fernandez and the CIA didn't want to be seen with.
He was assigned to "monitor" an NHAO contract with a Costa Rican shrimp company called Frigorificos de Puntarenas, S.A. This consisted of a small fleet of fishing boats based in the humid Pacific Coast village of Puntarenas, and an import company in Miami called Ocean Hunter, which brought Frigorificos' catch into the United States. In reality, however, it was "a firm owned and operated by Cuban-American drug traffickers," according to a 1988 Senate subcommittee report.
That conclusion was based partly on the congressional testimony of former Medellín cartel accountant Ramon Milian Rodriguez, a suave Cuban-American who was the cartel's money-laundering wizard until his arrest in Miami in 1983, when he and $5 million in cash were taken off a Lear jet bound for Panama. Frigorificos, he testified, was one of an interlocking chain of companies he'd created to launder the torrents of cash that were pouring into the cartel's coffers from its worldwide cocaine sales. Drug money would go into one company and come out of another through a series of intercompany transactions, clean and ready to be banked or invested. In 1982, Frigorificos was taken over by a group of major Miami-based drug traffickers, who began using it to help the Contras.
"Were payments or arrangements made by which the Contras could receive money through Frigorificos?" Senator John Kerry asked Milian during a Senate subcommittee hearing in 1987.
"Yes sir," the accountant answered.
"You arranged that?"
"I, through my intermediaries, made it possible."
"Was any of the money that you provided Frigorificos traceable to drugs or to drug-related transactions?" Kerry asked.
"No, sir."
"Why was that?"
"Because," said Milian, "we were experts at what we do."
CONTINUES
