Preston: This is a great catch! If it can be sourced anywhere it is very valuable. Can you get a publication, author, witness? Anything that makes it useable in a hard news story? I am on deadlines and will be a poor correspondent for a while. One of the things I am using for my next cover story on Colombia in an MS-NBC piece showing that the Russians are flying big Ilyushin transports directly into FARC held territory after a single refueling stop in Lebanon. The transports are offloading weapons and filling up with cocaine which the FARC have allegedly taken as taxes to protect the traffickers in the regions. The huge ILs are capable of landing on pretty crappy runways. Remember that taxes are usually not in the form of US dollars to FARC. Taxes are usually a percentage of the drug straight off the top that FARC takes. They get cash too but they also handle the drugs. There are no saints in Colombia. If the story you were sent can be sourced and made credible it is very important. One things is certain, just about everybody who has guns to sell is selling them into Colombia right now. It's gonna blow big time. Mike Ruppert www.copvcia.com www.suppressedwriters.com -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2000 11:17 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [CIA-DRUGS] CIA and invasion of Eritrea HI all, Hey, anyone ever heard of Kaliningrad? Where the Soviet's had their main fleet I think? Apparently this is the biggest route of drugs into Europe, as they transit this port through the Russian mob's hands. The Balkans route is the one that gets attention, but what about the Russians? (other than for you Mike) Here are some clips from a couple notes to me from a friend on this issue, on the FARC getting their arms from the Russians, then washing their money through the NY banks, as I recently quoted Mike saying in an article for HT. Peace, Preston "Virtually all the Russian ordnance that moves into Colombia goes across the docks at Turbo in Uraba State on the Caribbean, and Uraba State is run entirely, lock, stock and gunbarrel, by the rightwing Autodefensas militias of Carlos Castano. Which means that the initial coke-for-arms exchanges in Colombia are necessarily brokered originally by thugs under Castano's effective jurisdiction. The FARC actually gets most of its ordnance smuggled in the back way, through Ecuador and Peru, I understand, and they pay for all this snuff stuff with money, not directly with cocaine. Which means that when it comes to DIRECT dope-for-arms transactions, it's Castano's rightwingers who rightfully ought to get lambasted and finger-pointed in print for it. Whereas the poor FARC has to take its cocaine money and wash it a couple times before they pay for guns with it. Of course, they're paying it to exactly the same Russian thugs who are moving arms through Turbo to Castano's people, so it all gets horribly complicated and economically incestuous, and I don't believe it makes enough of a difference that we have to bother elucidating the difference here--as long as we're aware of the difference ourselves, anyhow." "When it comes to dope moving from Colombia to Russia, the one place which the US State Department has NOT made a big deal of fingering is this little patch of Russian territory between Latvia and Poland that used to be called Ekaterinberg, or Ykaterinberg, I forget the spelling exactly. (note-This is Kaliningrad he means here, as he wrote me to correct himself later-Preston) It's a little chunk of property on the Baltic Sea (or maybe the North Sea), all to itself, unconnected to Russia, which the Russians have controlled as sovereign territory since the late 1800s or thereabouts. All it really is, see, is the home port of the main Russian naval fleet. And as soon as the USSR broke up ten years ago, the Russian naval commanders there went straight into business with the old Medellin cartel, it seems. So when you hear about Colombian cocaine being moved by submarines, that's where the subs came from. And so on. Anyhow, this little far-flung chunk of Russia has its own congressfolk in Moscow, its own governor, and its own protectors tight with the Kremlin inner circle--Voloshin and Berezovsky and those thugs. And NOBODY makes a big deal about it, including the high and mighty US Department of State. I got the impression that if somebody in the Alternative Press were to look into Ekaterinberg (or whatever it's called nowadays) (Kaliningrad-Preston) and start drawing attention to it, the bowels of the Mighty here in the US government might be disturbed exceedingly. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SALESFORCE.COM MAKES SOFTWARE OBSOLETE Secure, online sales force automation with 5 users FREE for 1 year! http://click.egroups.com/1/2658/6/_/475667/_/961654645/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ <FONT COLOR="#000099">SALESFORCE.COM MAKES SOFTWARE OBSOLETE Secure, online sales force automation with 5 users FREE for 1 year! </FONT><A HREF="http://click.egroups.com/1/2658/6/_/475667/_/961656062/"><B>Click Here!</B></A> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
