Trump Opens Door to Assassinations of Mexico Cartel Bosses

Former senior DoJ counterterrorism official says Trump executive order could revive 1972 Nixon plan for DEA assassinations of drug bosses

Lou Conein in his varoius guises through the decades, as OSS and CIA agent. President Nixon drafted the French-American with Corsican mob connections to run covert operations under the emerging DEA, includingh murders.

The Drug Enforcement Administration has long been straining to be an equal partner in the U.S. intelligence community. This was true even before its official establishment in 1973, when the White House relied on ex-CIA officials to staff the new agency. These operators would inevitably seek to obtain and use intelligence tools in countering illegal narcotics. Once it reached into the CIA’s bag of tricks, the DEA started planning CIA-type operations. This meant assassinations.

The DEA could be back in that business for real under President Trump’s announced plans to use military force against drug cartels in Mexico. At the very least, Trump wants to treat the cartels as terrorist organizations, which will bring the DEA more firmly into the world of counterterrorism. Military strikes alone, on drug labs and shipment routes and the like, would hardly dent the operations of these highly sophisticated transnational organizations. 

Dark Arts Lou

In 1972 President Nixon appointed an old CIA hand named Lucien Conein, a colorful French-American paramilitary veteran of World War Two and Vietnam, who had ties to Corsican mobsters, to be the DEA’s director of covert operations.