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Subversion in the Senate: Kerry's Communist Constituency
The allegations which triggered the Kerry investigation and Christic lawsuit had initially been collected by the ICDP and Christic from several key witnesses. The first was Jack Terrell, a mercenary who had volunteered to aid the Contras in 1984 and was suspected by US intelligence of being a Nicaraguan agent.28 Terrell directed Kerry's staff to another key witness, Steven Carr, an imprisoned mercenary who had been discharged from the Navy for dealing drugs before briefly joining the Contras, and had initially reported his allegations of Contra drug dealing to California State Assemblyman Tom Hayden, husband of Jane Fonda, then a supporter of pro-Sandinista groups.29 Carr helped elicit the cooperation of another key witness, his former associate Jesus Garcia, then imprisoned for illegal firearm trafficking.30 Terrell, Carr, and Kerry's staff also assisted a lawsuit filed by the Christic Institute against allegedly CIA-linked individuals on behalf of Tony Avirgan, an ABC cameraman, and his wife Martha Honey, a Canadian Broadcast Corporation/London Sunday Times journalist.31 Avirgan had been injured in a bomb blast while on assignment from ABC in Costa Rica to cover a May 1984 press conference where Contra faction leader Edén Pastora was planning to denounce other factions of the Contras and announce the formation of his own Contra faction. Pastora a former Sandinista, had refused to work under the Contra groups backed by the CIA and as a result had been cut off by the CIA earlier in 1984. Subsequently for funding he had turned to George Morales32, a drug dealer linked to the Medellin Cartel and to Cuba.33 Pastora's main rival within the Contras was CIA asset John Hull, a prime target of Kerry's investigation and of the Christic lawsuit, which attempted to link him to the Medellin Cartel's Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa. Kerry built his case against Hull on the testimony of Terrell, Carr, Garcia, and five other key witnesses with criminal backgrounds and clear conflicts of interest: Pastora's cocaine supplier Morales; Morales' pilot Gary Betzer; Floyd Carlton, a pilot who smuggled drugs for Manuel Noriega, who had recently fallen out with the Medellin Cartel and been targeted for assassination by Escobar; Jose Blandon, who was also linked to Noriega as well as to the Medellin Cartel's main rival in the cocaine trade, the Cali Cartel, which was then waging a vendetta against Escobar; and Werner Lotz, a convicted drug dealer who had been the personal pilot of Medellin Cartel cofounder Robert Vesco.
So Kerry's case was questionable. That said, there were also some Brigade 2506 veterans who became loose cannons after CIA cut off their official support and got involved in some shady stuff linked to the above cast of characters, notably one Jose Egozi Behar, who became a close associate of the Guadalajara Cartel, a Mexican ally of the Colombian cartels which was the target of a major DEA investigation in the 1970s, which unlike Kerry's committee did result in arrests and convictions. I suspect Kerry's sources had a vague suspicion they could use this type of thing to pin something on the Contras and they put him on a fishing expedition hoping to find something solid. Meanwhile their ally Castro was supporting the Medellin Cartel himself. As I also note in the link above, In the late 1970s and 1980s as the Medellin Cartel was gaining control of the growing cocaine traffic, Castro allowed cartel cofounders Robert Vesco and Carlos Lehder-Rivas to use Cuban waters and airspace for drug smuggling. Meanwhile in the late 1970s smugglers in Central America who would later work for the Medellin Cartel smuggled weapons to the Cuban-backed Sandinistas, and used the opportunity to set up drug-smuggling channels in Nicaragua and the surrounding region. Similarly, on the BCCI end of Kerry's investigation, one of the BCCI-linked drug dealers Kerry investigated, Monzer Al-Kassar, had links to Soviet intelligence and Middle Eastern terrorist groups.