Couple more chapter's from the work that brought about the murder of author Gary Webb : 'Dark Alliance...The CIA,The Contra's and The Crack Cocaine Explosion'....

.... Joseph Kelso, an undercover informant for the U.S. Customs Service, slipped quietly into Costa Rica in April 1986 on the trail of an elusive drug dealer. Before his visit was over, he would be chased, beaten, shot at, clubbed, caged, threatened with death, and deported. Kelso's horrific misadventures would earn him a minor place in history, a footnote to one of America's worst scandals—the Iran-Contra affair. His case would be cited by the congressional Iran-Contra committees as one example of how Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council impeded law enforcement investigations to protect his illegal Contra supply operation from public exposure.

But the four paragraphs about Joe Kelso—buried deep inside the official Iran-Contra report—tell only a fraction of his story. How the former fireman from Golden Valley, Minnesota, happened to attract the stony gaze of Oliver North and his preppy CIA informant, Robert Owen, was never explained by the congressional committee. That omission bothered several Democratic members of the Iran-Contra panel—Congressmen Peter Rodino of New Jersey, Dante Fascell of Florida, Jack Brooks of Texas, and Louis Stokes of Ohio—who decided to write their own report on the matter of Joe Kelso. "The significance of the Kelso section. . .of the Committee report is not entirely clear from the facts as stated," the congressmen complained in a little-read appendix to the final report. "In order to understand why Owen and North were so concerned about Kelso, one must understand just what Kelso was doing and learning in Costa Rica."

What Kelso was doing, records show, was investigating allegations that the same Costa Rican DEA agents watching over Norwin Meneses and Danilo Blandón were trafficking in drugs and funny money. What he was learning was just how hazardous investigating such matters could be.

Kelso, a would-be spy and inveterate thrill seeker, had been working as a CIA informant since the early 1980s, after he befriended a German-born arms dealer in Denver named Heinrich Rupp. Kelso said he was approached by a CIA agent who called himself Bill Chandler and asked to gather information about Rupp's activities. Rupp was selling arms to the Argentines during their short war with Great Britain over the Falkland Islands, and the CIA wanted to know what they were buying. At the CIA's suggestion, Kelso began working for Rupp, posing as a weapons broker seeking arms for Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The agency figured it would draw some interesting people out of the woodwork, Kelso said, but the mission ended in a minor disaster. The tough-talking twenty-six-year-old was arrested by the U.S. Customs Service and charged with attempting to buy Harpoon missiles—big radar-guided cruise missiles designed to blow up ships— for the Iraqi government. Unbeknownst to Kelso, the men he had been negotiating missile deals with were undercover Customs investigators.

Kelso's arrest presented the CIA with a problem; the agency's charter prohibits it from spying on people inside the United States. To keep the operation under wraps, Kelso was advised by his CIA handlers to keep his mouth shut and plead guilty to the weapons charges, and they promised that his legal problems would go away.

Federal court records lend support to Kelso's story. Despite the severity of his crime—attempting to acquire cruise missiles for an unfriendly foreign government—Kelso was put on probation and promptly vanished. Supplied with a new identity and a matching passport, Kelso went back to work for the federal government, this time as an informant for the very agency that had just arrested him: the U.S. Customs Service. His control officer, Special Agent Larry LaDodge, registered him as an informant under the name of Richard Williams and sent him to Europe to hunt down a fugitive methamphetamine dealer who was wanted in the United States on "numerous, numerous charges," Kelso said....]
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