relatively immense Nicaraguan Armed Forces." 1986 drug allegations On March 16, 1986, the San Francisco Examiner published a report on the "1983 seizure of 430 pounds of cocaine from a Colombian freighter" in San Francisco which indicated that a "cocaine ring in the San Francisco Bay area helped finance Nicaragua's Contra rebels." Carlos Cabezas, convicted of conspiracy to traffic cocaine, said that the profits from his crimes "belonged to ... the Contra revolution". He told the Examiner, "I just wanted to get the Communists out of my country." Julio Zavala, also convicted on trafficking charges, said: "that he supplied $500,000 to two Costa Rican-based Contra groups and that the majority of it came from cocaine trafficking in the San Francisco Bay area, Miami and New Orleans." John Stockwell, a former CIA covert specialist, described the situation as "A dream situation for drug smugglers." Former CIA agent David MacMichael explained the inherent relationship between CIA activity in Latin America and drug trafficking: "Once you set up a covert operation to supply arms and money, it's very difficult to separate it from the kind of people who are involved in other forms of trade, and especially drugs. There is a limited number of planes, pilots and landing strips. By developing a system for the supply of the Contras, the US built a road for drug supply into the US." In August 1986, Lt. Col. Oliver North had begun to converse by email with John Poindexter, who was the National Security Adviser to President Ronald Reagan. In the email, North stated that if U.S. officials could, "help clean up [Noriega's] image", that he would be able to, take care of' the Sandinista leadership for us." This would require lifting a weapons embargo with Nicaragua. This email proved to be a smoking gun that proved that an illicit sale of arms took place. North would later be arrested for lying to Congress about accepting illicit funds, which ended up going to Noriega to help sabotage the Sandinista regime. August would also be the time that the CIA's Dewey would want to meet Noriega in Europe or Israel. 1987 Senator John Kerry, who was the head of the Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism, and International Operations, decided to begin investigating allegations of Contra-drug links. They found that there was an attempt to divert drug money from an anti-narcotics program into the Contra war. The Kerry