Published: January 27, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/us/politics/issa-voices-concerns-that-dea-operation-needs-oversight.html

WASHINGTON — The powerful chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform ratcheted up his pressure on the Justice Department on Friday, raising new questions about how the Drug Enforcement Administration conducts its undercover money-laundering investigations and whether those operations cross the line between fighting and facilitating crime.

In a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican who is chairman of the committee, accused the Justice Department of dragging its feet in responding to his request more than a month ago for a briefing on the operations, which allow D.E.A. agents to pose as money launderers and smugglers in order to infiltrate drug-trafficking organizations.

Mr. Issa wrote that he was concerned about whether there was sufficient oversight of these operations. He said an investigation by his office had revealed evidence of potential impropriety, including the arrests of two American pilots who were held in a Panamanian jail for seven months.

Mr. Issa’s investigators on the oversight committee, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to talk about their inquiry, said it appeared that the two pilots, who work for a charter jet company, were unwitting participants in a D.E.A. money-laundering operation gone wrong. They said the pilots were arrested in Panama when the authorities there discovered they were transporting millions of dollars in cash.

The investigators said the pilots were unaware the money was on board. They said the Latin American businessman who had chartered the flight told the pilots that the money was the property of the United States government and that the D.E.A. would clear their names.

But that did not happen. Congressional investigators said that D.E.A. agents in Panama did speak to the pilots, but stood by while they were detained. Although the two Americans have been released from custody, the committee investigators said, their passports have been confiscated, rendering them unable to leave the country.

“As this case illustrates all too vividly, innocent people have been ensnared in a high-stakes game with transnational implications,” Mr. Issa wrote. “It is imperative that proper controls be put in place to ensure innocent bystanders do not suffer needlessly at the hands of the D.E.A.”

Justice Department officials refused to discuss Mr. Issa’s letter, saying only that they were reviewing it. Previously, both the D.E.A. and the Justice Department have defended the so-called Attorney General Exempt Operations, saying that they are tightly controlled, and that they are crucial in helping determine how drug-trafficking organizations move their money and in locating high-value suspects.

After reviewing Mr. Issa’s letter, one former D.E.A. official with knowledge of the money-laundering operations cautioned that there might be nothing improper about the agency’s conduct in the case of the two pilots. He pointed out that the D.E.A. does not, by its own rules, transport money across borders without the permission of host governments. The former official raised questions about the innocence of the pilots, saying the charter company and its Latin American clients could have been the target of the D.E.A.’s money-laundering investigation, rather than unwitting parties to it.

Mr. Issa has been pressuring the Justice Department for answers about its efforts against Mexican drug-trafficking organizations since early last year when he uncovered information about an Arizona operation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, called Fast and Furious, in which agents seeking to identify high-level gun smugglers did not always move to arrest straw-purchasers or seize the guns they were buying.

Mr. Issa expanded his investigation of the Justice Department to include the D.E.A.’s money-laundering operations after they were described last month in an article by The New York Times.

“A very successful, accountable program is getting unfairly slammed,” the former official said. Then, referring to the D.E.A., he added, “They’re hoping it survives.”