Pubdate: Sun, 17 Aug 2008 Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO) Copyright: 2008 St. Louis Post-Dispatch Contact: http://www.stltoday.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/418 Author: Phillip Dine, Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau MISSOURIAN CONNECTED WAR ON DRUGS TO WAR ON TERROR WASHINGTON -- If you want to understand the man leading the U.S. fight against the tightening links between narcotics and terror, some clues can be found in Cape Girardeau, St. Louis and Springfield, Ill. Those are the places that forged Missourian Michael Braun, chief of operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration. These days, the DEA's mission isn't just to combat the world's $322 billion drug trade, but also to seek and destroy a new type of hybrid terrorist group/drug cartel that Braun describes as "meaner and uglier than anything law enforcement or the military have ever faced." "It is all interconnected and getting damned scary." It's a fight that has taken Braun from the streets of St. Louis to the jungles of Brazil, the Mexican border and the mountains of Afghanistan. Since 2005, he's overseen DEA operations around the world, while also leading intelligence operations that include the Pentagon and FBI. A fierce demeanor, a shaved head and a beard, along with a 6-foot 3-inch, 210-pound chiseled frame give Braun the type of appearance that not only a drug dealer might flee on a dark street. At age 55, he gets up at 4:45 every morning to run three to four miles or lift weights. He speaks in a surprisingly soft voice, often about the Midwestern work ethic and values he absorbed growing up in Missouri, and the lessons he learned from local law enforcement officers in Missouri and Illinois. "He's a straight-talking tough guy with all the right experiences on the ground in the rough parts of the world," said Michael Jacobson, a counterterrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Douglas Farah, a national security consultant who works frequently with the federal government, called Braun "the person who realized how DEA could fit into the war on terror in a more robust way." A Sea Of Blue Braun traces his interest in law enforcement to a street corner near his father's grocery in Cape Girardeau. There, at the age of 8, he stood impressed as a steady stream of blue police cruisers arrived from around the country for the funeral of an officer who had been shot by two escaped convicts on a cross-country crime spree. "Right there on that street corner I decided I wanted to be a police officer, and I never lost sight of that," he says. After high school, Braun joined the Marines and served in Vietnam. While attending college in Cape Girardeau, he worked as a police officer, and then was hired by the Illinois State Police. In 1985, the DEA offered him a job. After topping the class at the agency's training school, Braun worked in St. Louis, alternating between working local drug cases and spending three to four months at a stretch investigating drug labs and dealers in the jungles of Latin America. A full-time assignment to Latin America was followed by posts in Houston, Washington, Los Angeles and Detroit as he rose through the ranks. When U.S. forces invaded Iraq in 2003, Braun was assigned to the Pentagon to serve in Iraq as chief of staff for the new ministry of interior, helping create the new Iraqi police, customs and security forces. Two years later, he was back in Washington. 'Lightning Speed' One key area where drugs and terrorist groups are merging is the tri-border area of Latin America where the borders of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay join, Braun said. There, the Palestinian groups Hamas and Hezbollah are active. Meanwhile, Latin American drug groups can be found in China and elsewhere. The al-Qaida affiliate that carried out the Madrid train bombing funded the operation almost entirely through the sale of illicit drugs, Braun said. Of 43 officially designated foreign terrorist organizations, the DEA has formally linked 19 to the global drug trade, but officials believe 60 percent are actually involved. Ed Frothingham is the Pentagon's director of policy for transnational threats. He said drug traffickers and terrorists are uniting and using sophisticated technology, communications and transportation to "outmatch most of the abilities of the countries in many places of the world." A decline in state sponsorship of terrorism and progress made by law enforcement and intelligence agencies in disrupting other forms of financing has prompted terrorist groups to get involved with drugs. That connection requires cooperation between the DEA and the military - -- and it's reinvigorated the drug agency. The DEA has "briefed more generals and admirals in the last 18 months than in the last 35 years," Braun said. Jim Carafano, military expert at the Heritage Foundation, said the counterterrorism mission "has given new life and more resources to DEA." The agency's network of informers around the world has been particularly useful, Farah said. They helped DEA seize $3.4 billion last year from intercepted drug transactions, a figure Braun expects to rise to $4 billion this year. "The nexus between drugs and terror is growing at lightning speed," he says. "Every dollar that the DEA seizes is a dollar not in the hands of these transnational terror organizations or drug cartels." - --- MAP posted-by: Steve Heath