The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), one of the principal members of the US intelligence community, has been the “world’s leading illicit drug trafficker” for decades, an American analyst says.

The CIA has been involved in drug trafficking since the spy agency was founded in 1947, said Stephen Lendman, a journalist and political analyst based in Chicago.

“It has billions of dollars in its budget already through conducting mischief on a worldwide basis…and it gets more money by trafficking drugs, selling to people who harm themselves egregiously by using this stuff,” Lendman said.

Juan Pablo Escobar, the son of Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria, a Colombian drug lord who was one the wealthiest criminals in history, says his father “worked for the CIA.”

In a new book, “Pablo Escobar In Fraganti,” Escobar explains his “father worked for the CIA selling cocaine to finance the [US] fight against Communism in Central America.”

“What the CIA was doing was buying the controls to get the drug into their country and getting a wonderful deal,” he says.

“He did not make the money alone, but with US agencies that allowed him access to this money. He had direct relations with the CIA,” says Escobar, who lives under the pseudonym, Juan Sebastián Marroquín.

“My father had an active participation, among them with the American CIA,” he said in a recent interview.

The CIA’s alleged role in trafficking cocaine into the United States was revealed in 1996 in a controversial investigative series “Dark Alliance” by journalist Gary Webb for the San Jose Mercury News.

The investigation exposed ties between the CIA, Nicaraguan contra rebels and the crack epidemic that ravaged black communities in the US from the late 1980s until the early 1990s.

The investigation sparked massive protests and congressional hearings, as well as criticism from the mainstream US media to discredit Webb’s reporting.

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CIA World’s Leading Illicit Drug Trafficker