Lester Coleman

Lester Coleman is a self-employed freelance writer, editor, and security consultant who also served as a DIA covert intelligence officer. He worked for six years with the secret unit Middle East Collection 10 (MC-10) in Cyprus, running a network of agents in Beirut with the mission to find American hostages held by extremists.¹

Coleman was paid in travelers checks sent from the Luxembourg branch of the now-collapsed BCCI. Two senior MC-10 members, Matthew Kevin Gannon and Major Charles Dennis McKee, were on Pan Am Flight 103, having just returned from a mission in Beirut, when it exploded over Scotland.¹

Coleman claimed that the DEA, in collaboration with the Cypriot national police narcotics squad, the German BKA police, and British customs, ran a "drug sting operation" code-named "Khourah" through Cyprus and European airports, including Frankfurt. This operation involved delivering heroin from the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon to the United States. Coleman maintained that Pan Am Flight 103 was being used by the DEA as a "controlled delivery" flight.¹

After the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103, the Beirut end of MC-10 was reportedly "blown." Werner Tony Asmar, a German Lebanese member of MC-10, was killed in a bomb explosion in Beirut in May 1988. Another MC-10 member, Charlie Frezeli, a Lebanese army officer, was shot dead in Beirut in November 1989. Following Asmar's death, the DIA ordered Coleman home.¹

Danny Casolaro contacted Coleman in Sweden on August 3, 1991, seven days before Casolaro's death. They discussed the sale of the PROMIS software by the U.S. Government to foreign governments, the BCCI, and the Iran-Contra Affair. After learning of Casolaro's death, Coleman provided INSLAW president Bill Hamilton with an affidavit in October 1991. In this affidavit, Coleman stated that he became aware that the DEA was using its proprietary company, Euramae Trading Company, to sell PROMIS software to drug abuse control agencies in various Middle Eastern countries, including Cyprus, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait, and Turkey.¹

Coleman also stated that the DEA's objective was to augment U.S. drug control resources by enabling the U.S. Government to access sensitive drug control law enforcement and intelligence files of these Middle Eastern governments. He noted that third-party funds, including from the United Nations Fund for Drug Abuse Control in Vienna, Austria, were generally made available for the purchase of these systems.¹

Coleman found the reassignment of Michael T. Hurley, the DEA Country Attache for Cyprus, to a DEA intelligence position in Washington State prior to Michael Riconosciuto's arrest suspicious. He believed Hurley's reassignment was intended to "manufacture a case" against Riconosciuto to prevent him from becoming a credible witness about the U.S. Government's covert sale of the PROMIS software to foreign governments.¹