It is unknown who authorized killing El Chapo. Any number of government agencies write “decision memos.” This may have been a decision within the DEA pending approval from the National Security Council. Or the Bush administration may have approved the plan, only for it to languish under the new president. After all, El Chapo is still alive.
Were it approved, the plan might have been implemented by a DEA
Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team(FAST). The FAST teams are military-trained commando squads. While the DEA is known primarily as a law enforcement agency that conducts criminal investigations and arrests, the FAST squads of its Special Operations Division have been involved in firefights in
Afghanistan and
Honduras. The squads were created during the Bush administration to investigate Taliban-linked drug traffickers in Afghanistan; under Obama, their use has expanded.
The memo refers to El Chapo as a “national security threat”—and DEA spokesperson Rusty Payne told
WhoWhatWhythat he is “absolutely” such a threat, though Payne acknowledged “someone like him is driven by money” rather than by ideology. But, he said, those driven by ideology could hook up with those driven by money to further anti-American agendas. (He also said that cartels could give valuable information to terrorists about penetrating the US border.)
In the next two memos (Email-ID
3429384 and Email-ID
1188082), the second sent immediately after the first, Burton displays his trademark humor, and also reports that the White House (but not Obama personally) denied the DEA’s request for permission to “whack” El Chapo
