“Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day,” one official said. The two senior DEA officials, who spoke on behalf of the agency but only on condition of anonymity, said the process is kept secret to protect sources and investigative methods. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as “parallel construction.” How DEA program differs from recent NSA revelationsĪfter an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. “You’d be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.’ And so we’d alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it,” the agent said. Agents are instructed to then use “normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by SOD.”Ī spokesman with the Department of Justice, which oversees the DEA, declined to comment.īut two senior DEA officials defended the program, and said trying to “recreate” an investigative trail is not only legal but a technique that is used almost daily.Ī former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. The document specifically directs agents to omit the SOD’s involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony. “Remember that the utilization of SOD cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function,” a document presented to agents reads. The documents reviewed by Reuters are marked “Law Enforcement Sensitive,” a government categorization that is meant to keep them confidential. Today, much of the SOD’s work is classified, and officials asked that its precise location in Virginia not be revealed. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations.” THE SPECIAL OPERATIONS DIVISION “It is one thing to create special rules for national security,” Gertner said. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. “I have never heard of anything like this at all,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses. The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial.
Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.
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