MEXICO CITY — The day after he met his tough new Mexican counterpart here last December, President Clinton's top counter-narcotics official, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, offered effusive praise.
"This is a deadly serious guy," McCaffrey, himself a retired four-star general, said of the Mexican army general who had just taken over all federal drug enforcement here.
Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, McCaffrey told several U.S. reporters over breakfast at his Mexico City hotel that day, was a hard-nosed field commander of the "highest integrity" who clearly was committed to cooperating with the United States in battling Mexico's powerful drug cartels.
In the weeks that followed, Gutierrez reportedly was privy to a wealth of data on counter-narcotics operations. Hosted by McCaffrey and the United States' top drug enforcement agencies in Washington as recently as three weeks ago, Gutierrez was briefed on the inner workings of the United States' anti-drug efforts and the intricacies of the joint U.S.-Mexican drug war--part of a new era of cooperation and intelligence-sharing.
On Thursday, though, Gutierrez--chief of Mexico's anti-drug effort until he was fired Tuesday--was in maximum-security federal prison here, accused of collaborating for years with Mexico's biggest narcotics-smuggling cartel.
U.S. intelligence agencies were feverishly assessing the damage and whether it would jeopardize future cooperation with Mexico on the drug front.
"It's a very serious revelation and deeply troubling," Clinton acknowledged in Washington on Thursday when asked about the general's arrest.
However, Clinton praised Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo for taking bold and swift action against Gutierrez.
At the same time, though, administration officials acknowledged that the Mexican general's arrest also raised questions about the competence of U.S. intelligence forces, given that Tuesday's announcement in Mexico City that Gutierrez was allegedly collaborating with drug traffickers appeared to have taken Washington by surprise.
"The question is being asked," said Eric Rubin, spokesman for the White House National Security Council. "It's one thing not to know he was corrupt, but it's another thing not to even know that he had been [under investigation] for two weeks."
For Mexico, the damage clearly was greater.
