Uribe isn't the only popular figure listed in the memo. No. 89 is Carlos Vives, then an aspiring actor and now a Grammy-winning pop star. The memo describes Vives as being "involved in narcotics trafficking" and said he worked closely with an uncle who was a trafficker in the Medellin cartel.
Vives, who has lived in Miami since the early 1990s, could not be reached for comment Sunday. Sources said he was a favorite performer of traffickers from his coastal region of Santa Marta, who would invite him to perform at their parties. The same sources said they doubted that Vives was directly involved in trafficking.
Pentagon and State Department officials took pains to deny the validity of the information in the document, which was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archives, a nonprofit research group in Washington.
A Pentagon spokesman said the memo consisted of unconfirmed allegations and did not represent an official position of the Department of Defense. The spokesman said he knew of no other intelligence reports linking Uribe to the narcotics business.
"It's not a smoking gun. The reliability and validity of this raw data is very suspect, to say the least," said Army Lt. Col. Chris Conway, a Pentagon spokesman.
One U.S. intelligence official said that the memo, produced shortly after President George H. W. Bush ordered the military to begin tracking drug trafficking more closely, was based on a single confidential informant in Colombia.
The official noted that such information is typically passed on unedited to military intelligence analysts in Washington to avoid misinterpretation of the raw data.
This explanation is backed up by the presence of several errors in the report. One drug trafficker is listed as Fidel Castro with an alias of "Rambo" -- an apparent mix-up with Fidel Castano, a legendary onetime assassin and paramilitary fighter who went by that moniker.
"The one thing you don't want to do is sanitize the information in a report like this," the intelligence official said. "You want to keep it [as] close to raw intelligence as you can."
Colombian government officials denied that Uribe had dealings with the drug trade. They said the charges were similar to attacks Uribe faced during his 2002 presidential campaign and questioned whether the source for the document had political motives.
