WATERS QUESTIONS DRUG SMUGGLER IN NICARAGUAN PRISON.

Byline: Knight-Ridder Tribune News Service

A Los Angeles congresswoman who has been at the forefront of African-American protests over reports linking the CIA to the sale of crack cocaine in Los Angeles ghettos spent 90 minutes talking to an imprisoned Nicaraguan drug smuggler Friday and afterward said she wants CIA and Justice Department officials to talk to the man.

``He has told me enough for me to advise our investigators to follow up with him,'' Rep. Maxine Waters said after talking with Enrique Miranda, who was extradited to Nicaragua last month after his arrest in Miami.

Miranda was living in Miami illegally after escaping from the Nicaraguan prison where he was serving a seven-year term on narcotics charges.

Waters has been among the toughest critics of the CIA since the San Jose Mercury News published reports in August claiming the agency and the Nicaraguan Contra rebels it supported during the 1980s had ties with a Los Angeles cocaine merchant.

The reports were strongly denied by both the CIA and former Contra officials and have come under serious fire from other newspapers that investigated them, including The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times.

Nonetheless, Waters and other African-American political leaders have pressed for congressional hearings. She hinted Friday that Miranda might be called to testify before Congress.

His imprisonment in 1991 stemmed from his part in a shipment of cocaine masterminded by Nicaraguan drug smuggler Norwin Meneses, whom the Mercury News named as the link of the CIA and the Contras with cocaine shipments during the early 1980s.

But what firsthand knowledge Miranda would have of the CIA or the Contras is unclear. He was never involved with the Contras, and in fact he has had close connections to the Sandinista government that the rebels were fighting.