A document recently made available by the CIA shows that an unnamed Ops Center was monitoring news media coverage of the unfolding Sean Penn El Chapo Guzman story in early 2016.  While theories continue to circulate about the extent of Penn’s awareness that he was helping Mexican and US authorities track down the drug lord, the official line remains that he played an unwitting role.

The story begins in January 2012 when Mexican actress Kate del Castillo tweeted about how she trusted El Chapo more than she trusted the government, asking the kingpin to traffic in love rather than in narcotics.  Over the following years El Chapo, a fan of Kate’s with a smooch of romantic interest in her, developed a relationship with the screen star.  Following his capture and arrest in 2014 del Castillo met with his lawyers to discuss a possible movie adaptation of his life’s story.  She obtained an agreement over his life rights and, despite a mis-step with Colombian producer Javier Rey, the project began to move forward.

Unknown to del Castillo, she was under surveillance by both the Mexican and American governments.  CISEN later leaked photos to Mexico’s biggest newspaper, El Universal, showing that they’d had her under surveillance for years.  El Chapo escaped (again) in 2015 and his lawyer gave Del Castillo a phone to use to contact Guzman via text message.

Meanwhile, Sean Penn had been trying to get a meeting or interview with El Chapo and learned of Kate’s friendship with the drug lord.  She asked Guzman about the idea, and as El Chapo typed Penn’s name into google to begin vetting the actor the NSA were watching in real-time.  The DEA were looped in, and in October 2015 as Penn met up with Del Castillo in Guadalajara on the way to meet Guzman the Mexican Naval Infantry Force (essentially Mexican Marines) had a raid lined up and ready to go.  Upon hearing of Penn’s likely presence the DEA tried to have the raid called off but the Marines attitude was, according to author Alan Feuer, ‘F-uck Sean Penn, the raid goes on as planned.’

In the event the raid had to be cancelled due to a storm, but just days later the Marines raided another location and nearly caught up with Guzman.  Months later, in early January 2016 they finally caught up with him in Los Mochis, Sinaloa.  A firefight took out five of his bodyguards, with Guzman slipping out via a hidden door in a closet.  He surfaced outside through a manhole and stole two cars, but he couldn’t evade the police and was brought to ground.

The day after his (re)capture, Penn’s article for Rolling Stone describing his meeting and conversation with Guzman hit the internet, and the rumours began to swirl.  The Mexican Attorney General said that Penn was ‘essential’ to the mission to capture El Chapo, and it became known that Rolling Stone had given the kingpin the right to vet the story prior to publication.  Penn found himself in the middle of an international incident, leading to an appearance on Charlie Rose where he explained:

There is this myth about the visit that we made, my colleagues and I with El Chapo, that it was—as the Attorney General of Mexico is quoted—‘essential’ to his capture. We had met with him many weeks earlier…on October 2nd, in a place nowhere near where he was captured.

Rose asked:

So as far as you know, you had nothing to do and your visit had nothing to do with his recapture?

Penn’s reply:

Here’s the things that we know. We know that the Mexican government…they were clearly very humiliated by the notion that someone found him before they did. Well, nobody found him before they did. We didn’t—we’re not smarter than the DEA or the Mexican intelligence. We had a contact upon which we were able to facilitate an invitation.

While it seems to be true that El Chapo’s desire to have a film made telling the story of his crazy life was a factor in the US and Mexican government’s ability to eventually arrest him, it seems that Penn wasn’t aware of what was going on, and nor was del Castillo.  The raid that brought him down was months later, in a vastly different location to where he met with Sean and Kate.  The upshot was that the point Penn was trying to make about the failed War on Drugs got lost amid the hubbub around whether he was a secret agent and who, exactly, was involved in this secret operation that took down El Chapo.

Sadly, the CIA document doesn’t tell us much.  It is an email from [redacted] to [redacted] sent after 10pm on the evening that Penn’s Rolling Stone article was published.  It links up Penn’s article and a copy of a New York Times article based on the same story.  What is most interesting is that this email originated in an unidentified Ops Center rather than from an external media monitoring company or from the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs.  The Rolling Stone and New York Times pieces weren’t picked up as part of the general monitoring of stories about the CIA, after all the Agency themselves aren’t mentioned in either article.

So why did the CIA pick up on this story so quickly?  Penn said in one of his communications with El Chapo, ‘there is no question in my mind but that DEA and the Mexican government are tracking our movements’ but he didn’t have any contact with them, at least according to the Charlie Rose interview.  Did Sean Penn have any contact with the CIA regarding his El Chapo interview?  Did the CIA have any role in the tracking and operations to capture Guzman?  This email suggests that the answer to both questions is yes, because otherwise why does it even exist?

CIA Document on Sean Penn El Chapo media

CIA Ops Center email on Sean Penn El Chapo media coverage