The drug agency refused to take part in the operation and said it should be called off. In a transcript of the "60 Minutes" broadcast supplied to The New York Times, Ms. Grimm said Mr. McFarlin of the C.I.A. and General Guillen had gone ahead anyway.

"I really take great exception to the fact that 1,000 kilos came in, funded by U.S. taxpayer money," Ms. Grimm said, according to the transcript. "I found that particularly appalling."

D.E.A. officers and other Government officials gave this account of the cocaine shipments and subsequent investigations into their origins:

The C.I.A.-Venezuelan force accumulated more than 3,000 pounds of cocaine delivered to its undercover agents by Colombian traffickers and stored the cocaine in a truck at the intelligence agency's counter-narcotics center in Caracas. Most of the cocaine was flown to the United States in a series of shipments during 1990. DrugCocaine Seizureed at Miami Airport

In late 1990, United States Customs Service officials seized a shipment of nearly 1,000 pounds at Miami's international airport and discovered that it had been shipped by members of the Venezuelan National Guard. Investigators from the drug agency interviewed a Venezuelan undercover agent working with the C.I.A.'s counter-narcotics center, who told them that the shipments had been approved by the United States Government.

The investigators from the drug agency, unaware that the intelligence agency had any role in the affair, first set about trying to eliminate their own personnel as suspects. They found that a female drug enforcement officer in Caracas had a close relationship with Mr. McFarlin. Using information she had obtained from him, the drug agency then focused its attention on the C.I.A. officer and his colleague, General Guillen.

In June 1991 the United States Attorney in Miami sent a memorandum to the Justice Department proposing the indictment of the general.

"The fly in the ointment is that the dope was delivered to the United States," a senior Drug Enforcement Agency official said in an interview today. "If you're part of a drug shipment and you have knowledge that it is going to the U.S., whether or not you ever entered the U.S., you're culpable."