I found this article via Roger Hedgecock.
Washington (CNN) -- U.S. officials kept their Mexican counterparts in the dark about a widely criticized gun-trafficking probe even as rising numbers of weapons reached the hands of Mexico's drug cartels, a congressional committee reported Tuesday.
The Justice Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also held back key details about "Operation Fast and Furious" from agents based in Mexico City when they raised alarms, according to the report.
"Not only were they stonewalled by their colleagues, they were actively thwarted in their attempts to find out what was happening," the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee concluded.
"Fast and Furious" has been the subject of congressional investigations since December, when two weapons traced to the operation were found at the scene of a U.S. Border Patrol agent's killing in Arizona. More than 2,000 guns may have reached the hands of the cartels as a result of the probe, in which ATF agents allowed weapons bought in the United States to "walk" into Mexico.
"ATF senior leadership allegedly feared that any such disclosure would compromise their investigation," states the report, written by the joint staff of the committee. "Instead, ATF and DOJ leaderships' reluctance to share information may have only prolonged the flow of weapons from this straw purchasing ring into Mexico."
Carlos Canino, the ATF's acting attache in Mexico City, informed the country's attorney general of the probe only after learning that guns monitored by the investigation were involved in the killing of the brother of a top prosecutor in Mexico's Chihuahua state. Canino said he disclosed the operation despite the absence of clear direction from Washington "because I did not want her to find out through media reports where these guns had come from."
"If I hadn't told the attorney general this, and this had come out in the news media, I would never be able to work with her ever again, and we would be done in Mexico," the report quotes Canino. "We just might as well pack up the office and go home."
Even then, ATF officials in Mexico City did not learn the full extent of the "Fast and Furious" probe until after it was shut down, following the December killing of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.
The operation began in late 2009 and concluded in January. Investigators say the ATF allowed more than 2,000 weapons to be purchased illegally and transported in to Mexico, where heavily armed drug gangs have been battling Mexican authorities for control of the streets for several years.
