Selected Excerpts from
THE GREAT HEROIN COUP - DRUGS, INTELLIGENCE AND INTERNATIONAL FASCISM
By Henrik Kruger; Jerry Meldon, Translator
South End Press©1980: Box 68 Astor Station, Boston, MA 02123
ISBN 0-89608-0319-5
240pps - one edition - out-of-print; Orginally published in Danish
Smukke Serge og Heroien; Bogan 1976
Previous chapters:
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
WHITE HOUSE HANKY PANKY
Never had Richard Nixon's White House staff been so preoccupied with narcotics matters as in the summer of 1971. They were obsessed with two projects: a new White House intelligence and enforcement unit as envisioned by the Huston Plan, and a comprehensive narcotics control apparatus, similarly under direct presidential control. The two idees fixes converged in a conspiratorial and political‑criminal network of hitherto unimagined dimensions.
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| Office for Drug Abuse Prevention, 1971 |
John Caulfield (Plumber)—a former agent of the New York City Police Department's Bureau of Special Services (BOSS), which specialized in narcotics and "monitoring the activities of terrorist organizations." In the 1960 presidential campaign he had been assigned to protect candidate Nixon in New York City. That and his close relationship with Nixon's personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods (of eighteen and one‑half minute tape gap fame), gained him a foot in the door of the White House.[2]
Myles Ambrose—the former Customs Commissioner, who was named head of the narcotics campaign's domestic strike force. He would later leave government service in disgrace.
On the afternoon of April 6, 1972 President Nixon arrived in Key Biscayne, Florida, to stay at his compound, next door to Bebe Rebozo's residence and swimming pool. The following morning he "directed the establishment of a nationwide toll-free telephone number to be manned on a 24-hour basis, 7 days a week. The Hot line, a phase of the Drug Abuse Law Enforcement program, was designed to provide citizens a direct line to help the national effort to eliminate heroin trafficking through the contribution of information anonymously." Nixon had chosen Ambrose less than four months earlier, announcing his appointment along with his new Executive Order 11641, which established ODALE.
***
Editor's Notes:
The first Myles Ambrose in America (wife Anna) was an Irish-born grocery clerk in the Bronx who arrived before 1900. The next Myles was born in New York in 1898, served in the Army during WWI, worked for the telephone company in the Bronx, and later managed a telephone company office in Teaneck, N.J. Our research shows there was a Myles J. Ambrose born into this family in 1926; however, the following listing from Marquis Who's Who identifies him as the son of Arthur P. and Ann Campbell Ambrose. There was an Arthur P. Ambrose of Dexter, Maine in the 1930 census, but he was married to Elizabeth--not Ann--and they had no son named Myles.
Our Myles went to a New Hampshire prep school, then college in Manhattan before finishing with law studies at New York Law School, an adjunct to Columbia University, graduating in 1952, two years behind AIG's Maurice R. "Hank" Greenberg.
Myles Joseph Ambrose Occupation: lawyer;
Born: New York City, July 21, 1926
Education: Grad., New Hampton School, New Hampshire, 1944; BBA, Manhattan College, 1948; LLD (hon.), Manhattan College, 1972; JD, New York Law School, 1952
Certification:
Bar: New York 1952, US Supreme Court 1969, DC 1973, US Court Appeals (federal cir.) 1970, US Court International Trade 1970, DC Court Appeals 1973
Career: Currently senior advisor, Sandler Travis Trade Adv. Service; Private practice law, New York City, New York, 1963-69
Executive director, Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, 1960-63; Assistant to secretary, US Treasury, 1957-60; Instructor economics and industrial relations, Manhattan College, 1955-57; Administrative assistant, US attorney Southern district, New York, 1954-57; Personnel manager, Devenco, Inc., 1948-49, 51-54; Of counsel, Arter and Hadden, Washington, DC, 1998—2002; Partner, Ross and Hardies, Washington, DC, 1988—1998; Partner, O'Connor and Hannan, Washington, DC, 1978—1988; Partner, Ambrose and Casselman, Professional Corporation, 1975—1978; Partner, Spear and Hill, 1973-75; Special consultant to President, special assistant attorney general, Washington, DC, 1972-73; U.S. commissioner customs, Washington, DC, 1969-72; Chief counsel, New York State Joint Legislative Committee for Study Alcoholic Beverage Control Law, 1963-65
Career Related: US observer 13th session UN Commission on Narcotics, Geneva, Switzerland, 1958; chairman, US delegation to 27th General Assembly, International Criminal Police Organization, London, 1958, 28th Extraordinary General Assembly, Paris, 1959; US observer 29th General Assembly, Washington, 1960; member US delegation to Mexico City, 1969, Brussels, 1970, Ottawa, 1971, Frankfurt, 1972; chairman, US-Mexico Conference on Narcotics, Washington, 1960, member conferences, Washington and; Mexico City, 1969, 70, 71, 72; chairman US-Canadian-Mexican Conference on Customs Procedures, San Clemente, California, 1970; chairman US delegate to Customs Cooperation Council, Brussels, 1970; chairman, Vienna, 1971, US-European Customs Conference Narcotics, Paris and; Vienna, 1971; organized Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), 1973; honorary consul Principality of Monaco, Washington, 1973-98; member adv. committee on customs commercial operations US Treasury Department, 1988-91; past chairman American Bar Association standing committee on customs law.
Creative Works: Author--Primer on Customs Law.
Awards: Decorated chevalier Order of Grimaldi (Monaco), knight Commander Order of Merit Italian Republic, Knight of the Holy Sepulchre; recipient Presidential Management Improvement cert. President Nixon, 1970, Secretary Treasury Exceptional Service award, 1970, Distinguished Alumnus award New York Law School, 1973, Alumni award for pub. service Manhattan College, 1972
Civic: Board directors University College of Dublin-Grad. Business School, 1996-2001; board member Daytop Village, 1973—; vice-chmn. Reagan-Bush Inaugural Committee, 1980; member adv. board Eisenhower Institute of World Affairs.
Memberships: Fellow Am. Bar Foundation; member Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, Univ. Club (DC), Alpha Sigma Beta, Phi Alpha Delta (hon.)
Political Affiliation: Republican
Religion: Roman Catholic
Family: son of Arthur P. and Ann (Campbell) A.; Married Elaine Miller, June 26, 1948 (deceased September 1975); children: Myles Joseph, Kathleen Anne, Kevin Arthur, Elise Mary, Nora Jeanne, Christopher Miller; Married Lorraine Genovese, June 3, 1994.
As revealed by the above resume, Ambrose quickly focused on international control of narcotics as his primary legal interest. Since 1925 the center of such control has been Geneva, with the Commission on Narcotic Drugs operated since 1949 under auspices of the United Nations, which replaced the role of the League of Nations Opium Advisory Commission. Harry Anslinger was appointed U.S. representative in 1946 and served through 1962.
***
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| Room 16 of OEOB |
The Plumbers' first assignment was the break‑in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist.[3] For the break‑in dirty work, Hunt enlisted Bernard Barker, Eugenio Rolando Martinez and Felipe de Diego, three of his Cuban friends who had been involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Martinez and de Diego also took part in the CIA's follow‑up Operation 40, and the ubiquitous Martinez was in on Trafficante‑masterminded boat raids on Cuba.[4]
By the summer of 1971 the White House Death Squad was well on its way. Hunt sought out Barker in Miami for what Hunt called "a new national security organization above the CIA and FBI." Barker would assemble a force of 120 CIA‑trained exiles for Operation Diamond, which, under cover of narcotics enforcement, would kidnap or assassinate political enemies. Barker signed up.[5]
In the fall of 1971 Hunt asked another of his Cuban friends, Bay of Pigs veteran Manuel Artime, to set up "hit teams" for the liquidation of narcotics dealers. As later revealed, Artime's primary target was to have been the Panamanian strongman, General Omar Torrijos.[6]
The White House now controlled narcotics intelligence at home and abroad. But that still wasn't enough. Nixon's staff also sought to control enforcement itself, and that required effective strike forces.
In January 1972 the White House set up the Office for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE) according to a plan conceived by Gordon Liddy. It became the domestic strike force under Myles Ambrose — whose government career ended with news of his pleasure trip to the ranch of a Texan indicted for narcotics and gun‑running.[14]
Time Out for a Little Texas History
Note from Editor: This Texas rancher who hosted Myles Ambrose at his ranch was none other than Richmond Chase Harper of Eagle Pass, a town on the Mexican border. Those historians and reporters not familiar with Texas history can be forgiven for skipping over this little tidbit without even a mention of the man's name, but Texans like me, who have worked for years to understand and dig up all the real dirt in this state, cannot overlook the importance of this man and what he represents.
Much of the story has been unknown until a recent book was published by Richmond's son, Rick Harper, ostensibly a biography of the first Mexican-American Texas Ranger, written in a whimsical style that might throw academics away from the scent of meat hidden within the tale. Rick reveals that Richmond's father, Ocie S. Harper, had moved to Tampico, Mexico, between 1908 and 1911, a decade or so before he purchased the Azulejo Ranch in Coahuila, Mexico, about 75 miles south of Eagle Pass.
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| J. R. Worthington, Jr. |
Richmond
Harper, born in 1923, married the daughter of Bruce Holsomback, mayor
of Crystal City, allegedly hand-picked by John Nance Garner. The
Holsombacks attended the inaugural in Washington, D.C. of FDR and his Texas-born vice president, John Nance (Cactus Jack) Garner, in 1933 . Bruce had grown up at 416 N. Getty Street in Uvalde, and was said to have been the best friend of Tully Garner, the Congressman's son. Tully's father was appointed
to Congress in 1896 to replace a deceased member of the House, and the family lived mostly in Washington, D.C.,
even though they still claimed Uvalde as home.
Garner
had quickly gerrymandered a new district to help him get reelected at
the
end of that term and went on to become Speaker of the House until he
resigned when chosen by Franklin Roosevelt as his vice president. Garner
no doubt expected FDR to quit after two terms to allow him to become
his successor, but that did not happen, and Garner never forgave him for
it.
 | |
| Licensed by the War Trade Board |
One of his banking partners was Thomas Howard McNelly--brother
of Leander McNelly, the famous Texas Ranger, and of Rose McNelly Black,
Richmond Harper's grandmother. Rose McNelly Black's daughter Mary, who
married Orceneth Samuel "Osie" Harper, was Harper's mother. Osie and his brother Paul Harper ran the Eagle
Hardware Co. in Eagle Pass, exporters of guns and other hardware into
Mexico since 1914, according to passport records in 1918.
Tully Garner left the bank in 1934 and moved to Amarillo, about as far away from Uvalde as he could be and still live in Texas. Control
of this bank would be sold to Dolph Briscoe, Jr. in 1960. The elder
Garner died in November 1967, and according to his obituary:
Garner spent 46 years in public life; in the Texas Legislature, in Congress where he was Speaker of the House and when he was nominated to be Roosevelt's first vice president in 1932. Twice he sought the presidential nomination. The first time was in 1932 when he finally threw his support to Roosevelt. The latter was in 1940 when he unsuccessfully opposed the third-term bid of Roosevelt, whom he then was calling "Boss". After swearing in his successor, Henry A. Wallace, Garner left Washington. He said he was through with politics.
Tully's friend, Bruce Holsomback, graduated from Vanderbilt in Tennessee, attempted to study dentistry, but soon dropped out of dental school and became a banker instead. He was hired by Garner to work at his bank in Crystal City (Zavala County) as early as 1920, then became the town's mayor in 1928.
Uvalde,
Crystal City and Eagle Pass were all in Congressman Garner's district,
and controlling the city and county elective positions was important to
securing the vote--a major part of the patron system in south Texas.As
it turns out, Carrizo Springs had two banks, and in 1976 one of them
(Citizens State Bank) was sold to a fellow named Enrique M. Salinas.
Enrique's brother, Juan, was planning to marry a divorced woman named Alex Short, who had worked for Morris Jaffe for several years.
In a book written by Madeleine Duncan Brown called Texas in the Morning. The Love Story of
Madeleine Brown and Lyndon Baines Johnson (Baltimore, Maryland: The Conservatory Press, pp. 222-223), we learn more about Alex Short's relationships. Alex had a sister named Beth Horstmann, who was the girlfriend of Madeleine Duncan Brown's son, Steven:
In 1976, Madeleine Brown received a telephone call from Sam Park, a multimillionaire bachelor from Harris County at his South Texas ranch. He called regarding the collapse of the Salinas family bank in South Texas. The bank had taken down several celebrities with them, including John Connally, Sammy Davis Jr. and Lt. Governor Ben Barnes. Connally and Barnes filed for bankruptcy.
Sam told Madeleine, "It sure looks like ol' Lyndon's carpetbagger, Morris Jaffe, has done in Steve's pretty little girlfriend, Beth Horstmann, and her sister, Alex Short."
Sam continued, "It was Jaffe, who introduced Alex Short to Salinas, wasn't it? The girls burned to death in a plane crash with $500,000 that the paper says is missing from the bank."
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| Did Enrique Salinas have a Morris Jaffe connection? |
But that was by no means the whole story. Congressman Fernand St. Germain (D-R.I.), held hearings in San Antonio late in 1976 to investigate what was always referred to as the 'rent-a-bank scandal'. According to Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans, by Stephen Pizzo, Mary Fricker, and Paul Muolo:
A former executive vice president of Citizens State Bank testified at the hearing that an associate had attended a meeting between Herman Beebe and Richmond Harper and later told him "that Beebe was supposedly connected with the Mafia." Beebe denied the rumor.
Dolph Briscoe, Sr. (father of the man who would later purchase control of Garner's bank) moved to Uvalde in 1910, and Dolph Jr. was born there the same year as Richmond Harper was born in nearby Utopia--1923. In 1932 the elder Briscoe (who was already a partner with Humble Oil (Exxon) founder, Ross Sterling, in a ranch previously owned by Abner (Ab) Pickens Blocker, the Chupadera Ranch just outside Carrizo Springs, Texas) bought a half interest in the 222,000-acre Margarite ranch in Coahuila, Mexico. The following year this noted cattleman was elected to replace J. M. West of Houston as president of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, for which Blocker began working in 1912. Blocker sold the Chupadera Ranch to this same J.M. (Jim) West, who later sold it to Sterling and Briscoe. Part of the ranch lies in Mexico.
Many of Richmond Harper's ancestors and their kinsmen would qualify for membership in the Sons of the Republic of Texas: Orceneth Fisher, for example, a Methodist Chaplain of the Republic of Texas Senate; Fisher's daughter, Judith, married Albert Buckner Harper of Hallettsville, Texas, and they became grandparents of Richmond Chase Harper. After a year of college, Richmond joined the Army Air Reserves in 1943. His first name came from his mother's father, Augustus Richmond Black, who married a niece of Leander Harvey McNelly, organizer of a special force of Texas Rangers.Back to the Demise of the French Connection
That Made Way for the Mexican Connection
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| Harper was an associate of Barry Seal. |
Overseas, as well, the White House was dissatisfied with the BNDD's enforcement powers. Dr. J. Thomas Ungerleider, a member of the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, noted in a record of his conversations with BNDD officials: "There was some talk about establishing hit squads (assassination teams), as they are said to have in a South American country. It was stated that with 150 key assassinations, the entire heroin refining operation can be thrown into chaos. 'Officials' say it is known exactly who is involved in these operations but can't prove it."
Hunt, Liddy and others in Room 16 did not confine themselves to narcotics campaigns and political assassinations. On behalf of CREEP they raised campaign funds from more or less shady sources and sabotaged the campaigns of George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie, and George McGovern. Hunt's CIA colleagues are among those who suspect he spiked Muskie's lemonade with an LSD-like substance prior to the candidate's famous tearful speech.[16]
Besides Hunt's Cubans, the familiar Frank Sturgis, who had earlier taken orders from Santo Trafficante, took on narcotics work and special assignments for CREEP.[17] According to a 1972 FBI report, sources in Miami had claimed Sturgis was then associated with organized crime activities. He later told an interviewer that he had aided Hunt in a 1971 investigation of the drug traffic reaching the U.S. from Paraguay via Panama.[18] He was in on several actions connected with the investigation, which focussed exclusively on Auguste Ricord's Grupo Frances.[19]
Sturgis was everywhere in the hectic spring of 1972. In May he was among the men who assaulted Daniel Ellsberg on the steps of the Capitol. Later that month he and Cubans including Bernard Barker arranged a Miami demonstration in support of Nixon's decision to mine Haiphong harbor. Sturgis himself was at the wheel of the truck leading the procession. He helped recruit agitators to disrupt the Democratic national convention, and in the June 17 Watergate break‑ in Sturgis joined CIA/ Trafficante Cubans and White House narcotics conspirators.[20]
As the noted Berkeley researcher Peter Dale Scott put it in 1973:
"In my opinion it is no coincidence that the key figures in Watergate — Liddy, Hunt, Sturgis, Krogh, Caulfield—had been drawn from the conspiratorial world of government narcotics enforcement, a shady realm in which operations of organized crime, counter‑revolution and government intelligence have traditionally overlapped."[21]
In July 1973 Nixon's narcotics forces were essentially consolidated according to Reorganization Plan Number Two worked out by former CIA agent Walter Minnick and Egil Krogh. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was formed out of the BNDD, ODALE, ONNI and Customs Intelligence. Four thousand operatives, including fifty CIA agents (many of them Cubans from the ODALE hard core), five hundred customs agents and most of the BNDD staff made the DEA a powerful new agency.
Ingersoll of the BNDD, Ambrose of ODALE and Sullivan of ONNI all resigned as John R. Bartels became the DEA's first director. His was no small task. Earlier rivalries persisted. The strange brew of agents with widely varying backgrounds and assignments made the DEA difficult if not impossible to steer. U.S. narcotics enforcement has a history of corruption, scandal and exposure of agent collaboration with the criminals it has been assigned to police.
Still, no bureau has been as plagued by scandal as the DEA has in seven years of existence. The exposes and charges run the gamut from trafficking in drugs, teamwork with the Mob and protection of major traffickers, to thievery, gunrunning, torture, and assassination of drug traffickers.[22]
When Lucien Conein became the head of the DEA's Special Operations Branch he allegedly carried out an assassination program after setting up the DEA's Special Operations Group (DEASOG), under cover of the B.R. Fox Company and housed on Connecticut Avenue in Washington.[23] DEASOG's twelve members—the Dirty Dozen—were hard‑nosed and experienced Latino CIA agents transferred over to the drug agency for the occasion. Prior to DEASOG, Conein had set up another DEA "intelligence" operation, Deacon I, employing Cuban exile veterans of CIA training camps, who were supervised by thirty other Cubans, all formerly of the CIA's Clandestine Services.[24] In response to the claim that DEASOG was a "hit team," Conein told journalist George Crile: "That is a big ‑‑‑‑‑‑‑ lie. That is bull ‑‑‑‑‑. However, a DEA official had told Crile:
"When you get down to it, Conein was organizing an assassination program. He was frustrated by the big‑time operators who were just too insulated to get to." DEA officials also told Crile that "meetings were held to decide whom to target and what method of assassination to employ. Conein then assigned the task to three of the former CIA operatives assigned to the Connecticut Avenue safe house."[25]
DEASOG shared its Washington office with an old friend and colleague of Hunt and Conein's from OSS China, the weapons dealing soldier of fortune and specialist in assassination, Mitch WerBell III.26 WerBell told Crile he had been a business partner of Conein's as late as 1974, and that he and Conein had worked together on providing the DEA with assassination devices.[27] Among WerBell's other associates were Frank Sturgis, Cuban exile leaders, and Robert Vesco, who, like WerBell himself, has been charged with bankrolling narcotics smuggling.[28] Carlos Hernandez Rumbaut, the bodyguard of Vesco's close friend and business partner, former Costa Rican President Pepe Figueres, is a former Conein agent who fled the country to avoid imprisonment on a drug conviction.[29] He has reportedly reentered the U.S. twice with a U.S. diplomatic passport.[30]
Assassination, it can be argued, became a modus operandi under Richard Nixon. The CIA carried out assassination and extermination campaigns in Vietnam, Guatemala, Argentina, and Brazil[31]—aided in Latin America by the local Death Squads. The White House appears to have‑sponsored a secret assassination program under cover of drug enforcement. It was continued by the DEA, which seemingly overlapped with the CIA in political rather than drug enforcement.
Until 1974 the training of torturers and members of Latin American death squads came under the auspices of the CIA and USAID's Office of Public Safety. Some 100,000 Brazilian policemen, for example, were trained and 523 of them were chosen for courses in the U.S.A.[32] They were trained at the International Police Academy in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. and at a secret CIA center in the same city on R Street, under cover of International Police Services, Inc. When school was out the prize pupils returned home to work, beside CIA advisors, as functionaries or torturers in such effective repression apparatuses as Sao Paulo's Operacao Bandeirantes.[33] Many would moonlight with the Death Squads.
After Tupamaros guerillas kidnapped and killed U.S. police advisor Dan Mitrione in Uruguay, Washington's schools for foreign police came into the limelight and Congress cut off their funding.[34] Nonetheless, the training program and direct assistance and supervision continued. A 1976 investigation authorized by Senator James Abourezk revealed that the U.S. torture academies had not in fact been completely closed down. According to Jack Anderson, Abourezk found such a school had been in operation since 1974 in Los Fresnos, Texas [far south Texas near Matamoros, Mexico] at the site of a former "bomb school."
Another journalist, William Hoffman, later confirmed the existence of a school for torture in Los Fresnos, which had since moved to Georgia, where it was known as the Law Enforcement Training Center.[35] Interestingly, Conein's friend WerBell runs his own large training center in Georgia, The Farm. It's used for, among other things, the training of law enforcement officers.[36]
Much of the old police support apparatus was simply transferred to AID's International Narcotics Control program (INC), which really spelled DEA. In 1974 the DEA had some 400 agents in Latin America, or roughly the number of advisors recalled from the OPS program. INC's budget for technical equipment abroad, meanwhile, jumped from $2.2 million in 1973 to $12.5 million in 1974.
The politics of the new drug effort were exposed when, in 1974, the man behind Argentina's death squad (the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance), Social Minister Lopez Rega, appeared on TV with U.S. Ambassador Robert C. Hill to publicize the two nations' antinarcotics collaboration with the words: "Guerillas are the main users of drugs in Argentina. Therefore, the anti‑drug campaign will automatically be an anti‑guerilla campaign as well.”[31]
It's striking how close the various extermination and repression campaigns have been to the narcotics traffic. The Meo Army deployed by the CIA in Laos smuggled large quantities of opium. Lopez Rega and his Argentine AAA henchmen were eventually exposed as keys to a cocaine ring.[38] One of the chief AAA hatchet men, Francois Chiappe, was a lieutenant in the Ricord/David heroin network.[39] Paraguay's most ruthless high‑ranking officers were exposed as heroin profiteers.
Christian David took part in extermination campaigns in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Operacao Bandeirantes' chief, Sergio Fleury, and several of his colleagues pocketed large protection payoffs.[40] Fleury's number two man in the Sao Paulo Death Squad, Ademar Augusto, de Oliveira, alias Fininho, fled to Paraguay after he was charged with murder. There, under the name Irineu. Bruno da Silva, he worked for the Ricord gang.[41]
When David's successor, the Brazilian narcotics dealer Milton Concalves Thiago, alias Cabecao (The Brain), was arrested in 1975, it was learned that he had been paying off the entire Rio de Janeiro Death Squad, which included four narcotics police lieutenants .[42] And finally as we go to press we learn that the dictator, Pinochet, assumed control of Chile's cocaine trade, then turned it over to his secret police, DINA, which shared the profits with its Cuban exile henchmen.[43]
The political violence set in motion by the White House narcotics offices ran smoothly. But what of actual drug enforcement? From its inception it focussed on dismantling the French narcotics network. When that was done, America would be free of the heroin plague, or so said Nixon and his staff. Reports of increasing amounts of heroin from Southeast Asia and Mexico were obscured by the great public relations campaign on the struggle against the Corsicans.
The Turkey/ Marseilles/ U.S. heroin pipeline was indeed shut down, and the French Corsican Mafia was almost totally decimated. But major new suppliers in Southeast Asia and South America were left untouched — despite warnings and reports — and despite the many CIA "experts" on the Latin American drug scene. Not only were most major heroin suppliers in the two regions left alone, they were protected. And they were aided by the arrest of small‑time competitors.
At home the story was nearly the same. ODALE and DEA nabbed only minor distributors and sidewalk pushers.
pps. 159-169
Notes
1. L. Lurie: The Impeachment of Richard Nixon (Berkeley, 1973).
2. J.A. Lukas: Nightmare (Viking, 1976).
3. It is interesting to speculate whether Ellsberg's knowledge of top‑secret operations in Vietnam touched on narcotics. His supervisors in Southeast Asia had been General Lansdale and Lieutenant Colonel Conein. Ellsberg and Conein were apparently quite close in Vietnam. Conein reportedly saved Ellsberg's life when the latter got romantically involved with the mistress of an Corsican Mafia capo. The gangster threatened to kill Ellsberg. Conein, in turn, told the gangster it would lead to his own funeral and war between the CIA and the Corsicans ‑see J. Hougan: Spooks (William Morrow, 1978).
4. See chapter fifteen.
5.1977 CBS interview of Bernard Barker; see also G. Crile III in the Washington Post, 13 June 1976.
6. J. Marshall: "The White House Death Squad," Inquiry, 5 March 1979.
7. E.J. Epstein: Agency of Fear (Putnam, 1977).
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. D. Wise and T.B. Ross: The Invisible Government (Random House, 1964).
11. S. Blumenthal: "How the FBI Tried to Destroy the Black Panthers," in Government by Gunplay, S. Blumenthal and H. Yazijian, eds. (New American Library, 1976).
12. H. Messick: ‑Of Grass and Snow (Prentice‑Hall, 1979).
13. A 1971 New York investigation revealed that 47 percent of the city's 300,000 addicts were Black, 27 percent Hispanic and only 15 percent White‑see C. Lamour and M.R. Lamberti: Les Grandes Maneuvres de l'0pium (Editions du Seuil, 1972); i.e., there were some 150,000 Black addicts in New York City alone. Still, Nixon named as director of ONNI, William C. Sullivan. The man who had planned and executed Operation Cointelpro would now battle the forces doping the potentially troublesome elements of the Ghetto. Ironically, Malcolm X and the Panthers, prime Cointelpro targets, had been the only ones to make significant headway against ghetto drug addiction.
14. T. Meldal‑Johnsen and V. Young: The Interpol Connection (Dial, 1979).
15. Epstein, op. cit.
16. M. Copeland: Beyond Cloak and Dagger (Pinnacle Books, 1974).
17. H. Kohn: "Strange Bedfellows," Rolling Stone, 20 May 1976.
18. True, August 1974.
19. In his book Cygne (Grasset, 1976), intelligence agent Luis Gonzales‑Mata describes being assigned a special task by CIA agent "Robert Berg." He was to convince the Paraguayan dictator Stroessner that Ricord was behind a planned coup attempt against him financed with heroin from Red China. Stroessner was in a bind, since he very well knew that the source of the heroin was not Red China but his bosom buddies in Taiwan.
20. C. Bernstein and B. Woodward: All the President's Men (Warner Books, 1975).
21. P.D. Scott: "From Dallas to Watergate," Ramparts, November 1973.
22. U.S. Justice Department DeFeo Report, 1975; the list of DEA abuses has recently been expanded to include a computerized information system covering 570,000 names (a number which may be compared with the 8000 federal drug arrests each year)‑see E. Rasen: "High‑Tech Fascism," Penthouse, March 1980.
23. Hougan, op. cit.
24. Ibid.
25. Crile, op. cit.
26. Another OSS China hand, Clark McGregor, replaced John Mitchell as the
head of CREEP.
27. Crile, op. cit.
28. T. Dunkin: "The Great Pot Plot," Soldier of Fortune, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1977;
L.H. Whittemore: Peroff (Ballantine, 1975).
29. Hougan, op. cit.
30. Crile, op. cit.
31. Cuban exiles took part in an extermination campaign in Guatemala between 1968 and 1971. According to Amnesty International, 30,000 people were murdered there between 1962 and 1971, most of them in the last three years. Similarly, anti‑Castro Cubans had their hand in the Argentine AAA's murder campaign believed to have claimed 10,000 lives. In Brazil the Sao Paulo Death Squad alone is estimated to have assassinated 2000 between 1968 and 1972, while many others perished in the torture chambers.
32. Skeptic, January/ February 1977.
33. A.J. Langguth: Hidden Terrors (Pantheon, 1978). 34. Ibid.
35. Gallery, May 1978.
36. Dunkin, op. cit. Among other antiterrorism trainees at WerBell's camp in Powder Springs have been several members of U.S. presidential candidate Lyndon Larouche's U.S. Labor Party. The Marxist turned extreme rightist and anti‑Semitic U.S. Labor Party has voluntarily sent the FBI and local police forces "intelligence" reports on left wing movements, and regularly exchanges information with one Roy Frankhouser, the self‑proclaimed Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Pennsylvania and active member of the American Nazi Party — see the New York Times, 7 October 1979.
37. P.Lernoux: "Corrupting Colombia," Inquiry, 30 September 1979. In July 1978, DEA chief Peter Bensinger strongly recommended that Colombian authorities militarize the Guajira Peninsula, home of the marijuana/cocaine traffic. Two months later, newly elected (and current) President Julio Cesar Turbay issued a security statute empowering the military to arrest any Colombian deemed subversive, without recourse to habeas corpus or other constitutional guarantees. In April 1980, the Colombian Army was about to abandon its U.S.‑financed multi‑million dollar drug war, its failure connected, no doubt, to an estimated $110 million in protection money distributed annually by the smugglers (New York Times, 3 April 1980). Meanwhile, the military has assumed the dominant position in what was one of Latin America's few remaining democracies. U.S. military aid to Colombia — where, according to Amnesty International's April 1980 report, military personnel torture political prisoners in thirty‑three locations throughout the country, resorting to fifty identifiable techniques ‑totalled $155 million between 1946 and 1975; 6200 Colombian military personnel were trained by the U.S. in the same period (N. Chomsky and E.S. Herman: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, South End Press, 1979). U.S. military aid for 1979 was $12.7 million, the highest amount in Latin America.
38. Latin America, 19 December 1975.
39. L'Aurore, 31 May 1976; Liberation, 19 July 1976.
40. Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 May 1973; A. Lopez: L'Escadron de la Mort (Casterman, 1973); H. Bicudo: Meu Depoimento sobre o Esquadrao da Morte (1976).
41. Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 May 1973. 42. Diario, de Noticias, 7 May 1975. 43. See the foreword, footnote 52.
1 comment:
Hi Linda - Very interesting. I may have some information to share. Do you have a private email address?
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