The Incarnations of Pauline...Vandervoort Steese Dresser Rogers Hoving

"It matters not one iota what political party is in power or what President holds the reins of office. We are not politicians or public thinkers; we are the rich; we own America; we got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it if we can by throwing all the tremendous weight of our support, our influence, our money, our political connections, our purchased Senators, our hungry Congressmen, our public-speaking demagogues into the scale against any legislature, any political platform, any presidential campaign that threatens the integrity of our estate." Frederick Townsend Martin, The Passing of the Idle Rich (1911), p. 149.[1]

 ~~~~~~~~~~

How Poppy Bush Became Controlled by Exxon: Follow the Dresser Money 

by Linda Minor

Dresser ad began running in 1888

Solomon Robert Dresser had a creative, inventive mind, and he was a hard worker, to boot. When he encountered a problem in his business, he set out create a solution. As a result, he became the owner of numerous patents he either designed himself, or paid others to design, for pipe coupling devices which prevented natural gas from leaking from the joined sections of pipelines.

The Dresser company really took off in 1878, when Solomon located his family in Bradford, Pennsylvania, in the state's northwest corner. While he worked, his wife (formerly Vesta Simpson) had given birth to children, only two of whom lived to adulthood--Ione (1870) and Robert Alexis (1877) Dresser. Vesta died of tuberculosis in 1883, but Solomon remarried two years later, and the new wife (Caroline Kirsch) gave him two more sons--Carl Kirsch and S. Richard Dresser.

In 1906, after Solomon had served two terms in Congress, it was reported that he had decided to build a large factory in Bradford, Pennsylvania to mass-produce his most common coupling devices. Having worked too hard, it was said, he became ill around 1907 and died after four years of illness. Robert Dresser married Olive Brady in 1900 and later worked for the Boy Scouts of America organization in Bradford, having little interest in his father's passion.

Solomon Dresser's mansion in Bradford sat atop a rise--at 149 Jackson Avenue--and was not far from his Boylston Avenue office, where the Medical Plaza in Bradford sits today. The factory was situated across town. Caroline, Carl and Richard had lived in the gigantic residence, but by 1911, when Solomon died, Carl Dresser was away at Princeton while Richard was in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, at the Hill School. Carl graduated from Princeton in 1912 and was followed there by Richard two years later.

When Caroline died in November 1916, she was stopping in New York City, with plans of visiting Richard in Trenton to take in Princeton's football game against Yale. Five months earlier, Carl had taken his mother and Richard, by then a junior at Princeton, to Atlantic City, New Jersey. He was accompanied by his new lady friend, Pauline Steese, divorced since March of that year.

The mansion would remain a relic of Bradford history for many years thereafter. Richard would bring his family there to live, and after his death his widow, who died in 1956, bequeathed it to the Presbyterian church, which made it into a home for the aged. Ione Dresser's husband, Fred A. Miller, worked for the Dresser company all his life, even after the company was sold to W.A. Harriman & Co.

Carl Dresser's Wife, Pauline: Her Many Husbands

Pauline Steese Dresser, 1920

Vandervoort
Pauline's father was Charles Ransom Vandervoort of Jamestown, New York, who left his family home at Tonawanda, New York, in 1882 to work in Jamestown, New York, at a large textile mill called Broadhead Worsted Mills. In 1907 Pauline's brother, Sherman B. Vandervoort, went into business for himself manufacturing cement blocks, which he later expanded into coal delivery, taking his father into the company. Sherman's wife was the daughter of a Bradford, Pennsylvania, physician and maintained contacts by joining a Bradford social club through which they knew the Dresser family. Carl, like Sherman, was an avid sportsman.


Steese
Pauline's first marriage in 1908 was to Charles J. Steese, Jr., assistant cashier at First National Bank of Massillon, Ohio, where his father was the bank president. Pauline had divorced him in the spring of 1916, a few months before she accompanied Caroline and Carl Dresser to Atlantic City the following June.[2]

Dresser
Pauline's marriage to Carl Dresser was announced in the "summer resort" section of the Pittsburgh Press on August 13, 1916. Although Carl was secretary of the S.R. Dresser Manufacturing Co., his main focus was finding new supplies of oil and gas, through his own company, Dresser Gas Company, which had drilled for natural gas in 1896, built a pipeline to distribute its gas to customers in northeastern Ohio. He first met Pauline, while she was playing society wife to her banker husband of Massillon, Ohio.

By the time Carl and Pauline married in 1916, however, he was president of the Malta & McConnellsville Gas Co. in Malta, Ohio, having succeeded to the company after his father's death in 1911 and his own graduation from Princeton. Steese's parental rights were terminated, apparently with his consent, and both of Pauline's sons, Charles and Bradley Steese, were adopted by Carl. The family moved into the mansion with Carl's mother until Caroline's death that November.

Thede Barnsdall

T. N. "Thede" Barnsdall, who had worked in Bradford before following the oil discoveries in Oklahoma, proposed Carl for membership in the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers. His father had started Thede as an oilman in Bradford, Carl Dresser's hometown, and he eventually acquired over a million acres of oil lands in the Osage Indian reservation in Oklahoma upon his death in 1917. Those acres were found to actually end up in control of Standard Oil of New Jersey, which had given Barnsdall a loan of several million dollars, according to an investigation made by the U. S. Senate in 1917. Newspapers had been reporting that fact since 1908.

By 1918 Carl Dresser was talking of moving to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he hoped to expand his oil and gas business. He acquired a residence in Tulsa, where Pauline is said to have set up a "salon" to entertain other wives of wealthy oilmen in that location.

Mr. & Mrs. C.B. Wrightsman

At the Tulsa County Club in June 1922 Carl and Pauline Dresser hosted a tea dance in honor of the wedding of Charles B. Wrightsman to his bride, Irene Dill Stafford of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Irene was born into a Catholic working class family, the daughter of Thomas A. Stafford who in 1925 managed a clothing store and lived in a rented residence. Irene's mother died before 1940, her father had remarried, and at age 70 was still selling retail clothing and still living in rented accommodations at 96 S. Main Street.

Casino St. John's baths

It was sometimes claimed that Irene Wrightsman had been a debutante who had wintered in Miami Beach, Florida, but the truth was much different. She had first gone to Florida because her sister Kathryn, who married Thomas McHale in 1918, was there with her husband. Thomas enlisted in the Navy aviation division when the United States entered WWI. Kathryn, a dance teacher in Pennsylvania, worked as a "dancing hostess" at the Casino St. John in Miami Beach while her husband was stationed at the Miami Naval Air Station.

“Collins' Pool Older than Beach" - 166th in a series on early Miami by HOWARD KLEINBERG

More than a year before the City of Miami Beach was incorporated in 1915, pioneer developer John Collins and his son-in-law, Thomas J. Pancoast, created a tourist attraction at what is now Collins Avenue between 22nd and 23rd streets. It was given no particular name, people just called it the pavilion, but it became better known through the years as the Miami Beach Casino and Roman Pools. In its lifetime, the casino and pools had a considerable number of owners and names. Among them were the Collins Casino, Miami Beach Casino, Casino St. John's, Roman Pools, Everglades Cabana Club and its last name, the Riviera Cabana Club. Collins opened his swimming pool on Jan. 11, 1914, at a time when Miami Beach had not yet settled upon the name “Miami Beach.”

Social life based on wealth

J.N. Lummus, who owned the property on the southern portion of the beach, called the land Ocean Beach. Carl Fisher called his properties Alton Beach, and Collins used Miami Beach as a name. Fisher bought the facility from Collins in 1917 and, according to “Billion Dollar Sandbar," Polly Redford's 1970 biography of Miami Beach, added "$350,000 worth of improvements to the bathing pavilion that the Collins family had built of driftwood three years earlier. With a second pool and a Dutch windmill to pump in seawater, a restaurant, ballroom, and shopping arcade topped with rococo towers, the old Collins pavilion was transformed into the "Roman pools."

From that point on, the place took on a more social air. It was fashionable to be seen at the Roman Pools and Casino. Leading swimmers appeared there regularly, and visitors dined in an elaborate setting or danced the night away in the main ballroom. By 1925, the casino and pools had moved into the hands of N.B.T. Roney, who was about to build a magnificent hotel on the northern side of the pools-- calling it the Roney Plaza.

At about the same time Irene Stafford met Wrightsman, possibly at the large swimming pool on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, developers began turning the pool into the town of Palm Beach, and wealthy New Yorkers who had introduced polo to C.B. began building polo fields about 20 miles to the north of the new resort, which were to become the town of Gulf Stream:

Starting in 1922, Bessemer Properties, a real estate venture controlled by the family of Henry Phipps, Jr. (co-founder with Andrew Carnegie of the company that became U.S. Steel) began to accumulate parcels of land on both sides of the intracoastal canal for future development. Friends and business associates of the Phipps family in Palm Beach saw the roughly 500 virgin acres of property as an ideal location for a golf course and polo fields, surrounded by seasonal residences.

Charles J. Wrightsman of Oklahoma


Charles B.'s father, C. J. Wrightsman, had been born in Ohio but got into the oil business in Pawnee, Oklahoma, before his son was born there in 1895. C.J. was a lawyer, leasing lands of members of the Osage Indian Reservation tribe. At first his family lived in the tiny community south of a bend of the Arkansas River, on the west side of the Indian lands, but by 1910 had moved to Tulsa.

Somewhat more prosperous now, C.J. added two live-in yardmen to a household that also included a Swedish house maid. Tulsa was fifty miles away, now on the southeast side of the Osage Reservation, north of another bend of the Arkansas River. Today the United Way building sits where their home on Boulder once stood. There were no tall buildings in 1910, such as the Boulder Towers which Skelly oil built in 1959 across from where their house sat.

In 1915 C.J. set up Wrightsman Oil company, a Delaware corporation, which he located at the top floor of the then-new Kennedy Building, 321 S. Boston Avenue in Tulsa. Wrightsman sold most of his oil leases to Harry F. Sinclair:

Early in his career, Sinclair attracted the attention of wealthy speculators like Chicago meatpacker J.M. Cudahy, Pittsburgh capitalist Theodore Barnsdall, and James F. O’Neill, president of Prairie Oil Company, a subsidiary of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of Kansas. Unlike his backers, Sinclair came from humble beginnings.

Exeter Academy and the Dekes

C.J.'s only son, Charles B. Wrightsman, was away at school during this time--first at Phillips Exeter prep (class of 1914) then pre-law at Stanford University in California, where he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon (ΔKE) during 1915. From there he went on to Columbia University in New York, where he became interested in becoming a pilot in 1917, as America began revving up to enter WWI.

As a resident member of the Aero Club of America, at Madison Avenue at 41st Street in Manhattan, C.B. served on the Central Committee which funded the Liberty Loan. He was also an ensign in the Naval Militia of New York, and thus came into contact with men from the East Coast and Ivy League schools involved in the Aerial Coast Patrol. F. Trubee Davison, Henry P. Davison and Robert A. Lovett were three of the twelve who constituted the "First Yale Unit." After training all summer at Peacock Point and Port Washington on Long Island, they returned to New Haven in the fall and organized the Yale Aero Club.

The first new training base to open was at Bay Shore, Long Island, which was headed by Albert Cushing Read, with help from his chief aide, C.B. Wrightsman.

As cold weather approached, Lewis Rodman Wanamaker, son of John Wanamaker and brother of the late Thomas B. Wanamaker, allowed them to use the property at West Palm Beach, where he was building a new flying boat, and airplanes were also supplied by Henry Woodhouse through the Aero Club of America. As more airplanes were donated, the size of the group increased. William A. "Bill"
Rockefeller and Samuel Sloan Walker were among the 18 new recruits in early 1917, and the pilots of Unit #1 were sworn into the Naval Reserve Flying Corps on March 24, 1917.

The unit which trained C. B. Wrightsman, Columbia's Aerial Coast Patrol #4, was engaged in a balloon training camp with St. Louis millionaire Albert Bond Lambert--the St. Louis Lambert family profiled in Part IV of our series here on George Bush 41's grandfather Bert Walker. There were other ACP units as well, including one in Dayton, Ohio, of which Harold E. Talbott, Jr., whose father was president of the Dayton-Wright company, was part.

After his Naval Aviation service during the war, C.B. went abroad to Roumania and Russia, to "make investigations of petroleum markets and production" for his father's company. We must assume he also reported back to the appropriate government officials at the time. President Woodrow Wilson had been re-elected in 1916, and his head of the War Council of the Red Cross, banker Henry P. Davison, was father of two of the young men who instigated the group of college men with which C.B. trained. F. Trubee Davison in 1951 would be named director of personnel for the newly established Central Intelligence Agency, leaving us to wonder if he had not been involved in the agency from its first days.

C.B. Wrightsman, poloist

Intriguingly, Wrightsman claimed that he first saw polo played in 1921 at the Westchester Cup. That event took place at Meadow Brook, the polo fields closest to Bert Walker's Long Island residence, and all the players lived nearby. More than a decade after watching his first polo match, Wrightsman was still an avid polo enthusiast, frequenting clubs such as Gulf Stream in Florida, developed by, among others, the Phipps brothers and Stewart Ighlehart, close neighbors of George Herbert (Bert) Walker in Old Westbury, Long Island.

Gulf Stream polo fields

The Wrightsmans in 1935 gave their address as Wheatley Hills in Old Westbury, the same address used, not only by the Walker family, but also by Cornelius Vanderbilt "Sonny" Whitney, frequent polo teammate of Tommy Hitchcock, Jr. In 1939 Wrightsman would still be playing with his team known as the Texas Rangers, against Hitchcock's team. Sonny Whitney was not only an heir to his mother's Vanderbilt fortune, he was also a pilot who ran an airline company, and he was heir to a fortune from his father, Harry Payne Whitney, from whom Bert Walker and Averell Harriman acquired the first horses with which they set up a partnership known as Log Cabin Stud based in Wheatley Hills, Old Westbury.

Palm Beach polo

The Phipps land in Florida was purchased by Henry Phipps in 1912, when he paid $90,000 for one-thousand feet of vacant oceanfront land located on Palm Beach’s North End, but the family eventually amassed 25 miles of ocean-front property, and they "financed the Miami International Airport, the Venetian Causeway and the University of Miami, as well as developed the Miami Shores and Bay Point subdivisions. Their portfolio included the two miles of oceanfront that became the Town of Gulf Stream." In 1923 they built the Gulf Stream Golf Club. Before that, however, they had constructed the polo grounds next to the Everglades Club.

Polo near Meadow Brook

Within this circle of millionaire sportsman, George Herbert Walker had insinuated himself. We do not know the exact location of the residence he acquired in the early 1920 at Wheatley Hills, Old Westbury, but we do know it was surrounded by polo fields and golf courses, not to mention fellow horse breeders.

The sale to W.A. Harriman & Co.

Carl Dresser's marriage to Pauline became a casualty of divorce in 1927, the year after he sold his father's company to W. A. Harriman & Co., whose president was G. H. "Bert" Walker. Pauline appealed the Oklahoma decree regarding alimony, alleging fraud by Carl in his monetary evaluation of his Dresser Manufacturing Co. stock. The court's opinion ruled against her, stating the facts as follows:

They were married in 1916, he being 25 years old, the son of wealthy parents, and worth over $1,000,000, among his assets being some Dresser Manufacturing Company stock upon which this litigation principally turns. That was a close corporation, and the stock was held in the family. She was 26 years of age, but in both marital and financial experience was much older than he, having been married and divorced, then facing the world with one child six years, and one three years, of age, with a total financial worth, according to her own testimony, of about $15,000, principally the proceeds, over attorney's fees, of $23,000 alimony. He owned a gas company and a torpedo company, but later sold them. About two years after marriage they moved to Tulsa, Okla., and he was reported in 1919 and 1920 as worth $2,000,000, largely speculative, paper value of oil leases, although he did have considerable production. In 1919 and 1920 and subsequently he spent about $750,000 in drilling many dry wildcat wells, but much of that was paid from production, of which he once had considerable, and much was met from the proceeds of the sale of leases around the drilling sites. That did not put him on the verge of bankruptcy and in the terribly embarrassing condition existing at the time of the divorce. That condition was due to expenditures for living expenses, which ran about $100,000 a year, and which she refused to appreciably reduce. His stock in the Dresser Manufacturing Company in 1925 and 1926 paid about $60,000 in dividends each year, and in 1927 about $70,000.

The opinion seemed to conclude that the divorce had stemmed from Pauline's desire for a living standard exceeding their means, which caused Carl's inability to pay debts. Part of the difficulty, the court concluded, was that the manufacturing company was not a public corporation and had no market for its shares. It was for that reason, we have been told by Darwin Payne, in his book Initiatives in Energy, that Carl sought out the W.A. Harriman & Co. investment bank. Additional facts are given in the same opinion:

The Harriman deal came about because Mr. Atkins [bookkeeper for S. R. Dresser Manufacturing Co., called as a witness by Pauline] knew Mr. [Alexander O.] Cushny of that concern and sold him the idea of getting control. Carl Dresser was in debt and had to have money, and at first W. A. Harriman & Co. loaned him $225,000, out of which Mr. Atkins got a commission of $15,000. Later he borrowed $15,000. And in closing up the deal they paid $17,000 on his debts, paid $30,000 to his [Carl's] second wife [Gloria Jack], whom he married December 13, 1927, about eight months after the divorce, and issued the balance, $555,000 of paper price to her in class A stock, 12,000 shares at $46.25 each. Also, in the original agreement they agreed to loan him up to $400 a share on up to 500 more shares, evidently to permit him to try to get the stock from his brother [Richard], in which he was unsuccessful. Also, they took an option on the 1,000 shares at $650 a share, but nothing indicates that they would have exercised it if the deal had not gone through. Nobody got $850, that price to Carl Dresser being largely a paper price, and the others got only a paper price of $700 share, plus about $38 tax, which would be a paper price of $738,000 for 1,000 shares, which was the number owned by Carl Dresser, if the owner paid the tax from his own money. If we were to adopt either price as a basis to work from, the price to the others would be the better basis, for they did not have to sell, and none of that was for aiding in putting over the deal. The other stockholders took new stock for about all of the price, and it seems that had they not done so, the deal would not have been made, for W. A. Harriman & Co. put as little money in as it had to, and busied itself in getting it out with despatch.

The above details of this opinion were not made public until April 1933, two years after Carl's death from "liver trouble," and five years after his remarriage in 1927 to Gloria Jack of Kane, Pennsylvania. We know, however, from Darwin Payne's book that what followed next was putting Neil Mallon in place as Dresser's president. In 1931, instead of selling or dividing the Dresser company, the stock was shifted to the new Brown Brothers Harriman company, of which Prescott Bush became a partner. Bert Walker remained at the old offices (39 Broadway) while Prescott moved to the new digs--Brown Brothers offices at 59 Wall Street.

Four months after losing her appeal against division of the Dresser assets, Pauline made headlines once again: "Pauline Dresser To Wed Col. Rogers". The friendships she had made in Tulsa in 1922 paying dividends by 1933.

Rogers

Port of Missing Men, Southampton

Pauline was honored by an engagement dinner given by her stepdaughter-to-be, Millicent, daughter of Col. Henry Huddleston Rogers. Millicent was then married to an Argentine millionaire named Arturo Peralta Ramos. It is not rightly known exactly how Pauline snared her wealthy third husband. Their wedding took place at Col. Rogers' "summer home" on Long Island. Fortunately for her, Pauline did manage to stay married to her multi-millionaire husband, becoming a widow after only a two-year marriage.

The mansion Pauline inherited in Southampton, Long Island, New York, had also been the scene of Millicent's 1927 wedding to the Argentinian polo player. Intriguingly, Millicent divorced him in December 1935 after a six-week stay in Reno, obtaining her divorce on the same day that "Sidney" Wrightsman obtained a divorce from Irene Wrightsman--the same person Pauline had honored with a tea on the eve of her wedding in Tulsa in 1922. Possibly one of those amazing coincidences?


No mention of the Charles B. Wrightsman divorce has been found, although we know he did marry Jayne Larkin in 1944. His obituary failed to mention his first marriage, which had occurred at the time the Dressers had known them in Tulsa in 1922 and produced two daughters, Irene Margaret and Charlene. The daughters were living with their divorced mother in a modest apartment building in Santa Monica in 1940, a mile from the Pacific Coast highway. Five years earlier they had all lived at the Warwick Hotel in Houston, and C.B. had his office for Standard Oil of Kansas at #1540 Mellie Esperson Building.

Hoving
In May 1937, Walter Hoving, after leaving Chicago and obtaining new employment as president of Lord & Taylor in New York, married Pauline at her New York City apartment on 57th Street, and they immediately sailed to Bermuda, along with her son (Bradley Steese Dresser) and his new wife--a sort of double honeymoon. 

Pauline received one-third of the income from Rogers' estate for the remainder of her life, including the use of the Port of Missing Men property pictured above:

a lavish estate in Southampton on Long Island, ... set on 1400 acres of prime land, including an 800-acre shooting preserve called The Cow Neck and a 400-acre lake, called Scallop Pond. As designed by the renowned architect John Russell Pope, the Rodgers’ manor house resembled not one, but several modest Colonial cottages, all strung together, to form an abode of palatial proportions with opulent appointments, not so different from Marie Antoinette’s retreat at Versailles. It included perhaps the most lavish Greco-Roman indoor swimming pool ever conceived in this country, which has since been destroyed.

Pauline would later be described by stepson, Thomas Hoving, in his 1994 book--Making the Mummies Dance: Inside The Metropolitan Museum Of Art--as a woman for whom he "developed an instant hatred" (page 85). Tom's parents were divorced when he was five, in August 1936, only seven months before Pauline married his father, and he recalled spending summers with two governesses at Pauline's Long Island estate as his stepmother tried to teach him how to live "in society."

During cooler months when he lived as a boy in Manhattan, Tom would go to the Hovings' apartment on the top floor of River House, 435 East 52nd Street on the East River. Sonny Whitney had a residence one building down at the corner of First Avenue, and Bert Walker's Manhattan residence was a few doors away at One Sutton Place South. Tom would even hint in his book about a possible romance between his stepmother Pauline and Charlie Wrightsman.

The Exxon story, too, is also hinted at here, but further research articles will hopefully bring it into clearer focus.



ENDNOTES

[1] Frederick Townsend Martin wrote the book from which the quote is taken about three years before his death. When his brother's obituary appeared in the Washington Post (1913), Frederick was said to be "a Bowery settlement worker." The real "idle" wealth of Frederick's brother came in the form of his wife's inheritance of hundreds of millions from her parents, with which she became noted for exceptionally elaborate balls at the Waldorf-Astoria.

[2] In Atlantic City, Pauline apparently encountered her ex-husband with an actress using the name Mae Francis, (a niece of "Wild Bill" Donovan, a famous baseball player of the day, not the spy). Steese, in his roadster, was insanely racing against aviator E. Kenneth Jaquith, flying above him. Steese married the actress early in 1917. The next time he was heard from, however, he was married to a woman named Blanche, with whom in 1925 he had built a house at Lake Salubria near Bath, New York, and moved there from Ohio. When Steese's mother died in 1929, Blanche was named Executrix. Soon after that, he received another inheritance from Anna Steese Baldwin, his late father's sister. He had no problem inheriting from family, but he suffered no qualms it seems in disinheriting his own two sons, giving them up to be raised by Pauline's second husband.

The Great Heroin Coup - Chapter 14

Note: This chapter was previously posted here, and became the motivation for additional background research. After posting the remainder of Henrik Kruger's book, we will pick up where we left off, back with the question, " Who engineered the heroin coup?"

Although Kruger began chapter fourteen of his book by going back in history to China in 1945, the elements involved in the heroin coup begin much earlier than that. Just as the Office of Strategic Services predated the Central Intelligence Agency, the Coordinator of Intelligence was the first method devised by the executive branch to collect intelligence abroad. 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in 1932, then again in 1934 and 1936. During his first year in office (1933) a real coup against his Presidency was averted when General Smedley Darlington Butler blew the whistle on mysterious American businessmen and bond brokers who had attempted to recruit  him to  serve as “assistant President,” a  so-called military straw man to prevent disgruntled World War I veterans from organizing a revolution against capitalism.

FDR would, therefore, have known by the time he ran in 1940, having completed three terms totaling twelve years in office, that he needed someone he could trust to gather intelligence for him. In July 1941 the President created the position of Coordinator of Information and appointed William J. Donovan to that post,  placing his eldest son James on its staff. 

A year earlier, following the fall of France to the Nazis in May 1940, President Roosevelt had devised a method of subsidizing the Allied forces while technically remaining neutral. The Neutrality Act had forbidden the U.S. to sell armaments on credit or to make loans to nations engaged in war. The Act was modified by a policy called "Cash and Carry," which morphed into Lend-Lease, which allowed the U.S. to "sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of ... any defense article," if that country's defense was deemed vital to America's defense.

Because it was a method to pay for certain military goods, FDR had to appoint a banker to head the Office of Lend-Lease, and he chose one connected to the J.P. Morgan banking network--Edward Reilly Stettinius, Jr., the man he later chose to succeed Cordell Hull as Secretary of State. After FDR's death, Truman named Stettinius as the first U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations.

Proviso: Remember, it's always about the money. Follow it. It was the Morgan banking and corporate network which set up the Federal Reserve under Woodrow Wilson. Before that, Morgan bankers helped to incorporate opium profits of Americans and their Chinese partners into America's physical infrastructure. Opium had been the first commodity that produced huge surplus funds for Americans, the profits realized through sight drafts issued by London banks converting the silver paid by Cantonese traders into bank notes. One of the biggest Anglo-American banking concerns involved in sight drafts was the Brown family.

President Wilson's chief of staff, Colonel House, though a Texan, was very close to T.J. Coolidge, a member of the China-trading Coolidge family. Even though the combination of Stillman and Rockefeller had seemingly overtaken the Morgan investment portfolio with petroleum assets by the mid-1930's what had actually occurred was a merger of two banking empires (Morgan/Carnegie on the left and Stillman/Rockefeller on the right)  into one investment bank--Brown Brothers Harriman. Where the Gold Is has been leading up to this point in America's banking history, while Minor Musings left off exploring the same question some time ago with an article titled "The Power of the Browns." All these attempts at describing this elephant in the room are finally beginning to merge.

Selected Excerpt 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:

Foreword and Chapter 1

Chapters 2-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapters 9-12  

Chapter 13

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

HEROIN IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

Opium and gold as primary exchange media

The place was Kunming in the South China province of Yunnan. The time was the end of World War II. Amid the chaos of war, opium and gold became the primary media of exchange, and cult‑like bonds were forged among a small staff of Americans and high‑ranking Chinese. Yunnan was a center of Chinese opium cultivation and Kunming was the hotbed of military operations, among them Claire Chennault's 14th Air Force and Detachment 202 of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Among Detachment 202's notorious collection of special agents, one in particular—E. Howard Hunt—has needed no introduction since the Watergate break‑in. In Kunming, the spy novelist who later became a comrade of Cuban exiles and China Lobbyists befriended an equally intriguing character, the French Foreign Legionnaire turned OSS agent, Captain Lucien Conein.[1] Although not part of Detachment 202 proper, Conein frequented Kunming while awaiting parachuting over Indochina.[2]

Detachment 202 was not the first of its kind. As we learn from the CIA's own website: "On April 14, 1942, William Donovan, as Coordinator of Information (forerunner of the Office of Strategic Services), activated Detachment 101 [under Carl F. Eifler] for action behind enemy lines in Burma. The first unit of its kind, the Detachment was charged with gathering intelligence, harassing the Japanese through guerrilla actions, identifying targets for the Army Air Force to bomb, and rescuing downed Allied airmen. Because Detachment 101 was never larger than a few hundred Americans, it relied on support from various tribal groups in Burma. In particular, the vigorously anti-Japanese Kachin people were vital to the unit’s success. By the time of its deactivation on July 12, 1945, Detachment 101 had scored impressive results."

Indochina remained Conein's base of operation after World War II, when, like Hunt, he slid over from the OSS to its successor, the CIA. He then operated throughout South and North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Burma, and became the top U.S. expert on the area‑as well as on the opium‑smuggling Corsican Mafia. He was Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge's middle man in the 1963 plot to overthrow South  Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem (who was assassinated along with his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, the Corsicans' partner in the drug traffic). A decade later, Conein and Hunt, working for the Nixon White House Plumbers, would attempt to make it appear that the plot had been ordered by JFK. Both Conein and William Colby, mastermind of the CIA's Phoenix assassination program, were recalled to the U.S. at the start of the seventies.

C. V. Starr

After Mao Tse‑tung's rise to power in China, OSS veterans formed a number of firms that would be linked both to the CIA and to its reactionary client regimes in the Far East. With financial assistance from his friends in Asia, OSS China hand C.V. Starr gained control of several U.S. insurance companies. As brought to light during the McClellan hearings, Jimmy Hoffa awarded one of them, U.S. Life, and a smaller company, Union Casualty —whose agents Paul and Allen Dorfman were among Hoffa's links to the underworld[3] —a Teamsters Union contract despite a lower bid from a larger, more reputable insurance firm.[4]

Starr's attorney was the powerful Washington‑based Tommy "The Cork" Corcoran. Corcoran's law partner, William Youngman [married to a descendant of Robert Bennet Forbes], was a director of U.S. Life. Corcoran's other clients included

• the United Fruit Company, 
• Chiang Kai‑shek's influential brother‑in‑law T.V. Soong, and 
• the mysterious airline, Civil Air Transport (CAT), of which 60 percent was owned by the Taiwan regime and 40 percent by the CIA.[5] 

On behalf of United Fruit, Corcoran triggered a CIA plot — in which E. Howard Hunt was the agency's chief political action officer — to overthrow Guatemala's President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954.[6]

OSS China hand Willis Bird settled in Bangkok, Thailand to head an office of Sea Supply, Inc., a CIA proprietary headquartered in Miami, which furnished weapons to opium‑smuggling Nationalist Chinese (KMT) troops in Burma. One William Bird, representing CAT in Bangkok, coordinated CAT airdrops to KMT troops and ran an engineering firm that constructed short airstrips used for the collection of Laotian opium.[7]

Sea Supply also provided arms and aid to Phao Sriyanonda, the head of Thailand's 45,000‑man paramilitary police force and reputedly one of the most corrupt men in the history of that corruption‑ridden nation. For years his troops protected KMT opium smugglers and directed the drug trade from Thailand.[8]

When President John F. Kennedy in 1962 attempted a crackdown on the most hawkish CIA elements in Indochina, he sought the prosecution of Willis Bird, who had been charged with the bribery of an aid official in Vientiane. But Bird never returned to the U.S. to stand trial.

Upon returning to Miami, the OSS Chief of Special Intelligence and head of Detachment 202 in Kunming, Colonel Paul Helliwell, was a busy man. In Miami offices of the American Bankers Insurance Co. [apparently incorporate in Nevada], he functioned simultaneously as the Thai consul, an the counsel for Sea Supply as well as for insurance companies run by his former subordinate C.V. Starr.[9] American Bankers Insurance was itself a most unusual firm; one of its directors, James L. King, was also a director of the Miami National Bank through which the Lansky syndicate reportedly passed millions en route to Geneva's Swiss Exchange and Investment Bank. One of the Swiss bank's directors, Lou Poller, also sat on the board of King's Miami National Bank.[10]

Moreover, in the fifties and sixties, Thai and Nationalist Chinese capital was invested in Florida's explosive development, much of it by way of the General Development Corporation controlled by associates of Meyer Lansky.[11] It's important to note the dubious alliance of Southeast Asian power groups with those concerned with Florida and Cuba. This early mutuality of business interests is the key to all that follows, and Miami is the nerve center to which we will continually return.

The alliance was comprised of the China Lobby, OSS China hands, Cuban exiles, the Lansky syndicate, and CIA hawks pushing for all‑out involvement in Indochina and against Castro's Cuba. It coalesced between 1961 and 1963, and its members had three things in common: a right wing political outlook, an interest in Asian opium, and a thirst for political might. The last factor led to another common denominator in which the alliance invested heavily: Richard M. Nixon.

Some people effectively overlap the entire spectrum of the alliance. Among them are Howard Hunt and Tommy Corcoran, the man behind United Fruit's dirty work. United Fruit was a client of the Miami‑based Double‑Chek Corp., a CIA front that supplied planes for the Bay of Pigs invasion.[12] Corcoran was the Washington escort of General Chennault's widow Anna Chen Chennault, erstwhile head of the China Lobby, the key to Southeast Asian opium.[13]

Another key figure in the China Lobby was weapons dealer/financier William Pawley, the American co-founder of Chennault's Flying Tigers.[14] Pawley's name was the password to intrigue: OSS China, Tommy Corcoran,[15] CIA cover firms,[16] and arms shipments to KMT Chinese on Taiwan in defiance of a State Department refusal of authorization." All were either directly or indirectly connected to Pawley. He also rubbed elbows with the U.S. heroin Mafia when, in 1963, he, Santo Trafficante, Jr. and Cuban exiles took part in one of the countless boat raids on Cuba.[18]

The China Lobby's Southeast Asian connection naturally went via the Taiwan regime, which controlled the opium‑growing Chinese in the Golden Triangle and, with the CIA, owned the opium‑running CAT airlines. As Ross Y. Koen wrote in 1964:

"There is considerable evidence that a number of Nationalist Chinese officials are engaged in the illegal smuggling of narcotics into the United States with the full knowledge and connivance of the Nationalist Chinese government. The evidence indicates that several prominent Americans have participated in and profited from these transactions. It indicates further that the narcotics business has been an important factor in the activities and permutations of the China Lobby." [19]

British writer Frank Robertson went one step further in 1977:

"Taiwan is a major link in the Far East narcotics route, and a heroin producer. Much of the acetic anhydride -‑ the chemical necessary for the transformation of morphine into heroin -‑ smuggled into Hong Kong and Thailand, comes from this island, a dictatorship under the iron rule of the late Chiang Kai‑shek's son, Chiang Chingkuo."[20]

When the Communists routed Chiang Kai‑shek's forces in 1949, some 10,000 KMT troops fled to Southeast Asia and settled in a remote part of Burma. Heavily armed, they soon assumed control of the area and intermarried with the local population. Under General Li Mi they continued to infiltrate China proper, but each time they were repulsed. While awaiting Chiang's signal for a final, two‑front onslaught, Burma's KMT army needed a source of income. Many had grown opium in Yunnan and so the poppies, which flourished on the hillsides, became the force's cash crop.

Around 1950 the CIA became interested in the KMT troops. With General Douglas MacArthur pushing to arm them for an attack on Red China, the agency secretly flew them weapons in CAT airplanes. But when the KMT instead used the weapons against the Burmese army, Burma protested before the UN, where it was decided that 2000 KMT troops would be flown by CAT to Taiwan by 1954. Those who eventually made the trip, however, were only farmers and mountain people in KMT uniforms, and the weapons they took out were obsolete.[21] Nonetheless, with help from the Red Chinese army, Burma drove most of the KMT forces into Thailand and Laos, though many later returned. The Kuomintang and their kin now number over 50,000. Though only a fraction are soldiers, the KMT still controls hundreds of thousands of Chinese occupying the region, especially in Thailand.

The junction of Burma, Thailand, and Laos, the Golden Triangle, is the site of the bulk of the world's opium production and thereby the source of enormous fortunes for the French and later the Americans. The French held effective control over the Southeast Asian opium traffic until 1965. Between 1946 and 1955 the Mixed Airborne Commando Group (MACG) and the French Air Force managed the shipment of opium from Burma to Laos. A guerilla corps comprised mostly of Laotian Meo tribesmen and led by Colonel Roger Trinquier, MACG remained unusually independent despite its direct connections to the SDECE and Deuxieme (Second) Bureau. To finance their secret Indochina operations, these organizations turned to the smuggling of gold and opium, with MACG in charge of the latter. Large quantities of opium were shipped to French Saigon headquarters and passed on to the Corsican Mafia, who in turn smuggled the drug to Marseille.

When the French withdrew from Indochina in 1955 after their defeat by the Vietminh, and after the CIA pushed aside the SDECE, MACG leaders communicating through CIA agent Lucien Conein offered the Americans their entire guerilla force. Against Conein's advice they refused.[22] History would cast doubt on the wisdom of that decision.

In 1955 CIA agent General Edward Lansdale began a war to liquidate the Corsican supply network. While Lansdale was cracking down on the French infrastructure, his employer the CIA was running proprietaries, like Sea Supply and CAT, that worked hand‑in‑hand with the opium‑smuggling Nationalist Chinese of the Golden Triangle, and with the corrupt Thai border police.[23]

The Lansdale/Corsican vendetta lasted several years, during which many attempts were made on Lansdale's life. Oddly enough, his principal informant on Corsican drug routes and connections was the former French Foreign Legionnaire, Lucien Conein, then of the CIA. Conein knew just about every opium field, smuggler, trail, airstrip, and Corsican in Southeast Asia. He spent his free time with the Corsicans, who considered him one of their own. Apparently they never realized it was he who was turning them in.[24]

When Lansdale returned from Vietnam in the late fifties, the Corsicans recouped some of their losses, chartering aging aircraft to establish Air Opium, which functioned until around 1965. That year, the Corsicans' nemesis Lansdale returned to Vietnam as an advisor to Amabassador[sic] Lodge. There was also an upheaval in the narcotics traffic, and perhaps the two were connected. CIA‑backed South Vietnamese and Laotian generals began taking over the opium traffic — and as they did so, increasing amounts of morphine and low‑quality heroin began showing up on the Saigon market.

The first heroin refineries sprang up in Laos under the control of General Ouane Rattikone. President Ky in Saigon was initially in charge of smuggling from the Laotian refineries to the South Vietnamese; and Lansdale's office, it is to be remembered, was working closely with Ky. Lansdale himself was one of Ky's heartiest supporters, and Conein went along with whatever Lansdale said.[25]

Ouane Rattikone

One result of the smuggling takeover by the generals was the end of the Corsicans' Air Opium. The KMT Chinese and Meo tribesmen who cultivated raw opium either transported it themselves to the refineries or had it flown there by the CIA via CAT and its successor, Air America, another agency proprietary. Though the Corsicans still sent drugs to Marseilles, the price was becoming prohibitive, since they were forced to buy opium and morphine in Saigon and Vientiane rather than pick up the opium for peanuts in the mountains.

In 1967 a three‑sided opium war broke out in Laos between a Burmese Shan State warlord, KMT Chinese and General Rattikone's Laotian army. Rattikone emerged victorious, capturing the opium shipment with the help of U.S.‑supplied aircraft. The KMT, for its part, managed to reassert its dominance over the warlord. The smuggling picture was becoming simplified, with Southeast Asian opium divided among fewer hands, and most of the Corsicans out of the way.

General Lansdale returned to the U.S. in 1967, leaving Conein in Vietnam. The next year Conein greeted a new boss, William Colby. Since 1962 Colby had run the agency's special division for covert operations in Southeast Asia, where his responsibilities included the " secret" CIA war in Laos with its 30,000‑man Meo army. He shared that responsibility with the U.S. ambassador [sic] in Laos, William H. Sullivan, who would later preside over the Tehran embassy during the fall of the Shah.

Many of the agents who ran the CIA's war in Laos had earlier trained Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and afterward had taken part in the agency's continued secret operations against Cuba.[26] Since exiles were furnished by the Trafficante mob,[27] intelligence agents had intermingled with representatives of America's number one narcotics organization. The same agents would now become involved with the extensive opium smuggling from Meo tribesmen camps to Vientiane.[28]

In 1967 Colby devised a plan of terror for the "pacification" of Vietnam. Operation Phoenix organized the torture and murder of any Vietnamese suspected of the slightest association with Vietcong. Just as Lansdale was travelling home, Colby was sent to South Vietnam to put his brainchild to work. According to Colby's own testimony before a Senate committee, 20,857 Vietcong were murdered in Phoenix's first two years. The figure of the South Vietnamese government for the same period was over 40, 000.[29[

It was during Colby's tour in Vietnam that the heroin turned out by General Ouane Rattikone's labs appeared in quantity, and with unusually high quality. The great heroin wave brought on a GI addiction epidemic in 1970; Congressional reports indicated that some 22 percent of all U.S. soldiers sampled the drugs and 15 percent became hooked.[30]

Former Air Marshal, then Vice President, Nguyen Cao Ky (now alive and well in the United States) and his underlings still controlled most of the traffic. President Nguyen Van Thieu and his faction, comprised mostly of army and navy officers, were also in it up to their necks. According to NBC's Saigon correspondent, Thieu's closest advisor, General Dang Van Quang, was the man most responsible for the monkey on the U.S. Army's back. But the U.S. Saigon embassy, where Colby was second in command, found no substance to the accusations, Ky's record notwithstanding: Ky had been removed from U.S. Operation Haylift, which flew commando units into Laos, for loading his aircraft with opium on the return trips.

In the face of skyrocketing GI heroin abuse, the Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) looked into General Ngo Dzu's complicity in the heroin traffic and filed a lengthy report at the U.S. embassy.[31] The embassy ignored the report and chose not to forward it to Washington.[32] The BNDD also investigated the roots of the heroin epidemic, but was impeded in its work by the CIA and U.S. embassy. In 1971, however, a string of heroin labs were uncovered in Thailand, and a number were closed down.

In 1971, furthermore, Colby and Conein were recalled to the United States. Colby became the Deputy Director of Operations, the man in charge of the CIA's covert operations. More remarkable, though, was Conein's homecoming after twenty‑four years of periodic service to the CIA in Indochina, raising the question of why the U.S.'s foremost expert on Indochina had been brought back to Washington just as the crucial phase of Vietnamization was about to begin.[33] Ironically, Corsican friends still around for Conein's departure presented him with a farewell gold medallion bearing the seal of the Corsican Union.

At the war's cataclysmic end, the CIA admitted that "certain elements in the organization" had been involved in opium smuggling and that the illegal activities of U.S. allies had been overlooked to retain their loyalties. In reality, the agency had been forced to confess because of its inability to refute the tales of returning GIs, among them that of Green Beret Paul Withers, a recipient of nine Purple Hearts, the Distinguished Service Cross and Silver and Bronze Stars:

"After completing basic training at Fort Dix in the fall of 1965 [Withers] was sent to Nha Trang, South Vietnam. Although he was ostensibly stationed there, he was placed on 'loan' to the CIA in January 1966 and sent to Pak Seng, Laos. Before going there he and his companions were stripped of their uniforms and all American credentials. They were issued Czechoslovakian guns and Korean uniforms. Paul even signed blank sheets of paper at the bottom and the CIA later typed out letters and sent them to his parents and wife. All this was done to hide the fact that there were American troops operating in Laos.

"The mission in Laos was to make friends with the Meo people and organize and train them to fight the Pathet Lao. One of the main tasks was to buy up the entire local crop of opium. About twice a week an Air America plane would arrive with supplies and kilo bags of opium which were loaded on the plane. Each bag was marked with the symbol of the tribe."[34]

The CIA, reportedly, did not support any form of smuggling after 1968. Del Rosario, a former CIA operative, had something to say about that:

"In 1971 I was an operations assistant for Continental Air Service, which flew for the CIA in Laos. The company's transport planes shipped large quantities of rice. However, when the freight invoice was marked 'Diverse' I knew it was opium. As a rule an office telephone with a special number would ring and a voice would say 'The customer here'-‑that was the code designation for the CIA agents who had hired us. 'Keep an eye on the planes from Ban Houai Sai. We're sending some goods and someone's going to take care of it. Nobody's allowed to touch anything, and nothing can be unloaded,' was a typical message. These shipments were always top priority. Sometimes the opium was unloaded in Vientiane and stored in Air America depots. At other times it went on to Bangkok or Saigon.[35]

Even while the CIA trafficked in opium, President Nixon ranted on TV against drug abuse and lauded the crackdown against French smuggling networks.

pps. 129-139

Notes

1. E.H. Hunt: Undercover (Berkeley‑Putnam, 1974).

2. Another of Conein's OSS sidekicks, Mitchell WerBell 111, was years later indicted in a major drug conspiracy case (T. Dunkin: "The Great Pot Plot," Soldier of Fortune, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1977), and now runs an antiterrorist training school in Georgia (T. Dunkin: "WerBell's Cobray School," Soldier of Fortune, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1980).

3. D. Moldea: The Hoffa Wars (Charter Books, 1978).

4. U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, Hearings, 85th Cong., 2nd Sess. (cited in P.D. Scott: The War Conspiracy, Bobbs‑Merrill, 1972).

5. CAT, which became Air America, was also identical with the "CATCL" that emerged from Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers.

6. D. Wise and T.B. Ross: The Invisible Government (Random House, 1964); Hunt, op. cit.

7. Scott, op. cit.

8. F. Robertson: Triangle of Death (Routledge and Keagen Paul, 1977); A. McCoy: The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (Harper & Row, 1972).

9. Scott, op. cit.

10. New York Times, 1 December 1969; H. Messick: Lansky (Berkeley, 1971). 11. Carl 0. Hoffmann, the former OSS agent and general counsel of the Thai king in New York in 1945‑50, later became the chairman of Lansky associates' First Florida Resource Corp.

12. L. Gonzalez‑Mata: Cygne (Grasset, 1976).

13. R.Y.Koen: The China Lobby in American Politics (Harper& Row, 1974). 14. Pawley, the ultraconservative former Pan Am executive and Assistant Secretary of both State and Defense, set up the Flying Tigers under a secret order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt exempting him from U.S. neutrality provisions; see A. Chan Chennault: Chennault's Flying Tigers (Eriksson, 1963).

15. Corcoran assisted in the establishment of the Flying Tigers and later Civil Air Transport; see Scott, op. cit.

16. Lindsey Hopkins, Jr., whose sizable investments included Miami Beach hotels, was an officer of the CIA proprietary, Zenith Technical Enterprises of Bay of Pigs note. He was also an officer of the Sperry Corp., through whose subsidiary, the Intercontinental Corp., Pawley helped found the Flying Tigers in 1941. Pawley was Intercontinental's president. See Scott, op. cit.

17. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Judiciary, Communist Threat to the United States through the Caribbean, Hearings, 86th Cong., 2nd Sess. (cited in Scott, op. cit.).

18. See chapter fifteen; it has also been revealed that a prominent Chinese

American, Dr. Margaret Chung of San Francisco, who was a major supporter

of the Flying Tigers, trafficked in narcotics together with the Syndicate; see P.D. Scott: "Opium and Empire," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, September 1973.

19. Koen, op. cit. 20. Robertson, op. cit.. After a one‑year suspension, the U.S. State Department recently approved the sale of $280 million in military weaponry to the repressive Taiwan regime (New York Times, 20 January 1980), the same regime whose disdain for human rights was most recently expressed by the preparation of cases of sedition against sixty‑five opposition demonstrators (New York Times, 24 January 1980). The CIA's Taiwan station chief in the late fifties and early sixties, when the unholy alliances were forged, was Ray S. Cline. Closely associated with the China Lobby, Cline became famous for his drunken binges with Chiang Ching‑kuo, currently the president of Taiwan (see V. Marchetti and J.D. Marks: CIA and Cult of Intelligence, Jonathan Cape, 1974). A CIA hawk, Cline also helped a gigantic Bay of Pigs‑style invasion of the Chinese mainland which was rejected by President Kennedy. Cline is currently the "director of world power studies" at Georgetown's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which, according to writer Fred Landis ("Georgetown's Ivory Tower for Spooks," Inquiry, 30 September 1979), "is rapidly becoming the New Right's most sophisticated propaganda mill." In testimony before the House Select Committee on Intelligence, Cline defended CIA manipulation of the press, saying "You know that first amendment is only an amendment."

21. McCoy, op. cit.

22. D. Warner: The Last Confucian (Angus & Robertson, 1964). 23. McCoy, op. cit.

24. Conein told writer McCoy: "The Corsicans are smarter, tougher and better organized than the Sicilians. They are absolutely ruthless and are the equal of anything we know about the Sicilians, but they hide their internal fighting better." (McCoy, op. cit.).

25. McCoy, op. cit.

26. T. Branch and G. Crile III: "The Kennedy Vendetta," Harper's, August 1975.

27. U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Interim Report, 94th Cong., 1st Sess. Senate Report No. 94‑463, 1975.

28. C. Lamour and M.R. Lamberti: Les Grandes Maneuvres de l'0pium (Editions du Seuil, 1972); McCoy, op. cit.; Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars: The Opium Rail (New England Free Press, 1971).

29. Marchetti and Marks, op. cit.

30. Congressman M.F. Murphy and R.H. Steele: The World Heroin Problem (U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1971).

31. Like Nguyen Cao Ky, Ngo Dzu came to the U.S. as a refugee after the final debacle in South Vietnam. Though accused by Rep. Steele of responsibility for the addiction of thousands of GIs to heroin, Dzu went about as a free man until his 13 February 1977 death in Sacramento of apparent heart failure.

32. McCoy, op. cit.

33. Conein's summons home coincided with Howard Hunt's recruitment by the White House and the creation of the special narcotics and Plumbers groups. 34. Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, op. cit. 35. Lamour and Lamberti, op. cit. (quote retranslated from the French).

Continued here.