Our Government's Real Heartbeat

Kris Millegan, 2000

Daniel Hopsicker is an unsung hero whom I first met online, oh, maybe around 1997. He was one of the originals at Kris Millegan's chat room known as CIA-Drugs. I had been invited to join the exclusive list after being a member of Kris' first list called the "Conspiracy Theory Research" group. At CIA-Drugs I was mostly a lurker and would probably never have advanced beyond that stage had Catherine Fitts not descended upon my humble abode in August 2000 and enticed me into doing research with her on the background of Pug Winokur, a subject which I'll eventually get around to here.

It is entirely possible Catherine may have been driving home from the CIA-Drugs Symposium in the early summer of 2000, which I had been afraid to attend. Preston Peet's article, complete with photos, written for High Times was entitled "Tracking The CIA Through Snowdrifts Of Drugs." Daniel presented his then recently completed video "Secret Heartbeat of America" inspired by the 1987 murder of two high school boys near Mena, Arkansas.


The story of Barry Seal is still what motivates Daniel's life and his search for truth about that secret government apparatus that turns brave young patriots into drug lords. His commitment to telling history honestly is what makes him a hero in my book:

The Secret History

So, we'd stared into the Heart of Darkness. The Heart of Darkness had stared right back. Allegations and speculation are not proof. The truth, indeed, is still out there.
But, for what little they're worth, here are my speculations about our journey into the secret history of our life and times.
I don't believe that the 'drug smuggler' Billy Bob Bottoms is any more a drug smuggler than you or I. I believe him to be a paid representative of the government of the United States of America acting under the doctrines of plausible deniability. Why? Just a hunch. I liked him too much. He was a Navy pilot. His brother in law Barry Seal was a Special Op guy. These were our best and our bravest men.
Here's what I would like to know. Who convinced men like Bear Bottoms that what they were doing was in the best interests of our country? What valid reasons might there be for our country's national security apparatus to be involved in the drug industry? Unless someone steps forward to make the argument for why this might be in our national interest, I'll wonder.
And here's what I've learned. Some things we'll never know for sure. The opposition's way too good for that. For example, I'm convinced, to the depths of my heart, that there was a coup d'etat in the United States of America in 1963. That the bad guys never got caught. And that, chances are, they still run things.
I will never, as long as I live, forget our 'Midnight ride to Mena,' seated beside tour guide and American hero Russell Welch. I'm convinced that what I saw there that night was a fully functional and operational secret government installation.
By that, I do not mean a secret installation of the government of the United States of America. Unh-uh. What I believe I saw, and what I believe exists in Mena, Arkansas today... is an installation of the secret government that runs the government of the United States of America.
And here's what I suspect: that today, long after Oliver North has become nothing but a minor league radio DJ... and long after the contra war is just a fading memory of yet another minor league war, our government--yours and mine--is going about the lucrative worldwide business of drug production and distribution.
It's the secret heartbeat of America. And it's as American as apple pie.

Daniel Hopsicker
January 29,1997
All rights reserved.

Daniel's videos and books are still available for purchase at Amazon.

The Great Heroin Coup - Chapters Eighteen and Nineteen

Changing the Middleman

by Linda Minor

President Nixon had already announced the concern of the United States in fighting drugs by the summer following his initial inauguration in 1969. Needing an excuse to take federal action against what was essentially a state crime, he told Congress:

Effective control of illicit drugs requires the cooperation of many agencies of the Federal and local and State governments; it is beyond the province of any one of them alone. At the Federal level, the burden of the national effort must be carried by the Departments of Justice, Health, Education, and Welfare, and the Treasury. I am proposing ten specific steps as this Administration's initial counter-moves against this growing national problem.

Since three Cabinet officials were cooperating in this effort, a committee of those officials was created September 7, 1971, called the Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control (CCINC). The timing of this occurred almost simultaneously with President Nixon's revelation that he was considering a devaluation of the dollar as well as cutting the connection of the value of gold from the value of the dollar. (See article at bottom of this post.) The two issues--international narcotics trade and protecting the American trade balance were, in fact, inextricably intertwined, and the Central Intelligence Agency worked covertly on both issues through the various agencies administered by the executive branch of the U.S. government.

The history of how the new drug enforcement agency's need for intelligence about international drug traffickers began to draw upon the resources of other federal agencies was recounted to Chairman Otis Pike's Select Committee on Intelligence by Jerry N. Jenson, whose testimony began on November 13, 1975. When DEA developed its intelligence division, it first incorporated the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence set up in 1972 under former FBI agent William Sullivan. It also had at its disposal the Customs Agency's facilities along the border with Mexico, called El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC), as well as Federal Aviation Administration's air intelligence. Jensen implied that once the CCINC was created, the DEA began to cooperate with the Central Intelligence Agency in acquiring information about international narcotics trafficking.

The truth, however, is that even more than the concern about the health and safety of drug users, the United States was much more anxious about how the organization of the drug traffic routes was affecting the international monetary structure. The following excerpt from an article by Christopher Matthew appeared in December 1971 of a magazine styled European Community:

The concern is clear. Every month $10 million was being sent from the United States to the French treasury and was helping to to create a devastating drain of America's dwindling gold supply into France. It was significant enough for the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to become involved in the issue of narcotics traffic since it was resulting in the collapse of the Bretton Woods system created in 1944.

As the United Nations, pursuant to 1532(XLIX) of 24 July 1970, began to take concerted action on 11 November 1970 to control international drug abuse, it acknowledged the need to establish a fund the UN could draw upon. To establish the fund, it added to its resolution a request to then Secretary General U Thant of Burma:

in keeping with the recommendation of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, to establish, as an initial measure and as a matter of urgency, a United Nations fund for drug-abuse control to be made up from voluntary contributions, such fund to be initially used for the purposes which were approved by the Commission and administered by the Secretary-General pending the development and consideration by the Council of the proposed long-term plan of action, including permanent arrangements for administration and financing...

President Nixon found himself as soon as he took office having to deal with a persistent deficit in the balance of payments, which did not fluctuate or disappear despite several actions which had been taken to alleviate it. His war against heroin was not technically an effort to end the drug trade per se. That would have meant ending the anti-Communist military actions in Indo-China, which were financed by opium produced there. Rather, President Nixon's administration was working toward changing the middleman from French heroin refineries to those controlled by Americans, i.e. through CIA proprietaries.

It's what I refer to as "following the money."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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:

Foreword and Chapter 1

Chapters 2-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapters 9-12  

Chapter 13 

Chapter 14 

Chapter 15 

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

ONE MORE COVER‑UP

In early 1973 the Department of Health, Education and Welfare estimated the number of U.S. heroin addicts at 600,000. By the end of that year, Dr. Robert Egebjerg, director of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Health Administration, placed the number at 300,000. And in June 1974 DEA international operations chief John T. Cusack, testifying before the House Committee on International Narcotics Control, said that the addict population was down to 200,000.[1]

This giant cover‑up hid the fact that Nixon's heroin war was no more than window‑dressing. On 7 October 1974, six weeks after Nixon's resignation, the head of the White House Special Action Office on Drug Abuse Prevention, Dr. Robert Dupont, was pressured to release a secret report that the number of addicts had in fact risen, reaching even into formerly untouched middle class suburbs.[2]

On 27 April 1976 President Gerald Ford said in a message to Congress: "By mid‑1973 many were convinced that we had turned the corner on the drug problem. Unfortunately, while we had won an important victory, we had not won the war on drugs. By 1975 it was clear that drug use was increasing, that the gains of prior years were being lost, that in human terms narcotics had became a national tragedy. Today, drug abuse constitutes a clear and present danger to the health and the future of our Nation."

In February 1977 the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control reported that the addict population totalled some 800,000. And in 1978 New York City's special narcotics prosecutor, Sterling Johnson, spoke of a heroin epidemic worse than that of the late sixties and early seventies.[3] But the cover‑up hadn't stopped in 1974.

DEA Lied about Source of Heroin

Cusack targeted the French, who made all the money.

From 1975 until the end of 1978 the DEA consistently maintained that between 80 and 90 percent of the heroin consumed in the U.S. was Mexican. However, the claim doesn't stand up against the following facts: 

1. 80 percent of the world's heroin--exactly the figure exported from Marseille until 1972 --was, at least until late 1976, produced from opium harvested in the Golden Triangle and distributed via Bangkok, Singapore, and Hong Kong;[4] 
2. the number of arrests of couriers en route from Southeast Asia increased steadily after 1973;[5] 
3. reports from New York and other big cities testified to the arrival of large shipments of white heroin from Southeast Asia; 
4. the market's supply of heroin did not dwindle despite aerial destruction of an estimated 60 percent of Mexico's poppy fields in early 1976;[6] 
5. an effective tidal wave of Golden Triangle heroin began flooding Europe in 1973, while many couriers en route to the U.S. and Canada were nabbed by European police; 
6. the DEA was aware of Santo Trafficante's dealings in Southeast Asia, as well as the later Mafia summit in Palermo where large sums of money were set aside for investment in the Golden Triangle; 
7. it was easy to verify the narcotics flow from Mexico, since the border was subject to close surveillance, but to conclude that most of the heroin on the U.S. market originated in Mexico was a stretch of logic.

Even the DEA had to admit the tenuousness of its claims. On 24 February 1976, the DEA's John Cusack admitted that his agency's estimate that only 8 percent of U.S. heroin came from Southeast Asia was surprising, considering the region's prolific opium production. He added:

Jack Cusack, 1955

"We are also concerned about our detection during 1975 of substantial quantities of white no. 4 heroin moving directly from Bangkok to the United States. In December, for example, forty‑six kilograms of heroin were seized in Bangkok, concealed in the household effects shipment of a returning U.S. serviceman. Follow‑up investigation in the development of an extensive conspiracy prosecution has identified twelve additional shipments entering the United States since 1974."

Twelve such shipments meant 552 kilos, or more than the entire 470 kilos confiscated in the U.S. in 1975 ‑and from only one of many Southeast Asian smuggling networks. Cusack went even further:

 "It appears almost certain that the bulk of the white heroin found during 1975 in the inner‑city areas of our eastern cities has been Asian no. 4 smuggled from Bangkok."[7]

Why then did the DEA continue to overstate Mexico's role and minimize Southeast Asia-‑even after the publication, in 1972, of Alfred McCoy's The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia? Perhaps to justify the great expenditure in support of right wing military and police forces in Latin America. (The later boom in Colombian cocaine would also provide justification.) Southeast Asia was downplayed so as not to jeopardize relations with America's loyal, if corrupt, allies — most of all Thailand, Taiwan, and the latter's overseas agents. They were allowed to profit from opium and heroin in relative peace.

Another reason: the DEA could not expose the Southeast Asia connection without compromising the CIA. A secret 1977 House Government Operations subcommittee report accused the CIA of helping an Asian opium ring smuggle drugs into the United States and then lying about it to Congress. Puttaporn Khramkhruan, a Thai national, was arrested in 1973 for smuggling fifty‑nine pounds of pure opium into the U.S. via JFK airport. Citing national security interests, the agency had the case squelched, and Khramkhruan was sent back home. However, the House subcommittee eventually established that he was a CIA operative in Thailand.[8] In fact, he was on the payroll of a CIA proprietary using the Agency for International Development (AID) as a cover for training the corrupt Thai border police.[9] Furthermore, Khramkhruan told a DEA investigator that he had been an officer in the KMT army and guarded opium mule caravans. His CIA contact was the U.S. consul in Chiang Mai, Thailand.[10] In its report, the House Committee stated: "It was ironic that the CIA should be given the responsibility of narcotics intelligence, particularly since they are supporting the prime movers."[11]

The Thai Connection Origins

[Editor's Note: To understand the history of CIA action in Thailand, we turn to Dr. Peter Dale Scott. The following is an excerpt from his Operation Paper:

The United States Helps Rebuild the Postwar Drug Connection

To appreciate the significance of the connection we are discussing, we must keep in mind that, by 1956, the KMT had been driven from the Chinese mainland and that Chinese production of opium, even in remote mountainous Yunnan, had been virtually eliminated. The disruptions of a world war and revolution had created an opportunity to terminate the opium problem in the Far East. Instead, U.S. covert support for the Thai and KMT drug traffickers converted Southeast Asia, for more than two decades, into the world’s major source of opium and heroin.

The origins of the U.S. interface with these drug traffickers in Thailand and Burma are obscure. They appear, however, to have involved principally four men:

• William Donovan;

• his British ally Sir William Stephenson, the organizer with Donovan of the World Commerce Corporation (WCC);

• Paul Helliwell; and

• Willis Bird (both veterans of OSS China). After World War II, Sir William Stephenson’s WCC “became very active in Bangkok,” and Stephenson himself established a strong personal relationship with King Rama IX.31 [footnotes at bottom of paper]

Stephenson recruited James Thompson, the last OSS commander in Bangkok, to stay on in Bangkok as the local WCC representative. This led to the WCC’s financing of Thompson’s Thai Silk Company, a successful commercial enterprise that also covered Thompson’s repeated trips to the northeastern Thai border with Laos, the so-called Isan, where communist insurrection was most feared and where future CIA operations would be concentrated.32 One would like to know whether WCC similarly launched the import-export business of Willis Bird, of whom much more shortly.

In the same postwar period, Paul Helliwell, who earlier had been OSS chief of Special Intelligence in Kunming, Yunnan, served as Far East Division chief of the Strategic Service Unit, the successor organization to OSS.33 In this capacity he allegedly “became the man who controlled the pipe-line of covert funds for secret operations throughout East Asia after the war.”34 Eventually, Helliwell would be responsible for the incorporation in America of the CIA proprietaries, Sea Supply Inc. and Civil Air Transport (CAT) Inc. (later Air America), which would provide support to both Phao Sriyanon of the Northern Army in Thailand and the KMT drug camps in Burma. It is unclear what he did before the creation of OPC in 1948. Speculation abounds as to the original source of funds available to Helliwell in this earlier period, ranging from the following:

    1.  The deep pockets of the overworld figures in the WCC. Citing Daniel Harkins, a former USG investigator, John Loftus and Mark Aarons claimed that Nazi money, laundered and manipulated by Allen Dulles and Sir William Stephenson through the WCC, reached Thailand after the war. When Harkins informed Congress, he “was suddenly fired and sent back [from Thailand] to the United States on the next ship.”35

    2.  The looted gold and other resources collected by Admiral Yamashita and others in Japan36 or of the SS in Germany.

    3.  The drug trade itself. Further research is needed to establish when the financial world of Paul Helliwell began to overlap with that of Meyer Lansky and the underworld. The banks discussed in the chapter 7, which are outward signs of this connection (Miami National Bank and Bank of Perrine), were not established until a decade or more later. Still to be established is whether the Eastern Development Company represented by Helliwell was the firm of this name that in the 1940s cooperated with Lansky and others in the supply of arms to the nascent state of Israel.37

Of these the best available evidence points tentatively to Nazi gold. We shall see that Helliwell acquired a banking partner in Florida, [Edward Philip] E. P. Barry, who had been the postwar head of OSS Counterintelligence (X-2) in Vienna, which oversaw the recovery of SS gold in Operation Safehaven.38 And it is not questioned that in December 1947 the National Security Council (NSC) created a Special Procedures Group “that, among other things, laundered over $10 million in captured Axis funds to influence the [Italian] election [of 1948].”39 Note that this authorization was before NSC 10/2 of June 18, 1948, first funded covert operations under what soon became OPC.

E. P. Barry and Helliwell

What matters is that, for some time before the first known official U.S. authorizations in 1949–1950, funds were reaching Helliwell’s former OSS China ally Willis Bird in Bangkok. There Bird ran a trading company supplying arms and materiel to Phin Chunhawan and Phin’s son-in-law, Phao Sriyanon, who in 1950 became director-general of the Thai Police Department. By 1951 OPC funds for Bird were being handled by a CIA proprietary firm, Sea Supply Inc., which had been incorporated by Paul Helliwell in his civilian capacity as a lawyer in Miami. As noted earlier, Helliwell also became general counsel for the Miami bank that Meyer Lansky allegedly used to launder proceeds from the Asian drug traffic.

Some sources claim that in the 1940s, Donovan, whose link to the WCC was by 1946 his only known intelligence connection, also visited Bangkok.40 Stephenson’s biographer, William Stevenson, writes that because MacArthur had cut Donovan out of the Pacific during World War II, Donovan “therefore turned Siam [i.e., Thailand] into a base from which to run [postwar] secret operations against the new Soviet threat in Asia.”41

William Walker agrees that by 1947–1948, the United States increasingly defined for Thailand a place in Western strategic policy in the early cold war. Among those who kept close watch over events were William J. Donovan, wartime head of the OSS, and Willis H. Bird, who worked with the OSS in China. . . . After the war, Bird, . . . still a reserve colonel in military intelligence, ran an import-export house in Bangkok. Following the November [1947 Thailand coup] Bird . . . implored Donovan:

Willis Bird

“Should there be any agency that is trying to take the place of O.S.S., . . . please have them get in touch with us as soon as possible. By the time Phibun returned as Prime Minister, Donovan was telling the Pentagon and the State Department that Bird was a reliable source whose information about growing Soviet activities in Thailand were [sic] credible.42

Bird’s wishes were soon answered by NSC 10/2 of June 18, 1948, which created the OPC. Washington swiftly agreed that Thailand would play an important role as a frontline ally in the Cold War. In 1948, U.S. intelligence units began arming and training a separate army under General Phao, which became known as the Thai Border Police (BPP). The relationship was cemented in 1949 as the communists captured power in China. The generals demonstrated their anticommunist credentials by echoing U.S. propaganda and killing alleged leftists. At midyear a CIA [OPC] team arrived in Bangkok to train the BPP for covert support of the Kuomintang in its continuing war against the Chinese communists on the Burma-China border. Later in the year the United States began to arm and train the Thai army and to provide the kingdom general economic aid.43

Walker notes how the collapse of the KMT forces in China led Washington to subordinate its anti-narcotics policies to the containment of communism: By the fall of 1949 . . . reports reached the State Department about the inroads communism was making within the Chinese community in Thailand as well as the involvement of the Thai army with opium. Since the army virtually controlled the nature of Thailand’s security relationship with the West, foreign promotion of opium control had to take a back seat to other policy priorities.44

On March 9, 1950, when Truman was asked to approve $10 million in military aid for Thailand, Acheson’s supporting memo noted that $5 million had already been approved by Truman for the Thai “constabulary.”45 This presumably came from the OPC’s secret budget: I can find no other reference to the $5 million in State Department published records, and two years later a U.S. aid official in Washington, Edwin Martin, wrote in a secret memo that the Thai Police force under General Phao “is receiving no American military aid.”46 [footnotes at bottom of paper]

Read this and other books by Alan A. Block.

In March 1977 the DEA began to speak of "major maneuvers in the international Asian narcotics market for a share of the U.S. drug scene" and of a "coalition between the U.S. Mafia, the Corsicans and the Chiu Chao Chinese Triad."[12] The coalition had, in reality, existed at least since 1970 and perhaps as early as Trafficante's 1968 journey to the East and it had functioned effectively, shipping large amounts of heroin to the U.S., since 1972‑73. The difference was that the Corsican arm of the coalition, their own umbrella organization having been smashed, was now essentially reduced to some 100 men working with the U.S. Mafia and the Chinese, most of them as chemists in Thailand's mobile heroin labs.[13]

Who has controlled the Golden Triangle opium traffic and heroin production since the establishment of the Mafia‑Chinese coalition — besides the CIA, that is? The answer is the Kuomintang (KMT) Chinese and overseas Chiu Chao syndicate—men such as Chang Chifu [Khun Sa], Lo Hsing‑han, Tsai Chien Cheng and older, more familiar figures like General LiMi.[14] Still head of what's left of the KMT forces, General Li resides in luxury outside Chiang Mai and received official visits there from the United States as recently as late 1976.[15]

In 1976‑77 a minor war was about to erupt over the control of the region's opium traffic and mobile refineries. Potential combatants were Chu Chi‑fu's United Shan Army (of rebels against the Burmese regime) and KMT forces under General Li. However, the opposing leaders were brought together by a senior Thai officer and an agreement was reached on the marketing of drugs and supply of arms to fight Communist forces in Burma's Shan states.[16] Again we see the connection between narcotics and anti‑Communist paramilitary operations—albeit Chu Chi‑fu later pulled out of the agreement, was arrested in Thailand, and eventually extradited to Burma.

The DEA's Golden Triangle unit, SNO, [Special Narcotics Operation] made many whole and half‑hearted attempts to eradicate the narcotics plague. All failed. Production has been great, the world's heroin market having multiplied in the seventies. SNO won't say outright that the CIA is undermining them, nor that politics underlies their constant failures. A SNO agent, nevertheless, came close to doing so in this 1976 statement to Alfred McCoy:

"If they were selling shares in Golden Triangle Heroin, Inc. in five, ten and twenty‑year bonds, I would put my money on a twenty‑year bond. The only thing that would end the whole Golden Triangle business would be a communist takeover in Thailand. If that happened, I'd sell my stock."[17]

Southeast Asia was initially the sole supplier to the rapidly growing European market. Until 1972 heroin abuse was essentially an American problem. But since the heroin shift from Marseille to Southeast Asia, the European habit has rapidly worsened. In 1972 ten kilos of Golden Triangle "brown sugar" were confiscated in Europe. By 1975 the figure was up to 227 kilos. The country hardest hit has been West Germany, where the large U.S. troop concentration serves as a magnet for heroin, where it is estimated that some 60‑80,000 Germans use hard drugs, and where there were over 500 hard drug-related deaths in 1979.

In the summer of 1977, we might note, the administration of Jimmy Carter rejected a proposal by a consortium of rebel army leaders in northern Burma that the U.S. spend $36 million over a sixyear period to purchase and destroy the Southeast Asia opium crop.[18]

Among the official explanations was the alleged policy of the United States to deal only with recognized local governments — a policy which in its time had found a number of exceptions, like the overseas Kuomintang Chinese.[19]

pps. 171-176

Notes

1. 1. Frank and G. Richardson: "Epidemic," Penthouse, September 1977.

2. Ibid. In light of recent years' revelations of CIA mind control experimentation with LSD, it's worth noting the enormous spread of the hallucinogen in 1971‑72. Behind it was the cover organization, Brotherhood of Love, whose backers, like Gulf Oil heir William Mellon Hitchcock, exploited and manipulated self‑styled LSD prophets like Timothy Leary. The Brotherhood was directly connected to the Robert Vesco‑controlled Fiduciary Trust Company of the Bahamas. LSD proceeds were laundered through the usual Syndicate banks in Geneva. See Der Spiegel, No. 39, 1974.

3. B. Herbert: "The Fleetwood Kids," Penthouse, August 1978.

4. A. McCoy: "The New Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia," Oui, December 1976.

5. F. Robertson: Triangle of Death (Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1977).

6. Politiken, 27 March 1976.

7. Drug Enforcement, Spring 1976.

8. J. Anderson and L. Whitten, Boston Globe, 3 October 1977.

9. J. Hougan: Spooks (William Morrow, 1978).

10. J. Burgess: "The Thailand Connection," Counterspy, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1976.

11. Anderson and Whitten, op. cit.

12. San Francisco Examiner, 9 December 1977; Robertson, op. cit.

13. Robertson, op. cit.

14. Lo Hsing‑han and his supporters at one time aided the Burmese government in its fight against Communist insurgents in northwest Burma. However, when the government asked him to disband his organization in 1973, Lo Hsing‑han refused and signed a pact with the rebels. The Burmese army eventually pushed him and his army into Thailand where he was arrested and extradited back to Burma. In the fall of 1977 he lost his final appeal to Burma's highest court to quash a death penalty for treason. (New York Times, 7 November 1977).

15. McCoy, op. cit.

16. Far Eastern Economic Review, 15 April 1977.

17. McCoy, op. cit.

18. New York Times, 13 July 1977.

19. According to High Times magazine (April 1980), the Shan States rebels have long been subsidized by Taiwan intelligence. Moreover, the article goes on, intelligence sources in Burma have suggested that the DEA, in an aboutface attempt to weld together a local force against right wing opium armies, has approached Burmese Communist guerillas — who, having been abandoned by the current, less revolution‑minded Peking regime, had themselves taken steps toward moving in on the opium trade.

=====

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE MEXICAN CONNECTION

The exaggeration of Mexico's and the downplaying of Southeast Asia's roles as suppliers of heroin to the United States does not mean that Mexico was unimportant. But the DEA and the U.S. press compound the distortion by constantly asserting that the production and smuggling of heroin in Mexico is strictly a Mexican business. No U.S. Mafia is supposedly involved, other than customers on the other side of the border. Heroin shipments are allegedly controlled by seven large Mexican families: the Herreras, the Maciaces, the Romeros, the Favelas, the Sicilia‑Falcons, the Valenzuelas, and the Aviles‑Quinteros. [1] Let's take a look at one of them.

Alberto Sicilia‑Falcon, leader of the Sicilia‑Falcons, is not a Mexican at all; he was born in Matanzas, Cuba. He and his family left the island immediately after Castro's takeover to become part of Miami's Cuban exile milieu. After the Bay of Pigs invasion he was trained by the CIA at Fort Jackson for Operation 40.[2] From there his trail is faint for several years. However, according to Mexican police, he was in Chile helping the CIA to undermine the government of Salvadore Allende.

In mid‑1973 he turned up in Mexico, where in record time he established a gigantic heroin and marijuana ring. According to DEA director Peter Bensinger, in 1975 the ring numbered more than 1600, including film stars and international businessmen. Sicilia‑Falcon himself resided in villas in Tijuana and San Diego. Heroin was transported to San Diego from a warehouse in Culiacan, marijuana from a processing plant in Mexicali to a U.S. distribution center in Coronado Kays.

In late 1973 one of Sicilia‑Falcon's truckers was stopped on his way back to Mexico. The truck was loaded with arms bound for Nicaragua. According to a later report of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, one illegal weapons dealer in Brownsville, Texas alone supplied Sicilia‑Falcon with 12 million rounds of ammunition in 1974.

The guns‑for‑drugs traffic proceeded unhindered until early 1975, when the government of then President Luis Echeverria discovered that Sicilia‑Falcon's weapons shipments went to groups in Mexico. "External forces are attempting to destabilize our country," said Echeverria in a 1975 speech, in obvious reference to his neighbor to the north.

Then the Mexicans began an intense surveillance of Sicilia-Falcon, who, they learned, often met and conversed by telephone with a mystery man in Cuernavaca, some ninety kilometers south of Mexico City. When a lemonade bottle bearing the man's fingerprints was sent to the FBI, the bureau informed Mexican authorities that the man was Sam Giancana, the Chicago Mafia capo, heroin trafficker, and CIA collaborator. The Mexicans agreed to a French extradition request for Giancana, but when his Paris‑bound plane stopped over in Houston, Giancana was whisked away by U.S. agents. Soon thereafter he was found murdered in his Chicago mansion. Mexican interior ministry officials claimed the CIA had done all it could to prevent the mobster's extradition.

On 2 July 1975 Sicilia‑Falcon was arrested. Under rough interrogation he claimed to be an agent of the CIA, and that his drug ring had been set up on orders from and with the support of the agency. Part of his profits were to go towards the purchase of weapons and ammunition for distribution throughout Central America for the destabilization of "undesirable" governments. If true, U.S. heroin addicts were again footing the bill for clandestine paramilitary operations and anti-Communist terror campaigns. And Sicilia‑Falcon and his Syndicate associates were not short of funds. In his possession police found two Swiss bank books to the tune of $260 million.

Still, the strange testimony of Alberto Sicilia‑Falcon did not end with his confession. His family's heroin and arms shipments continued and, on 26 April 1976, he and three of his lieutenants escaped from Lecumberri prison through an electrically lit, 100‑yard long tunnel dug from outside. They were recaptured three days later, at which time Sicilia‑Falcon, fearing for his life at the hands of the CIA, requested transfer to another prison and additional security.[3]

Echeverria and Sicilia‑Falcon each were right about the destabilization program. FBI documents released later disclosed that between 1970 and 1976 the FBI served as a secret link between the U.S.  embassy in Mexico City and the U.S. Border Patrol in California and Texas, "in order to help destabilize" the government of President Echeverria. J. Edgar Hoover had believed that Echeverria had surrounded himself with "old Communists and Communist Party sympathizers.[4] A memo from Hoover to the U.S. legal attache praises "the detonation of strategic and effective bombs in Mexico City" and "the wave of night machine‑gunnings to divide subversive leaders."[5]

Besides Echeverria's progressive attitude, another reason for U.S. hostility towards his government was the Mexican president's refusal to approve World Bank and International Monetary Fund plans for the exploitation of Mexico's newly discovered oil reserves. The first order of business of his successor Jose Lopez Portillo in 1976 was approval of the same plans. And the newspaper El Sol de Mexico wrote shortly after the latter's inauguration that year: "The new government is not interested in publicity regarding the Sicilia‑Falcon case. It will quietly extradite him to the U.S. as soon as the new extradition agreement between the two countries comes into effect."

In the Sicilia‑Falcon case the DEA and CIA struggled bitterly against one another. It was symptomatic of a split within the DEA's own ranks, a split rooted in the effective control of its narcotics intelligence division by transplanted agents of the CIA.

Since the DEA's emergence many of its agents have resigned in disgust with its modus operandi. Long‑standing conflicts between the CIA and BNDD and between the BNDD and Customs did not evaporate when all the narcotics agents were pooled in the DEA. Moreover, the CIA seems still to be guided by political interests incompatible with drug enforcement.

A 1975 Narcotics Control Action Plan for Mexico, drafted by the DEA, CIA and State Department, opened the way for new appropriations for fighting narcotics in Mexico through INC. Thirty helicopters as well as other aircraft and computer terminals were brought in, and extensive training programs were initiated. The notorious Operation Condor began in January 1976 with an army of DEA‑trained Mexican narcotics agents and their U.S. supervisors, mobilized to fight the drug traffic in the countryside. Reports of the operation reveal that U.S. taxpayers' money has in fact been used for political extermination; that DEA helicopters are used by private landowners to attack peasant revolutionaries with rockets, small‑arms fire and napalm;[6] that large groups of farmers and independent narcotics dealers have been murdered or tortured while the major narcotics families have been protected.[7]

House subcommittee investigators went to Mexico in 1975 to determine how organized internal corruption and payoff rings within the DEA had made possible the monopoly of Mexican heroin by a few powerful crime families. According to writer Ron Rosenbaum: "Some critics of DEA go even further than the subcommittee investigators and charge the protection of heroin profiteers is not caused by internal corruption but is, in fact, the true function of the agency under the present narcotics laws."[8]

DEA‑supervised killing and torture had not stopped as of 1978, when the Mexican Bar Association documented eighteen forms of torture applied by Mexican narcotics agents. Prisoners and Mexican agents alike affirmed that DEA agents not only knew of the torture, but at times were also present at the interrogations.[9]

pps. 177-180

Notes

1. D. Rosen: "The Mexican Connection," Penthouse, February 1977.

2. "Die gefahrlichen Geschafte des Alberto Sicilia," Der Spiegel, No. 20,1977. Much of the following story comes from this account.

3. Ibid.

4. High Times, August 1978.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. C. Pyes: "Legal Murders," Village Voice, 4 June 1979.

8. R.Rosenbaum: "The Decline and Fall of Nixon's Drug Czar," New Times, 5

September 1975.

9. Pyes, op. cit.

The Great Heroin Coup - Chapter 15

Kruger ends the last paragraph of this chapter with the implication that President Nixon would work directly for Santo Trafficante and his mob, by saying:

Trafficante and company could agree that if the Corsicans were to be neutralized, it had to be done totally and effectively. That was a job for President Nixon and his WhiteHouse staff, the BNDD/White House Death Squad, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Follow his research and see if he came up with the correct conclusion.

 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:

Foreword and Chapter 1

Chapters 2-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapters 9-12  

Chapter 13 

Chapter 14

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE CUBANS OF FLORIDA

Meyer Lansky, the Syndicate's financial wizard and its chairman from around 1947, began building his Cuban empire in the early forties. When free elections chased his close friend and dictator Fulgencio Batista from office in 1944, Lansky also left the island, entrusting his empire to the Trafficante family headed by Santo, Sr. Lansky and Batista settled in Hollywood, Florida, just north of Miami. Before long, Lansky was running an illegal casino empire on the coast, and in 1947 he eliminated Bugsy Siegel and moved into Las Vegas.

All the while Lansky expanded the narcotics trade founded by Lucky Luciano. The older Mafia dons deemed the trade taboo, so Lansky's wing of the Syndicate cornered the market, with Trafficante's eldest son, Santo, Jr., overseeing the heroin traffic.[1]

When Florida's illegal casinos were shut down in 1950, Lansky promoted Batista's return to power in Cuba. The drive bore fruit in 1952. With Trafficante, Sr.'s death in 1954, Santo, Jr. became Lansky's right‑hand man and manager of his Cuban interests. Until then, he had managed the Sans Souci Casino, a base for running Havana's tourist trade and keeping tabs on heroin shipments from Marseille to New York via Florida and Cuba.[2]

[Editor's Note:  In 1953, Santo, Sr. had been arrested in Tampa, as news headlines announced the overthrow of Mossadegh, the beginning of a blockade around Berlin, the Russians' acquisition of "the bomb," and the ouster by the French of the Sultan of Morocco, whose supporters went to exile in Corsica--all occurring on that one day--on August 23, 1953!]

Click to enlarge further.

Trafficante, Jr. has proven more talented than his father. Extraordinarily intelligent and energetic, he has handled the most acute crises with detached calm. Luciano characterized him as ". . a guy who always managed to hug the background, but he is rough and reliable. In fact, he's one of the few guys in the whole country that Meyer Lansky would never tangle with."[3]

In no time, Trafficante, Jr. ingratiated himself with dictator Batista, while remaining loyal to Lansky, who appointed him manager of his own Florida interests in addition to those in Cuba. Lansky needed to spend increasing amounts of time in New York, between travels to Las Vegas, Rome, Marseille, Beirut, and Geneva.

Many envied Lansky's ever‑increasing power and wealth, among them Murder, Inc. chairman of the board Albert Anastasia. In 1957 the latter tried enlisting Trafficante's aid in removing Lansky from the Havana scene. It was one of Anastasia's last moves. Trafficante arranged a "friendly" meeting in New York's Sheraton Hotel. An hour after Trafficante had checked out, Anastasia was murdered in the hotel's barber shop, shaving cream still on his face.[4]

According to Peter Dale Scott, "certain U.S. business interests collaborated with the narcotics‑linked American Mafia in Cuba-‑as they did with similar networks in China and later in Vietnam -‑for the Mafia supplied the necessary local intelligence, cash and muscle against the threat of communist takeover.[5] As Scott wrote those words in 1973, Cuban‑Americans recruited by the CIA were suspected by federal and city authorities to be "involved in everything from narcotics to extortion rackets and bombings."[6] The Church committee and other Senate and law enforcement reports would confirm these allegations.

Again we observe the Cuba/ Southeast Asia/ CIA triangle, and it's no secret who managed the Cuban side. There Trafficante, Jr. hired the fast‑learning natives, while dictator Batista's men made the empire safe for organized crime, often appearing more loyal to Trafficante than to Batista himself. In return the Cubans learned the business.

With Fidel Castro's 1 January 1959 ouster of Batista, Lansky and Trafficante were in trouble. Though they were expelled from their Cuban kingdom, nearly a year elapsed before the Syndicate departed and the casinos were closed. Along with Trafficante and Lansky, half a million Cubans left the island in the years following Castro's takeover. Some 100,000 settled in the New York City area, especially Manhattan's Washington Heights and New Jersey's Hudson County. Another 100,000 headed to Spain, others to Latin America, and a quarter of a million made their new home in Florida, the site of Trafficante's new headquarters.

Out of the Trafficante‑trained corps of Cuban officers, security staffers and politicians, a Cuban Mafia emerged under the mobster's control. It specialized in narcotics, first Latin American cocaine, then Marseille heroin. With his Cubans Trafficante also grabbed control of La Bolita, the numbers game that took Florida by storm and became a Syndicate gold mine.[7]

Besides the Cubans, who comprised the main wing of his organization, Trafficante also worked closely with the non‑Italian Harlan Blackburn mob, a break with Mafia tradition.[8] But the core of the Trafficante family remained Italian, and the Italians also dealt in drugs. In 1960 his man Benedetto "Beni the Cringe" Indiviglio negotiated the opening of a narcotics route with Jacques l'Americain, the representative of Corsican boss Joseph Orsini.[9] Benedetto and his brothers Romano, Arnold, Charles and Frederick eventually ran Trafficante's Montreal‑bound smuggling network, and were later joined by the notorious New York wholesaler Louis Cirillo.[10]

Trafficante settled in Tampa, but continued to run some of his activities from Jimmy Hoffa's Teamster Local 320 in Miami. Trafficante and David Yaras of Sam Giancana's Chicago mob were instrumental in founding Local 320, which, according to the McClellan hearings, was a front for Syndicate narcotics activities.[11]

After losing his Havana paradise, far‑sighted Meyer Lansky used straw men to buy up much of Grand Bahama Island and erected a new gambling center around the city of Nassau. But though Lansky and Trafficante each survived in style, neither they nor the Cuban exiles relinquished hope of a return to Cuba. Moreover, they were not alone in dreaming of overthrowing Castro. The CIA in particular let its imagination run wild to this end. Its covert operations expert, General Edward Lansdale, seriously planned to send a submarine to the shore outside Havana, where it would create an inferno of light. At the same time, Cuba‑based agents would warn the religious natives of the second coming of Christ and the Savior's distaste for Fidel Castro. However, "Elimination by Illumination" was shelved in favor of less fantastic suggestions for Castro's assassination. The latter brought together the CIA, Cuban exiles, and the Syndicate in the person of Santo Trafficante.

In 1960 the CIA asked its contract agent Robert Maheu to contact the mobster John Roselli. Roselli introduced Maheu to Trafficante and Sam Giancana, the Chicago capo, and the strange bedfellows arranged an attempt on the life of Castro.[12] The agency had previously stationed an agent on Cuba who was to flash the green light when assassination opportunities arose. He was Frank Angelo Fiorini, a one‑time smuggler of weapons to Castro's revolutionary army, to whom Castro had entrusted the liquidation of the gambling casinos.[13]

Through the latter assignment Fiorini had made the acquaintance of Trafficante.

Fontainebleu in 1961

In February 1961 Maheu, Trafficante and Roselli met at Miami's Fontainebleu Hotel. There Maheu gave the hoods untraceable poison capsules for delivery to a Cuban exile connected with the Trafficante mob.[14] 0ther Cubans were to smuggle them to the island and poison Castro; but the attempt failed. Trafficante engineered more attempts, including one in September 1962,[15] and his organization also provided Cubans for the Bay of Pigs invasion.[16]

Never before had there existed a more remarkable, fanatical group of conspirators than that assembled to create, finance, and train the Bay of Pigs invasion force. The top CIA figures were Lansdale protege Napoleon Valeriano, the mysterious Frank Bender, and E. Howard Hunt, who was himself involved in at least one of the attempts on Fidel Castro's life. They were supported by a small army of CIA operatives from four of its Miami cover firms.[17]

Runner‑up to Hunt for the Most Intriguing CIA Conspirator award is [Frank] Bender, a German refugee whose true identity remains a matter of speculation. Some contend that he had been an agent of the West German Gehlen espionage network under the name Drecher; others contend it was Droller.[18] The former security chief for Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo claims that Bender was in fact one Fritz Swend, a Gehlen collaborator and leader of ex‑Nazis in Peru. Prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion Swend was allegedly the CIA's man in the Dominican Republic as Don Frederico. There he purportedly planned the invasion along with mobster Frank Costello and ex-Cuban dictator Batista.[19]

Ambassador Pawley

The invasion's moral and financial supporters included many leading China Lobbyists. Most important was the multi‑millionaire behind Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers, William Pawley.[20] Pawley had been involved in the CIA's 1954 overthrow of Guatemala's democratically elected Arbenz regime. Like Lansky and Trafficante, Pawley had had a big stake in Cuba. Prior to Castro's takeover he had owned the Havana bus system and sugar refineries. He met with President Eisenhower several times in 1959 to persuade the president to assist Cuban exiles in overthrowing Castro. Pawley then helped the CIA recruit anti‑Castro Cubans.[21]

[Editor's Note: Pawley was President Truman's  non- diplomatic appointee in 1945 to be Ambassador to Peru, but the businessman had actually been "discovered" by FDR. In 1928 Pawley was president of a Cuban company, Nacional Cubana de Aviación Curtiss, which was sold to Pan American Airlines in 1932. He then went to work for Curtiss-Wright's China Airways company in 1929 and then had organized an aircraft manufacturing company in China in 1933 for Curtiss-Wright. When Truman appointed him to be Peru's ambassador, he replaced John Campbell White, a man from a family of diplomats.] 

The key Cuban exile conspirators in the Bay of Pigs operation and the ensuing attacks on Cuba and Castro included Manuel Artime, Orlando Bosch, Felipe de Diego, and Rolando Martinez -‑the first a close friend of Howard Hunt's, the last two future Watergate burglars. The name of Bosch was to become synonymous with terrorism.

Distinguishing the noncriminal element among the Bay of Pigs' anti‑Castro Cubans is no easy matter, since so many emerged from Trafficante's Cuban Mafia. According to agents of the BNDD, nearly 10 percent of the 1500‑man force had been or eventually were arrested for narcotics violations.[22] Its recruiters included Syndicate gangsters like Richard Cain, the former Chicago policeman who became a lieutenant for Sam Giancana.

The Dominican Republic, a focal point in the invasion scheme, also became a transit point for Trafficante's narcotics traffic. Furthermore, the CIA, according to agents of the BNDD, helped organize the drug route by providing IDs and speedboats to former Batista officers in the Dominican Republic in charge of narcotics shipments to Florida.[23]

It is of paramount importance to note the close CIA cooperation with Trafficante's Cuban Mafia, whose overriding source of income was the smuggling of drugs.

One of Trafficante's personal CIA contacts for the Bay of Pigs was Frank Fiorini, Castro's liquidator of Mob casinos, who now preferred the name Frank Sturgis.[24] In late 1960 Sturgis ran the Miami‑based International Anti‑Communist Brigade (IACB), said to be financed by the Syndicate.[25] According to Richard Whattley, a brigade member hired for the invasion, "Trafficante would order Sturgis to move his men and he'd do it. Our ultimate conclusion was that Trafficante was our backer. He was our money man."[26]

Another detail from Sturgis's past is especially interesting in light of Frank Bender's alleged ties to the Gehlen organization. For a period in the early fifties Sturgis was involved in espionage activities in Berlin, serving as a courier between various nations' intelligence agencies, and was thereby inevitably in contact with the Gehlen network.[27]

The Bay of Pigs invasion was, of course, a fiasco. But that hardly stopped the CIA, the Syndicate, or their Cuban exile troops. Wheels were soon turning on new assassination attempts under CIA agent William Harvey, who again collaborated with the underworld. Within months, the Miami CIA station JM/Wave was again in full swing. It sponsored a series of hit‑and‑run attacks on strategic Cuban targets that spanned three years and involved greater manpower and expenditures than the Bay of Pigs invasion itself.

To head the JM/Wave station, the CIA chose one of its up‑and‑coming agents, the thirty‑four year old Theodore Shackley, who came direct from Berlin. His closest Cuban exile associates were Joaquin Sanjenis and Rolando (Watergate burglary) Martinez.[28] Some 300 agents and 4,6000 Cuban exile operatives took part in the actions of JM/Wave. As later revealed, one of its last operations was closed down because one of its aircraft was caught smuggling narcotics into the United States.[29]

Shackley is another contender for the Most Intriguing CIA Conspirator award. After years of collaboration with Trafficante organization Cubans, he and part of his Miami staff were transferred to Laos,[30] where he joined Lucien Conein.[31] There they helped organize the CIA's secret Meo tribesmen army, the second such army drummed up by Shackley that was up to its ears in the drug traffic.

Vientiane, where Shackley was the station chief, became the new center of the heroin trade. Later he ran the station in Saigon, where the traffic flowed under the profiteering administration of Premier Nguyen Cao Ky. When the agency prepared its coup against the Chilean President Salvador Allende, Shackley was its chief of covert operations in the Western Hemisphere. When William Colby became the director of the CIA in 1973, Shackley took over his job as chief of covert operations in the Far East. Eventually he was booted out of the agency as part of the shakeup ordered by its current director Stansfield Turner.[32]

In the JM/Wave period a great expansion in China Lobby‑Traffiicante‑Cuban exile‑CIA connections occurred. William Pawley financed a mysterious summer 1963 boat raid against Cuba in his own yacht, the Flying Tiger II. Besides Pawley himself, the crew included mafioso John Martino, who had operated roulette wheels in one of Trafficante's Havana casinos; CIA agents code‑named Rip, Mike, and Ken; the ubiquitous Rolando Martinez; and a dozen other Cuban exiles led by Eddie Bayo and Eduardo Perez, many of whom eventually disappeared mysteriously.[33] Loren Hall, another former Trafficante casino employee, claimed that both his boss and Sam Giancana had helped plan the raid.[34] CIaire Boothe Luce, a queenpin of the China Lobby, testified during Senate hearings on the CIA that she had financed an exile gunboat raid on Cuba after JFK had ordered the agency to halt such raids.

I will not wander deeply into the quagmire of circumstances surrounding the murder of President John F. Kennedy. However, it is worth repeating a few lines from the final report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations: "The Committee's extensive investigation led to the conclusion that the most likely family bosses of organized crime to have participated in such a unilateral assassination plan were Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante."[35]

Of the many connections between Trafficante and Dallas the most important are his association with Jack Ruby, who visited him in a Havana prison in 1959; his statement to Cuban exile financier Jose Aleman that Kennedy "is going to be hit"; and his close association with fellow Mafia capo Carlos Marcello. The Cuban exiles, drug racketeers, and the CIA had no shortage of anti‑Kennedy motives, which were all the more intensified as the three forces gradually welded together.

The anti‑Cuba actions continued well into 1965, at which time a crucial three‑year turnabout for the Lansky Syndicate began. Its money had been invested in the unsuccessful attempts at toppling Castro and in its new casino complex in Nassau, which was threatened by local anti-gambling forces. So when Southeast Asia began emerging as a new heroin export center, Lansky sent his financial expert John Pullman to check out the opportunities for investment. Close on his heels went Frank Furci, the son of a Trafficante lieutenant.[36]

From 1968 on, Trafficante's Cubans were in effective control of the traffic in heroin and cocaine throughout the United States.[37] The Florida capo's only gangland partner of significance was the Cotroni family in Montreal.

Trafficante carried out his business in a cool and collected manner. Never out of line with the national Syndicate, he enjoyed relative anonymity while other, less prominent gangsters wrote their names in history with blood. His organization was so airtight that when narcotics investigators finally realized how big a fish he was, they had to admit he was untouchable. The BNDD tried nabbing him in its 1969‑70 Operation Eagle, then the most extensive action ever directed against a single narcotics network. The Bureau arrested over 120 traffickers, wholesalers, and pushers, but made no real dent. Within days, well‑trained Cubans moved into the vacated slots.[38]

To the BNDD's surprise, a very large number of those arrested in Operation Eagle were CIA‑trained veterans of the Bay of Pigs and Operation 40. Among them were Juan Cesar Restoy, a former Cuban senator under Batista, Allen Eric Rudd‑Marrero, a pilot, and Mario Escandar.[39] Their fates were most unusual. Escandar and Restoy, alleged leaders of the narcotics network, were arrested in June 1970 but fled from Miami City Jail in August. Escandar turned himself in, but was released soon afterward when it was established that Attorney General John Mitchell had neglected to sign the authorization for the wiretap that incriminated Escandar. He returned to narcotics and was arrested in 1978 for kidnapping, a crime punishable by life, but for which he got only six months.[40] As this book went to press the FBI was investigating Escandar's relationship with the Dade County (Miami) police force.

Juan Restoy, on the other hand, turned to blackmail. He threatened to expose a close friend of President Nixon's as a narcotics trafficker, if not given his freedom and $350,000.[41] Restoy was shot and killed by narcotics agents, as was Rudd‑Marrero.

Daily Star Oneonta, New York

In late 1970, in the wake of Operation Eagle, Bay of Pigs veteran GuillermoHernandez‑Cartaya set up the World Finance Corporation (WFC), a large company alleged to be a conduit for Trafficante investments and for the income from his narcotics activities.[42] Duney Perez-Alamo, a CIA‑trained explosives expert involved with several Cuban exile terrorist groups, was a building manager for the WFC. Juan Romanach, a close Trafficante associate, was a WFC bank director.[43] As Hank Messick put it:

Escandar, of course, was a friend of Hernandez‑Cartaya, who was a friend of Dick Fincher, who was a friend of Bebe Rebozo, who was a friend of Richard Nixon, who once told John Dean he could get a million dollars in cash.[44]

In 1968 Trafficante himself went on an extended business trip to the Far East, beginning in Hong Kong, where he had located his emissary Frank Furci.[45] After a slow 1965‑66 start, Furci had made great headway. Through his own Maradem, Ltd. he had cornered the market on Saigon's night spots catering to GIs.[46] He even ran officer and soldier mess halls, and he had set up a chain of heroin labs in Hong Kong to serve the GI market.

Saigon

From Hong Kong, Trafficante journeyed to Saigon, registering at the Continental Palace hotel owned by the Corsican Franchini family. His last stop was in Singapore, where he contacted a branch of the splintered Chinese Mafia.

     Several doors had to be opened to gain access to the opium treasure. The first led to the CIA‑ controlled Taiwan regime, the second to the Golden Triangle's KMT Chinese and Laotian Meo tribesmen. The latter door had already been opened by the CIA. Still another led to the Triads (Chinese gangster organizations) in Hong Kong. Traffiicante opened that door with the help of Furci, who gave him access to Southeast Asia's overseas Chinese. There was no way around the Nationalist Chinese suppliers and middle men. The world had long been told that the narcotics came from Red China, but the facts belied that propaganda claim.[47]

Trafficante liked what he saw in his Southeast Asian tour. With enough trained chemists, his Mob could be supplied with heroin at a fraction of what it was then paying out to the Corsicans. But first the smuggling networks had to be worked out and the Corsicans had to be eliminated.

Limpy Ho

So Santo Trafficante began his war against the Corsicans.[48] His major foe, Auguste Ricord in Paraguay, wasn't about to roll over and die. Ricord got hold of his own Hong Kong connection, Ng Sik‑ho,[49] also known as "Limpy Ho," a major Nationalist Chinese heroin smuggler well‑connected to the Taiwan regime.[50] After Ricord's emissaries had travelled twice in 1970 to Japan, where they met with Mr. Ho,[51] heroin shipments began going to Paraguay via, among other transit points, Chile. 62 When in 1972 Ricord was extradited to the U.S., Limpy Ho tried establishing his own smuggling route to the U.S. via Vancouver. But that failed when two of his lieutenants, Sammy Cho and Chang Yu Ching, were arrested in the U.S. with fifty pounds of pure heroin.

By early 1970, Southeast Asian‑produced heroin was ready to be tested on GI guinea pigs. Meyer Lansky, facing charges of business illegalities, turned over control to Trafficante and fled to Israel. On July 4 Lansky narcotics associates reportedly made their investment plans for Southeast Asia at a twelve‑day meeting with representatives of several Mafia families at the Hotel Sole in Palermo, Sicily.[53]

Weeks later the Corsican Mafia contemplated counter‑moves in a meeting at Philippe Franchini's suite in Saigon's Continental Palace Hotel. Turkish opium production was already waning and could no longer be relied upon. Unrest in the Middle East was destabilizing the production of morphine base. The Corsicans had to do something to regain control over their longtime Southeast Asian domain, a task made all but impossible by the U.S. presence. But the Corsicans still had large stocks of morphine, their Marseille labs, and a smoothly functioning smuggling network. Trafficante and company could agree that if the Corsicans were to be neutralized, it had to be done totally and effectively. That was a job for President Nixon and his White House staff, the BNDD/White House Death Squad, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

pps. 141-152

Notes

1. Santo Trafficante, Jr.'s first important appearance in his role as overseer of the heroin traffic might have been at a 1947 summit in Havana reportedly attended by Auguste Ricord, alias Lucien Dargelles, the French Nazi collaborator who became Latin America's narcotics czar; see V. Alexandrov: La Mafia des SS (Stock, 1978).

2. A.McCoy: The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (Harper& Row, 1972).

3. M. Gosch and R. Hammer: The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano (Little, Brown & Co., 1974).

4. Lansky was not then entirely sure of Trafficante's loyalty. He had the latter swear a "holy" oath, witnessed by Vincent Alo: "With an ancient Spanish dagger — none from Sicily was available — Trafficante cut his left wrist, allowed the blood to flow, and wet his right hand in the crimson stream. Then he held up the bloody hand: 'So long as the blood flows in my body,' he intoned solemnly, 'do I, Santo Trafficante, swear allegiance to the will of Meyer Lansky and the organization he represents. If I violate this oath, may I burn in Hell forever.'" — H. Messick: Lansky (Berkeley, 1971).

5. P.D. Scott: "From Dallas to Watergate," Ramparts, November 1973.

6. New York Times, 3 June 1973.

7. E. Reid: The Grim Reapers (Bantam, 1970).

8. Ibid.

9. P. Galante and L. Sapin: The Marseille Mafia (W.H. Allen, 1979).

10. The Newsday Staff: The Heroin Trail (Souvenir Press, 1974).

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

12. 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. (Henceforth referred to as Assassination Report).

 13. P. Meskill: "Mannen som Ville Myrde Fidel Castro," Vi Menn, 1976.

14. Assassination Report, op. cit.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. D. Wise and T.B. Ross: The Invisible Government (Random House, 1964);

P.D. Scott: The War Conspiracy (Bobbs‑Merrill, 1972).

18. The name Drecher appears in T. Szulc: Compulsive Spy (Viking, 1974); Droller is used in P. Wyden: The Bay of Pigs (Simon & Schuster, 1979).

19. L. Gonzalez‑Mata: Cygne (Grasset, 1976). According to this source (the author was the chief of security for the Dominican Republic's dictator, Rafael Trujillo), Howard Hunt went to the Dominican Republic with the mobster John Roselli in March 1961.

20. Pawley eventually built five large airplane factories around the world. It is also likely that he was involved in the CIA's Double Chek Corp. in Miami, as he had similarly been in the Flying Tigers. The CIA's air proprietaries are said to stick together. When in 1958, CIA pilot Allen Pope was shot down and taken prisoner in Indonesia, he was flying for CAT. When he was released in 1962 he began flying for Southern Air Transport, another agency proprietary, which operated as late as 1973 out of offices in Miami and Taiwan. Southern's attorney in 1962 was Alex E. Carlson, who a year before had represented Double Chek when it furnished pilots for the Bay of Pigs invasion; see V. Marchetti and J.D. Marks: CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (Jonathan Cape, 1974). On 23 March 1980, just as Iran's revolutionary government was about to request that Panama extradite Shah Reza Palevi, the ex‑dictator who had been installed on his throne in 1953 by a CIA coup, he was flown off to Cairo on an Evergreen International Airlines charter. As reported by Ben Bradlee of the Boston Globe, (20 April 1980), in 1975 Evergreen had assumed control over Intermountain Aviation, Inc., a CIA proprietary. George Deele, Jr., a paid consultant for Evergreen, controlled the CIA's worldwide network of secret airlines for nearly two decades.

21. M. Acoca and R.K. Brown: "The Bayo‑Pawley Affair," Soldier of Fortune, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1976.

22. The Newsday Staff, op. cit.

23. H. Kohn: "Strange Bedfellows," Rolling Stone, 20 May 1976.

24. The main character in Howard Hunt's 1949 spy novel, Bimini Run, was "Hank Sturgis."

25 . H. Tanner: Counter‑Revolutionary Agent (G.T. Foules, 1972).

26. Kohn, op. cit.

27. Meskill, op. cit.

28. Shackley was also indirectly responsible for Martinez's participation in the 17 June 1972 Watergate breakin; see T. Branch and G. Crile III: "The Kennedy Vendetta," Harper's, August 1975.

29. New York Times, 4 January 1975.

30. Branch and Crile, op. cit.

31. J. Hougan: Spooks (William Morrow, 1978).

32. Shackley might also have been responsible for the CIA's tapping of all telephone converstions to and from Latin America in the first half of 1973 "in connection with narcotics operations" (see Newsweek, 23 June 1975). According to Branch and Crile, op. cit., Shackley, as chief of the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division of Clandestine Services, "had overall responsibility for the agency's efforts to overthrow the Allende regime in Chile."

In a recent article in which he refers to Shackley as one of "the CIA's most esteemed officers," journalist Michael Ledeen claims that Shackley left the agency voluntarily when "forced to choose between retirement and accepting a post that would have represented a de facto demotion." (New York, 3 March 1980). Ledeen, incidentally, is a colleague of Ray S. Cline at Georgetown's rightwing propaganda mill, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (see chapter 14, footnote 20).

33. Acoca and Brown, op. cit.

34. D. Russell: "Loren Hall and the Politics of Assassination," Village Voice, 3 October 1977.

35. The New York Times, ed.: The Final Assassinations Report (Bantam, 1979). In early 1980 the Justice Department was investigating allegations that Marcello had offered Mario T. Noto, the Deputy Commissioner of Immigration, a guaranteed "plush job" after retirement, in return for Noto's help in lifting Marcello's travel restrictions. Noto's attorney, ironically, is Myles Ambrose, who stepped down from his job at the head of the BNDD in the wake of corruption allegations. (New York Times, 11 February 1980).

36. McCoy, op. cit.

37. H. Messick: The Mobs and the Mafia (Spring Books, 1972). 38. The Newsday Staff, op. cit.

39. H. Messick: Of Grass and Snow (Prentice‑Hall, 1979); The Newsday Staff, op. cit.

40. Miami Herald, 30 March 1978.

41. Messick: Of Grass and Snow, op. ‑cit.

 42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

 44. Ibid.

 45. McCoy, op. cit.

46. Ibid.

47. In the early seventies the opium bankrollers in Taiwan sent out, through their international lobby, the WACL, propaganda charging Red China with "the drugging of the world." The propaganda was directed at Nixon's rapprochement with mainland China. A 1972 BNDD report stated, however, that "not one investigation into heroin traffic in the area in the past two years indicates Chinese Communist involvement."

48. The existence of such a drug war is also mentioned in A. Jaubert: Dossier D ... comme Drogue (Alain Moreau, 1974).

49. S. O'Callaghan: The Triads (W.H. Allen, 1978).

50. F. Robertson: Triangle of Death (Routledge and Keagen Paul, 1977). 51. O'Callaghan, op. cit.

52. McCoy, op. cit.

53. F. Wulff in the Danish Rapport, 14 April 1975. A BNDD agent on the scene was reportedly discovered and liquidated. Apparently he hadn't known that the code words were "baccio la mano" — I kiss your hand. Subject number one of the meeting was Southeast Asia, which the conferees decided would replace Turkey and Marseille as the main source of opium and heroin. Mexico, to which Sam Giancana was sent, would be a safety valve. On one thing they were uananimous: the Corsicans had to be eliminated. To begin with, $300 million was to be invested in the bribery of politicians, as well as of military and police officers in Thailand, Burma, Laos, South Vietnam, and Hong Kong. Another nine‑figure sum was set aside to maximize opium production in the Golden Triangle.