Financing the Ratlines

Who was Patricia Spector Martinson?

Green Beret author, DEA and even Watergate?

Refer back to our posting of Chapter 20, in which a 1975 New York Times News Service (NYTNS) article appeared under the headline "Is Model the Link to Drug Ring?" The "model" was identified under her sketch as Patricia Richardson Martinson, said to be the former wife of a World War II intelligence officer named William H. Spector. The authors of the piece wrote that Spector had been going from one police department to another, ranting obsessively about his ex-wife's connection to a drug ring. While stirring up some investigative interest, he was unsuccessful proving his case against her.

The New York Times, had spent a month on research, the authors said, starting with unspecified documents furnished them by Spector. The police agencies which he apparently contacted (listed in the blurb to the right) go from the local cops all the way up to Interpol.

Although the NYTNS article failed to identify the French financier who was friends with President Nixon, we feel certain he could only have been Paul-Louis Weiller, creator of Air France.

It's Not MY Fault!

We get a somewhat adequate picture of Patricia from the full article linked above, but only a vague impression of her accuser, William Spector, as an outraged husband from upstate New York unable to cope with his wife leaving him. Probably just a psycho with a vivid imagination, over-reacting to being jilted, right?

Spector failed to explain why he had set up the car dealership in tiny Ogdensburg, New York, on the U.S. side of the Canadian border, when his family owned one of the biggest Cadillac dealerships in the East two hours to the south in his hometown of Syracuse. Did he perhaps know that being located so close to Canada would be useful to a drug ring operating between Canada and the Caribbean island of St. Maarten, where his wife was born? And on that note, exactly how did he meet his young wife unless he had been to St. Maarten himself at the precise time the scheme was being planned?

Why did this story so pique the interest of Robin Moore, who had previously written The Green Berets in 1964, followed by The French Connection in 1971? Was there possibly much more to this story than meets the eye?

Answering these questions requires research into the murky background of Mr. Spector, beginning first with his felony indictment in 1971. Prior to October that year he had sold seven cars that had "floor plan" financing without paying the bank $18,000 on its lien. His defense attorney attempted to offer flimsy evidence that the crime began in mid-1970 when Spector said he first discovered the beautiful Patricia had secretly charged $20,000 in bills to his credit accounts. To remedy this debt he created new liens against his home and business to the bank whose money had not been paid on the cars—a worthless endeavor considering the fact that the prior lienholders quickly foreclosed (allegedly without giving personal notice to Spector) before the end of 1971, preventing these third liens from being paid off.

What children?

It is not known if Bill confronted Patricia about her spending habits, only that six months after their home and business were taken in foreclosure —from some time in May until July 24, 1971—he claimed he was hospitalized for an undisclosed ailment. He came out to find "his children" alone, his wife having returned to St. Maarten; he had to spend an entire week attending to the matter of finding a nanny, he told the jury. Unsurprisingly it took these twelve men and women only two and half hours to say they did not believe a word of that rubbish. Rightly so, it seems, as he had no children! At least his 1995 obituary mentioned none.

Most intriguing of all is that not until August 1974 (at the exact time Richard Nixon resigned) did Spector begin claiming that

"a drug ring was using his cars to smuggle heroin across the Canada-U.S. border during the early 1970's. Neither attorney brought any of these allegation to bear" in his criminal trial.

Family Background

Spector's father, Solomon Spector, was a Jewish immigrant from Russia, naturalized as an American citizen in 1914, the same year he began selling cars in Syracuse. There were four sons—Joseph, Myers, William, and Nathan Theodore—all born before Solomon and his wife, the former Ida Cohen, divorced. When Solomon died in Miami in 1978, having cut William and Theodore out of his will, they sued the estate, valued at upwards of a million dollars, settling out of court.

Two Spector brothers enlist.

Ida's Jewish father had run a grocery store in Syracuse, but her youngest brother became a physician, Dr. Nathan Cohen, in Elmira, N.Y., where William himself lived for 16 years before starting the dealership near the Canadian border. Elmira was not far from his prep school,  Manlius School in DeWitt, New York, which he attended from 1936-39, before entering Cornell.

One of Frank Wisner's OSS Agents in Bucharest

Bill Spector appears to have put off military service until he was drafted. He had already completed his degree at Cornell and moved on to the University at Buffalo when called to serve. He entered as a First Lieutenant and was shipped off to Augusta, Georgia for training. Because he had learned the Russian language from his parents, the lieutenant was assigned to the secret intelligence unit of the OSS in Bucharest, commanded from August 1944 until January 1945 by Frank G. Wisner with Major Robert Bishop, second in command. The goal in sending an OSS team to Romania had been to rescue 2,000 captured airmen held as prisoners of war there and in Bulgaria, but the mission would continue for a year after peace with a secret stay-behind unit remaining within the Soviet-controlled sphere.

Bill Spector talks about Romania.

At that time Romania was a monarchy which had gained  Transylvania, Bessarabia and much Hungarian territory after being on the winning side in WWI, but, because of strong anti-Russian sentiment in those acquired regions, a Nazi-allied Iron Guard gained political power of the country. By the time WWII began, the Romania entered the war on the German side. At precisely the moment in 1944 that the Soviet armies reached the border, however, King Michael, who had been installed by military dictator Prime Minister Marshall Ion Antonescu, switched over to the side of the Allies, possibly hoping to save its industrial base from the Russians. The wealthiest industrialists in Bucharest was a man we've met before, quite recently, Nicolae Malaxa.

Anticipating Germany's surrender, Allen Dulles left his OSS station in Bern to begin plans for secret peace negotiations with Germany at  the Berlin station. In January 1945 Wisner was assigned to Berlin, as  second in command to Dulles. As the war in Europe was coming to a  close, the OSS would be disbanded in September 1945.

Wisner's previous assignment in Bucharest was left under the temporary command of his immediate subordinate, Major Robert Bishop, and this is where things really started to become interesting for the young officer, Lt. William H. Spector, whose name appears in recently declassified Top Secret files relating to certain events that occurred in the career of Major Bishop at this time.

Major Bishop and his boss, Frank Wisner, had worked long and hard in developing Romanian intelligence agents who had penetrated Romania's Communist Party:

Many tons of German documents and film

Wisner served during the war as the self-confident and capable head of the OSS station in Bucharest. He was credited with masterminding a number of operations in the Balkans, including the pinpointing of the Ploesti oil fields in Romania for the massive raid the U.S. Air Force launched from Egypt. In September 1944 while in Romania, Wisner was informed by Romanian intelligence—which had penetrated the Romanian Communist Party undetected—that the Russians planned to impose Soviet-friendly regimes in Eastern Europe. Wisner wanted to act against the Soviet plans, but no one would allow him. Wisner's experiences with Russian forces in the Balkans laid the groundwork for a growing anticommunism that was reinforced during his tour of duty in postwar Germany. There he was second in command to Allen W. Dulles at the OSS station in Berlin. American intelligence agents often encountered hostility in their Soviet counterparts and were impeded in their missions in Russian-controlled areas. By the time the two men were recalled to the United States, Dulles had begun to sympathize with Wisner, who wanted to move on from searching for Nazis to finding out what the Communists were doing.

Wisner moved along to Berlin, leaving behind the cache of documents and files the two men had collected against the Nazis only to have the index to the files be either destroyed or rendered useless. Were these the same files that revealed the atrocities of which Nicolae Malaxa was guilty? Is it possible Malaxa, whose son-in-law, George Palade, was a medical researcher, made a deal with the Rockefeller banking establishment to bring him and his family to the United States and sweep whatever war crimes they may have committed under the proverbial rug?

Russians were supporting Malaza/Malaxa?

One page of the Report relating to the investigation of his successors against Major Bishop seems to contain Malaxa's name, (misspelled as Malaza in the black inset to left). We know there was a connection between Max Ausnitt and Malaxa, though not entirely friendly. The question becomes whether these files could have been seen by Richard Nixon during his stint as a Navy lawyer. Was he in the right place at the time these files were sent to the United States for storage? Whether Nixon discovered this on his own, or was used by someone else who did know, seems irrelevant at this point.

A Report released by the CIA as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request, however, mentions that William H. Spector was a First Lieutenant in the U.S. military in 1945, engaged to marry Elisabeth Mezey-Feher, the subject of the 1945 report :

11. Fiance: 1st Lt. William H. SPECTOR ASN 0-438 705; age 23; born Syracuse, New York Residence: 132 W. 11th St., Elmira, New York

***

18. Identification papers: a. Subject carries a Dutch "Protection Passport" issued April 14, 1945, by the Royal Swedish Legation in Bucharest (Charge d'Affairs K. Anjou), temporarily representing the interests of the Netherlands Government. The passport is valid until July 14, 1945. b. Major Bishop stated on April 29th that Lt. Spector had obtained a Roumanian passport and exit visa for Subject late in March through his connections with a Gen. Stonescu, Roumanian Minister of Foreign Affairs. This passport was left at the office of the Russian Legation by Lt. Spector when he attempted to obtain Russian plane clearance. The plane clearance was not granted and the Russian Passport Control Office is still in control of the Roumanian passport. Subject professed absolutely no knowledge of the above passport or transactions and is extremely anxious to have this matter clarified by her fiance, Lt. Spector. c. Allied Force Permit No. 12501. issued on April 14, 1945 by the U.S. Military Representative, ACC, for Roumania, entitling owner to travel to Italy. Valid until July 14, 1945. d. Subject has no birth certificate. She left her only certificate with the Dutch Consul in Bucharest, Mr. Charles Dozzy, from whom a copy can be obtained if necessary. e. Letter of introduction from Mr. Lolle Snit, Phillips Radio Co. representative in Roumania, Hungary and Holland (Dutch citizen) to Mr. Oscar Berntsen, Phillips Radio Co. representative in Belgrade. Subject did not visit Berntsen while in Belgrade. f. A letter of recommendation dated 16 April 1945 by Major Robert Bishop, OSS/X-2 representative in Bucharest. g. A letter by Lt. William H. Spector dated 17 March 1945 to Mr. B. Y. Berry, American Representative in Roumania, declaring his engagement to Subject. h. Several miscellaneous personal letters.

The full declassified TOP SECRET Report dated 11 October 1945 which contains the report about  Spector's fiancee is titled "Report of Investigation in case of Major Robert Bishop, AC, 0918130," who was ordered to leave the Bucharest's OSS Station just as Spector's fiancee was attempting to leave the city in his own personal automobile. By his refusal to leave as ordered, Bishop faced a severe reprimand and even court-martial. As we see from the stamp, this report was not released by the CIA until 2006, pursuant to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. From the records of the Interagency Working Group (IWG) we learn that Major Robert Bishop of the Office of Strategic Services, was at the X-2 Branch in Bucharest, Romania before the end of WWII and that hearings were held to determine whether he had committed certain violations relating to Elisabeth Mezey-Feher, Lt. Spector's fiancee, who was a suspected informer to the German Nazis in Romania.

We do know that Max Ausnitt told the subject of one report he would pay $25,000 to anyone who helped him escape Romania. That subject was at the time none other than the fiancee of Lt. William Spector—Elizabeth Mezey-Feher (a/k/a Jocky Cristea)—rumored to be then living in Major Bishop's residence. We know that Spector obtained a Dutch passport for this "strikingly beautiful" woman who had married a Romanian man (Ionel Cristea) to head her Jewish stepfather's textile business in order to protect it from the Nazis. Her name was added to Major Bishop's list of sources of information which he eventually completed for the officer sent to replace him in Bucharest.

Both Ausnitt and Malaxa were still alive in 1951, and Frank Wisner, who by that time was back in covert intelligence work, was aware of Malaxa's deportation hearing, while struggling to keep those who had been allowed to escape away from each other's throats. Major Bishop was also back in the CIA by that time. Could he perhaps have recruited Spector as well? These men had helped develop escape routes for persons who had survived the Nazi regime and wished to find safety away from the Soviets, who were about to take charge of their post-war country.

That was all part of subterfuge which involved Lt. William H. Spector's engagement to Elisabeth Mezey-Feher. But once she escaped to Naples, and Spector was transferred to Austria, she married not Spector but another soldier named Elmer L. Kincaid, Jr. and later lived in Bronxville, NY, where she worked as a Conover (Powers) model. She sometimes was in touch with Spector, who still wanted to marry her, she told a friend not long before she made her way to Hollywood and into the movies as Lisa Ferraday. (See Lisa Kincaid, Appendix C.) She was also mentioned in a gossip column in 1949 in connection with a group that included Pat DiCicco, Howard Hughes' associate, and Cubby Broccoli, who later produced Ian Fleming's James Bond novels for the movies.

We are informed by Peter Grose in his book, Operation Rollback: America's Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain, that after the war Bishop worked for the International Rescue Organization (possibly he meant the International Relief and Rescue Committee, which was later shortened to the International Resc

Operation Rollback
by Peter Grose

ue Committee) and that he helped develop the "rat lines" with Krunoslav Draganović, financing the escape of Nazis through the Counter Intelligence Corps' unvouchered funds. One of the men in charge of those funds was Carmel Offie, who had been in charge of the Naples OSS team, where Spector's "fiancee" escaped to. Was that a mere coincidence? (See also chapter 9 of Frances Stonor's book, The Cultural Cold War.)

Think about this for a second. Is it possible the same ratlines were used to distribute heroin? This idea is not original to me; it was suggested by David Guyatt in his essay "The Mafia, the CIA & the Vatican's Intelligence Apparatus," in which he stated:

The principal means of funding Operation Amadeus activities was the hugely profitable narcotics business. Large stocks of SS morphia had been smuggled out of Europe and into "Catholic" South America at the end of the War in accordance with the Sunrise agreement.

The morphia was accompanied by looted SS gold and large quantities of counterfeit British banknotes, forged in concentration camps by captive but skilled counterfeiters as part of an SS scheme known as Operation Bernhardt.

The escape "lines" used to move wanted men around South America, away from the prying eyes of Israeli agents, also proved ideal as smuggling routes for drugs. Decades later, the stocks of heroin smuggled into the United States for distribution by the CIA-protected Mafia would be complemented with locally grown cocaine.

French Connection Through Haiti and French Antilles

Saint Martin/Sint Maarten

What was Spector's wife—or more likely Spector himself—doing between the West Indies and Canada from 1969 until 1971? It was not until Patricia Richardson (or Richards, as her name was given in the account of Spector's criminal trial) left her husband that he "discovered" through her diaries that she had known quite an assortment of extremely dodgy characters in St. Maarten, in the late 1960's, at about the same time she married William Spector. In Chapter Three of Henrik Kruger's book, we find these same men mentioned there as well. They were all members of Marcel Paul Francisci's international cartel, consisting of heroin refining labs in France, a distribution network run by the Corsican Mafia, and a money-laundering system of banks to hide the source of funds and make it available for reinvestment. As Kruger stated:

Most of it [heroin] was sold on the U.S. market, where Italian and Cuban wholesalers entered the scene. In 1971 the Corsican Mafia delivered 80 percent of the heroin on the U.S. market. They deposited their millions in Bahamian, Swiss, and Lebanese banks, reinvesting some of it later in legal enterprise.

The "Italian and Cuban wholesalers" mentioned above were described in greater detail in Chapter 9, where he wrote that Francisci used his connections with French politicians to negotiate an international agreement whereby his cartel could import opium into France and export the refined heroin through Italian mobsters. The distribution network (export) consisted of two air and three sea routes into the United States. As to the sea routes, he wrote:

The shipping lanes... either ended in  

• Brazil/Paraguay,  
• Haiti and the French West Indies, or  
• went directly to the east coast of the United States. 

Heroin smuggled into the U.S. from the French Antilles and Haiti, like that from Paraguay, went via Florida or Mexico.

The French Antilles islands—those islands within the Lesser Antilles subject to French colonial rule —are composed of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint-Barthélemy, and the northern half of Saint Martin/Sint Maarten (an island divided between the French to the north and the Dutch half to the south). Therefore, it is not surprising that French criminals would be able to ship drugs out of St. Maarten.

French Connection to Lebanon

 It is also not remarkable that the distribution network run by French gangsters would involve Lebanese banks to launder their profits. When the League of Nations, after World War I, divided up the Ottoman Empire, the French were given a mandate over Syria and Lebanon, while the British took control of Palestine and Iraq. Additional clues about this Lebanese connection appear in Chapter 20:

Several things point to [Robert] Vesco involvement in the long‑standing partnership of the CIA, the Lansky/Trafficante syndicate and the Cuban exiles, in a drugs ‑for ‑guns ‑for ‑terror deal to step up armed suppression and anti‑communism in Latin America. Journalist [Jim] Hougan* ventures that the conspirators might have used such go‑betweens and couriers as the beautiful Patricia Richardson Martinson. According to her ex‑husband, the former army intelligence agent William Spector, Ms. Martinson had very close relationships with almost everyone of importance in the drug business:

• Yussef Beidas, the Lebanese founder and managing director of INTRA Bank, known as one of the major financiers of the heroin traffic; 
• Paul Louis Weiller, a French financier similarly alleged to be behind the narcotics trade [the French financier named above as Nixon's friend];
• Eduardo Baroudi, a big‑time heroin and gun smuggler suspected of having arranged Beidas' mysterious death in Switzerland; 
• Christian "Beau Serge" David; 
• Conrad Bouchard, a top heroin trafficker heavily involved in Frank Peroff's Vesco heroin allegations; and 
• Marcel Boucan, the skipper of the Caprice du Temps, which was seized in 1972 with 425 kilos of pure heroin.

________________
*Hougan, Jim. Spooks: The Haunting of America — The Private Use of Secret Agents. New York: Bantam Books, 1979. 481 pages.

Links Between Assassins, Green Berets and French Connection?

In one segment of the Great Heroin Coup we viewed the plan to create a "war on drugs" as a plan to change the location point from which illegal drugs would be transported into the United States. We called it "changing the middleman." When did this plan originate? Who was coordinating it?

Gearing up for war on French narcotics, propaganda.

There was a drug bust in New York City in 1961 that nobody heard of until a book came out in 1969, which was developed into "The French Connection," the movie which swept the Academy Awards in April 1972. Brahman-bred author Robin Moore dug this story out of the archives just in time for Nixon to begin his war against French heroin refiners. Was that just a fluke, or could Moore, with contacts in Special Forces since the days it was still part of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), have known that this story was about to become big news?

Who Was Robin Moore?

Robin Moore, author

 
Robert Lowell "Robin" Moore, Jr., born in Boston in 1925, but grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the heart of transcendentalism. His mother, Eleanor Turner Moore, was a devoted volunteer at the Thoreau Society, while raising four children--Robin, his sister Marcia, and brothers William and  John. Robert L. Moore Sr.'s mother was Mrs. James Lowell Moore, a member of the Newell family. Her father, Rev. Dr. William Newell, had been pastor of the First Parish in Cambridge 1830-68, and her historical tale delivered in 1939 about her family connections to Harvard's literary Lowell family is intriguing, to say the least.

Their neighbors in Concord included local physician, Edward Waldo Emerson, son of Thoreau's best friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. Dr. Emerson's sister, Mrs. William Hathaway Forbes, had named one son, Edward Waldo Forbes, for her brother. Another son, Ralph Emerson Forbes married Elise Cabot, and their daughter Ruth Forbes grew up to be the mother of Michael Paine. 

 

It was Michael's wife, Ruth Hyde Paine, who befriended Marina Oswald in Dallas, possibly at the request of Michael's employer, Bell Helicopter, which manufactured and sold the invention patented by Michael's stepfather, Arthur M. Young. 

Another son, William Cameron Forbes, "worked as a partner in his grandfather's firm, J.M. Forbes and Co., after 1899 and was appointed by President Roosevelt in 1904 to the Philippine Commission, where he held several administrative posts and then served as governor-general of the islands, 1909-1913. He also served as the ambassador to Japan in 1931-1932 and led an economic mission to East Asia in 1935." In 1927 his name was tossed around briefly as a potential  Republican candidate for President, most likely by those at Harvard who would have liked to have one of their own in a position of power.

Robin Moore enlisted in 1944 and served in the Army Air Corps as a nose-gunner on a B-17 bomber during WWII. After the war he went to Harvard, graduating in 1949. Only eight years out of college, in 1957, he was able to purchase a 2,000-acre estate at the eastern end of Jamaica, a large chunk of which he donated to the government for a public beach. Near Port Antonio, his Blue Lagoon estate was almost 100 kilometers east of where British spy Ian Fleming was writing his tales of James Bond.

Jack Youngblood

Moore's first book (The Devil To Pay - The True Story of an American Soldier of Fortune in Castro's Revolution), was co-authored with mercenary Walter A. "Jack" Youngblood, and came out in 1961, at least four years after Moore bought his tropical island retreat. Thus the money did not come from book sales, nor from inheritance from his parents who were both still living at the time. 

 

Dick Russell wrote in the Village Voice in 1976 that the same  Youngblood whose story Moore told in 1959 was believed by James Earl Ray's attorney, Robert I. Livingston, to have been a contract assassin who worked with a man James Earl Ray claimed had set him up -- "a Latino gunrunner he'd known only as 'Raoul'," who looked very much like a man called "Frenchy," one of the tramps arrested in Dealy Plaza in 1963. Frenchy is believed by many researchers to have been a Texan named Charles Rogers from Houston, who was a first cousin of Charles Harrelson. (See The Man on the Grassy Knoll by John R. Craig and Philip A. Rogers for more on their family backgrounds and possible relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald.)

 
According to the Hal Boyle column (see clipping to left, above), Robin Moore told him he "ran a bar call 'The Teahouse of the Blue Lagoon'." If true, judging from an old postcard by that title showing a photo of an isolated bar, Moore would not have made much money at it unless.... Perhaps the "teahouse" was a code word for something else? Possibly a warehouse for weapons sales, approachable by boat.

The CIA once checked into using the bar and other parts of Moore's property as a staging area, based on a report from Jack Reed, who went to Jamaica in 1964 and spoke at length with Moore. Whether or not they worked out a deal is unknown, but their meeting occurred at approximately the same time Paul Davis tells us Robin "went back to school,"  according to his article in Military History:

At age 37 Moore graduated from the U.S. Army’s airborne school and the Special Warfare Center – the first and only writer to do so. He arrived in Vietnam on January 6, 1964 and spent six months with the Green Berets.

At the end of that Special Forces training mission, Moore returned to Blue Lagoon and wrote The Green Berets: The Amazing Story of the U. S. Army's Elite Special Forces Unit. It even had a catchy, nauseating tune to go along with it--Balad of the Green Beret.

Bahamian Tax Evaders
In 1973 Robin Moore, with two failed marriages already under his belt, married Mary Olga Troshkin, whom he met at a party given by his friend, G. Huntington Hartford II--the grocery heir who developed Paradise Island and its casino in the Bahamas. Hartford acquired the island in 1960 from the notorious Swedish Nazi, Axel Wenner- Gren, in 1962 entertained a defeated Richard Nixon there, and sold it to Resorts International in 1966. The following year Nixon attended the casino's gala opening in December. 

Wealthy Americans were being encouraged to set up secret bank accounts in these islands then being developed as tourist meccas, where money dropped in the casinos could be siphoned off by organized criminals, all in the guise of jet-setters' fun in the sun. Mitchell WerBell III, for example, was helping promote a group calling itself "Friends of Abaco," with help from John Patrick Muldoon, Michael "Moses Olitsky" Oliver, and Walter Josef "Walt" Mackem. Abaco was a Bahamian island that wanted to stay under the wing of the British monarchy. 

These tax evaders and gamblers not surprisingly had numerous connections to Mafia gunrunners, such as Jack Ruby, and all were in some way linked to ongoing intelligence operations previously mentioned with reference to Mitchell WerBell and the B.R. Fox company, allegedly created by Jimmy Hoffa's favorite wiretapper, Bernard Spindel. We will return to this scene in the future.

Sheraton Hotels and ITT
While Robin was whiling his time away with assassins and tax evaders, his father had been working with his partner Ernest Flagg Henderson II in negotiating a sale of their Sheraton Hotel Corporation to ITT, finally consummated in 1968. The elder Moore and Henderson had been roommates at Harvard before graduation in 1918. Moore then trained as a pilot in the Army Air Corps, while Henderson joined up as a pilot in the Navy. Upon release in 1920, both returned to study at MIT before entering business together. When Robin's father died in 1986, the following tribute was paid to him by the Associated Press:

Moore, who served as an ambulance driver and aviator in World War I, turned down a commission in the Army Air Force for World War II, telling the government he could be of more help working with William [Powell] Lear in development of the wire audio recorder - a predecessor to the tape recorder - and Radio Direction Finder, a navigational device. The RDF conceived and manufactured by Moore and Lear soon became standard equipment on all U.S. military aircraft. 

In 1944, having resumed his relationship with Henderson [through Atlantic Securities and Standard Investing Corporation], the two bought Boston's Copley Plaza hotel, made it their flagship, and continued building the Sheraton chain. In 1948, they merged with U.S. Realty and Improvement Corp., and the companies became Sheraton Corp. of America. In 1967, Moore and Henderson began negotiations with International Telephone and Telegraph Corp., which bought Sheraton in 1968. Henderson died during the negotiation period.

But ITT rose again to create another scandal during the Republican convention in San Diego in 1972. Jack Anderson printed a memo allegedly written by ITT's lobbyist Dita Beard.

 

 

 

 

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.