Allegations regarding “Butch” Merritt, Watergate, Intelligence Agencies and “Crimson Rose,” Vol. VIII

Nixon on Drugs – Part One

Written (and first posted) by Kris Millegan, March 23, 2011

Now I’m against legalizing marijuana because, I know all the arguments about, well, marijuana is no worse than whiskey, or etc. etc. etc. But the point is, once you cross that line, from the straight society to the drug society – marijuana, then speed, then it’s LSD, then it’s heroin, etc. then you’re done. Richard M. Nixon, May 13, 1971, Oval Office

Nixon at Lincoln Memorial, May 9, 1970

We all get played, at least, one time or another – if not simply, over and over again. It’s amazing what a person will overlook to get ahead, to get by, to get along.

Nixon is dead. We may never know the depths of the duplicity he played or those played against him, but we can examine the history that has been recorded.

The pregame to Watergate was drugs, yes there were earlier warm-up exercises with Nazis, Cold War intrigue, and … blackmail.

According to John Loftus, Nixon blackmailed the Dulles brothers concerning their Nazi activities, especially the illegal importation of thousands of Nazi, against direct written orders of President Truman. The pay-off for Nixon’s silence was his rising political star. He got the money, publicity and connections needed – paying back his benefactors with favors.

At the end of the day, he attempted to be his own man. Make his mark in history. Call his own tune. Playing both ends against the middle. To do this he needed “control.” His attempts to do that sealed his doom. Nixon became a liability, and was easily disposed.

Stage-managed out the door, the demise of the venal Nixon was played to the hilt, consolidating the power of those running the show, while undermining our republic, demoralizing our political arena and bastardizing our journalism.

From the book Elite Deviance:

The Watergate scandal, and its aftermath, 1972‑1974, brought down the Nixon administration. Watergate was also a most significant contributor to low public confidence in government in the past quarter century. The litany of illegal acts by governmental officials and/or their agents in Watergate included securing illegal campaign contributions, dirty tricks to discredit political opponents, burglary, bribery, perjury, wiretapping, harassment of administration opponents with tax audits, and the like. By 1975, when the above revelations became public and just after the end of the Watergate scandal, public confidence in government was understandably low. One poll revealed that 68 percent of Americans believed that the government regularly lies to them.

Here are some reports about the Post WWII drug trade, especially, the 1960s and ’70s, and how they concern Nixon:

An excerpt from the 1972 out-of-print book by Frank Browning, Smack:

With gross returns from the Indochinese traffic running anywhere from $250 million to $500 million per year, opium is one of the kingpins of Southeast Asian commerce. Indochina has not always had such an enviable position. Historically most of the world’s supply of opium and heroin came through well‑established routes from Turkey, Iran, and China. Then it was refined in chemical kitchens and warehouse factories in Marseilles. The Mediterranean trade was controlled by the Corsican Mafia (which itself has long been related to such American crime lords as Lucky Luciano, who funneled a certain amount of dope into the black ghettos). But high officials in the narcotics control division of the Canadian government, and in Interpol, the International Police Agency, confirm that since World War II – and paralleling the U.S. expansion in the Pacific – there has been a major redirection in the sources and routing of the world‑wide opium traffic.

According to the United Nations Commission on Drugs and Narcotics, since at least 1966, 80 percent of the world’s 1,200 tons of illicit opium has come from Southeast Asia‑directly contradicting most official U.S. claims that the primary sources are Middle Eastern. In 1966 Interpol’s former secretary general Jean Nepote told investigators from Arthur D. Little Research Institute (then under contract to the U.S. Government Crime Commission) that the Fertile Triangle was a principal production center of opium. And last year an Iranian government official told a United Nations seminar on narcotics control that 83 percent of the world’s illegal supply originated in the Fertile Triangle – the area where opium is controlled by the U.S.‑supplied troops of Laos and Nationalist China.

It is odd that the U.S. government with the most massive Intelligence apparatus in history could miss this innovation. But though it may seem to be an amazing oversight, what has happened is that Richard Nixon and the makers of America’s Asian policy have completely blanked Indochina out of the world narcotics trade. Not even Joe Stalin’s removal of Trotsky from the Russian history books parallels this historical reconstruction. In his recent State of the World address, Richard Nixon dealt directly with the international narcotics traffic. “Narcotics addiction has been spreading with pandemic virulence,” he said, adding that “this affliction is spreading rapidly and without the slightest respect for national boundaries.” What is needed is “an integrated attack on the demand for [narcotics], the supply of them, and their movement across international borders…. We have,” he says, “worked closely with a large number of governments, particularly Turkey, France, and Mexico, to try to stop the illicit production and smuggling of narcotics” (italics‑added).

It is no ‘accident that Nixon has ignored the real sources of narcotics trade abroad and by so doing has effectively precluded any possibility of being able to deal with heroin at home. It is he more than anyone else who has underwritten that trade through the policies he has formulated, the alliances he has forged, and most recently the political appointments he has made. For Richard Nixon’s rise to power has been intricately interwoven with the rise of proponents of America’s aggressive strategy in Asia, a group of people loosely called the China Lobby who have been in or near political power off and on since 1950.

Among the most notable members of the China Lobby are Madame Anna Chennault, whose husband, General Claire Chennault, founded Air America; columnist Joe Alsop; FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, former California Senator William Knowland, and Ray Cline, currently Chief of Intelligence for the State Department. They and such compatriots as the late Time magazine publisher Henry Luce and his widow, Congresswoman Claire Boothe Luce, have been some of the country’s strongest proponents of the Nationalist Chinese cause.

In 1954 Chiang Kai‑shek formed the Asian People’s Anti‑Communist League (APACL), which was to become one of the vital links between the China Lobby and the Taiwan government. (It was also *in that year that Nixon urged that U.S. troops be sent into Indochina following the French defeat in Dien Bien Phu—a. proposal which failed because of the lack of public support for such policy following the Korean War.) As soon as the APACL was formed, Chiang announced that it had established “close contact” with three American politicians – the most important of whom was Vice President Richard Nixon.

Over the years the China Lobby has continued to spring to Nixon’s support. It was Madame Chennault, co‑chairman in 1968 of Women for Nixon-Agnew Advisory Committee, who helped raise a quarter of a million dollars for the campaign; it was she who just before the election entered into an elaborate set of arrangements to sabotage a White House peace plan. Within 30 hours of the announced plan, South Vietnam President Thieu rejected the new negotiations it proposed—a rejection Madame Chennault had helped arrange as a last‑minute blow at Hubert Humphrey and the Democrats.

It is not only his debts, associations, and sympathies to the China Lobby which have linked Nixon with Kuomintang machinations in Indochina and helped plunge the U.S. deeper into the morass there. One of his most important foreign policy appointments since taking office has been the reassignment of Ray Cline as State Department director of intelligence and research. Cline, the controversial CIA station chief in Taiwan who helped organize KMT forays into Communist China, in 1962 promoted Nixon’s old project of a Bay of Pigs invasion of China. Within a month of Clines recent appointment, the resumption of pilotless Intelligence flights over mainland China was approved.

The entire cast of the China Lobby has relied on one magic corporation, the same corporation established just after World War II by General Claire Chennault as Civil Air Transport and renamed in the 1950’s Air America. Carrier not only of men and personnel for all of Southeast Asia, but also of the policies that have turned Indochina into the third bloodiest battlefield in American history, Air America’s chief contract is with the American Central Intelligence Agency.

Air America brings Brahmin Bostonians and wealthy Wall Streeters who are the China Lobby together with some of the most powerful men in Nationalist China’s financial history. One of its principal services has been to fly in support for the “remnant” 93d Division of the KMT, the “opium army” in Burma; another has been as a major carrier of opium itself. Air America flies through all of the Laotian and Vietnamese opium pickup points, for aside from the private “butterfly fleet!’ and various military transports, Air America is the “official” Indochina airline. A twenty‑five‑year‑old black man recently returned from Indochina told Ramparts of going to Vietnam in late 1968 as an adventurer, hoping to get in on the dope business. But he found that the business was all controlled by a “group like the Mafia. It was tight and there wasn’t room for me.” The only way he could make it in the dope trade, he says, was to go to work for Air America as a mechanic. He found there “was plenty of dope in Laos—lots of crystals [heroin] all over the place.” Air America was the only way to get in on it.

What has taken place in Indochina is more than a flurry of corruption among select dramatis personae in America’s great Asian Drama. The fact that Meo tribesmen have been nearly wiped out, that the Corsican Mafia’s Air Opium has been supplanted by the CIA’s Air America, that Nationalist Chinese soldiers operate as narcotics bandits, that such architects of U.S. democracy for the East as the Nhus and Vice President Ky have been dope runners – these are only the bizarre cameo roles in a larger tragedy that involves nothing less than the uprooting of what bad been the opium trade for decades – through the traditional lotus land of the Middle East into Western Europe – and the substitution of another network, whose shape is parallel to that of the U.S. presence in Southeast Asia. The ecology of narcotics has been disrupted and remade to coincide with the structure of America’s Asia strategy‑the stealthy conquest of a continent to serve the interests of the likes of the China Lobby.

The shift in the international opium traffic is also a metaphor for what has happened in Southeast Asia itself. As the U.S. has settled in there, its presence radiating a nimbus of genocide and corruption, armadas of airplanes have come to smash the land and lives of a helpless people; mercenary armies have been trained by the U.S.; and boundaries reflecting the U.S. desires have been established, along with house of ‘commerce and petty criminality created in the American image. One of the upshots has been that the opium trade has been systematized, given U.S. technological expertise and a shipping and transportation network as pervasive as the U.S. presence itself. The piratical Corsican transporters have been replaced by pragmatic technocrats carrying out their jobs with deadly accuracy. Unimpeded by boundaries’ scruples, or customs agents, and nurtured by the free flow of military personnel through the capitals of the Orient, the United States has—as a reflex of its warfare in Indochina—built up a support system for the trade in narcotics that is unparalleled in modem history.

The U.S. went on a holy war to stamp out Communism and to protect its Asian markets, and it brought home heroin. It is a fitting trade‑off, one that characterizes the moral quality of the U.S. involvement. This ugly war keeps coming home, each manifestation more terrifying than the last; home to the streets of the teeming urban ghettos and the lonely suburban isthmus where in the last year the number of teen‑age heroin addicts has taken a quantum leap forward. Heroin has now become the newest affliction of affluent America—of mothers in Westport, Connecticut, who only wanted to die when they traced track marks on their daughters’ elegant arms; or of fathers in Cicero, Illinois, speechless in outrage when their conscripted sons came back from the war bringing home a blood‑stained needle as their only lasting souvenir.

Some greater detail from the 1980 out-of-print book, The Great Heroin Coup – Drugs, Intelligence, & International Fascism by Henrik Kruger:

FOREWORD

The story of Christian David, an international narcotics trafficker used by the intelligence services of at least three nations, is fascinating in itself. It is even more important for what it tells us of a larger, less documented history ‑the secret collaboration of government intelligence services and parallel police throughout the world, and their use of criminals, particularly from drug networks, for political counter-subversion. Above all it is an important book for Americans to read, since the shadow of the CIA can be seen behind Christian David’s political intrigues in countries like France and Uruguay. America’s role in Christian David’s strange career has never before, to my knowledge, been revealed in this country. And Henrik Kruger is able to expand the story into larger perspectives on the CIA, Watergate, and current U.S. counterinsurgency tactics.

The heavy censorship of David’s story in the United States, or what may be called the media resistance to it, is perhaps the clearest symptom of America’s involvement. For example, it was surely newsworthy that in June 1973 Le Monde, France’s most respected newspaper, charged that the break‑up of the Ricord French drug network in Latin America (which had included David’s arrest and extradition to the United States), was the result of a “close Mafia‑police‑Narcotics Bureau collaboration” in the U.S. The result of this collaboration, according to Le Monde, was to shatter Corsican influence in the worldwide narcotics traffic, and create a virtual monopoly for the U.S.‑Italian Mafia connection (whose key figures were Santo Trafficante in America and Luciano Liggio in Europe).[1]

Le Monde’s charges, many details of which have since been corroborated, were passed over in silence by the U.S. press. This studied disinterest in the politics of narcotics (other than the propaganda, including flagrant lies, from official press releases) is a recurring, predictable phenomenon of our press; and it has visibly had a deleterious impact on U.S. politics. If the Washington Post and the New York Times, then supposed exposers of Watergate, had picked up on stories like the one in Le Monde, then the history of Watergate might have been altered. For the history of Nixon’s involvement in Watergate is intertwined with that of his personal involvement in drug enforcement. Nixon’s public declaration in June 1971 of his war on heroin promptly led to his assemblage of White House Plumbers, Cubans, and even “hit squads” with the avowed purpose of combatting the international narcotics traffic. (Among those with a White House narcotics mission, or cover, were Krogh, Liddy, Hunt, Caulfield, Sturgis, and Bernard Barker.)[2]

Many writers have since suggested that Nixon’s war on heroin was part of his “grand design” to develop a new drug superagency, under direct White House control, into “the strong investigative arm for domestic surveillance that President Nixon had long quested after.”[3] Yet the establishment press failed to look critically at Nixon’s war on heroin. Instead it blandly reported Nixon’s decision in June 1971 to provide $100 million in aid to end opium production in Turkey, a country which (according to CIA estimates) produced only 3 to 8 percent of the illicit opium available throughout the world.[4]

At the time perhaps 80 percent of the world’s illicit opium was grown, much of it by CIA‑supported tribesmen, in the “golden triangle” of Laos, Burma, and Thailand, while the Shah of Iran, who became one of Nixon’s closest foreign allies, had just announced resumption of Iranian opium production of over 20,000 hectares (an area 50 percent greater than the total cultivation in Turkey). As the New Republic noted only one month later, Nixon’s decision to shut down the supply of Turkish opium was “likely to do no more than drive the industry further east.”[5] [emphasis added]

Another, and even more cynical view of Nixon’s action is to see it as a direct attack on the French Corsican networks which relied almost exclusively on Turkey as their source of supply, and which, according to Le Monde, were being deliberately forced out of the international drug trade as the result of a “close Mafia‑police‑Narcotics Bureau collaboration.” Le Monde stated explicitly that it was the U.S.‑Sicilian Mafia which closed down the sluice‑gates of Turkish opium production. Was Nixon personally playing a role, as Henrik Kruger suggests, in this seamy international drug war between rival networks? Such a possibility seems less remote when we recall the rivalry which had grown up in the 1960s between deGaulle’s intelligence services and the CIA, and the respective reliance of these services upon the rival Corsican and U.S.‑Italian crime syndicates.

Le Monde had no difficulty in spelling out the American side of the intelligence‑Mafia connection, even though the CIA activities of Santo Trafficante, the alleged heir to the Luciano network, were not known to it at the time:

Instructed by his own experience of collaboration with the American intelligence services, Lucky Luciano used to recommend to his honorable correspondents scattered from Beirut to Tangiers, via Ankara and Marseilles, to operate as he had done. It was in this way that drug dealers and couriers served as informants to [the British] MI5, to [the American] CIA, to [the French] SDECE, to the [West German] Gehlen organization, even to the Italian SIFFAR.[6]

On the French side, LeMonde was predictably more reticent; but from other sources we learn that at least two members of the competing Ricord network, Christian David and Michel Nicoli, were former members of the Gaullist Service d’Action Civique (SAC), the parallel police or barbouzes who had been used to assassinate members of the right wing Organisation de I’Armee Secrete (OAS), in revolt against de Gaulle’s accommodation with Algeria. Through SAC, David and Nicoli had come into contact with SDECE operations as well.[7]

One of the major theses of Henrik Kruger’s fascinating book is that “the great heroin coup” –the “remarkable shift” from Marseilles (Corsican) to Southeast Asian and Mexican (Mafia) heroin in the United States, was a deliberate move to reconstruct and redirect the heroin trade, rather than to eliminate it, and that Cuban exiles, Santo Trafficante, the CIA, and the Nixon White House were all involved [emphasis added]:

It was, needless to say, not a willful conspiracy of all the above. But we can assert with reasonable certainty that the CIA, Trafficante and other mafiosi, certain Southeast Asians, and some people in the White House must have been in the know. (Kruger, p. 122)

As Kruger tells the story, the motivations for the alleged heroin coup were primarily political: to break the power of the old Gaullist SAC connection, which by 1970 was as distasteful to de Gaulle’s pro-American successor Pompidou as it was to Nixon, and (on the American side) to replace it by an alternative power base. In Kruger’s analysis it was not so much a struggle between the French and American intelligence services, SDECE and CIA, as it was a struggle between old and new leaderships. The coming to power of Pompidou in France, and of Nixon in America, had created unprecedented tensions and suspicions between these two presidents and their old-line intelligence services: hence Nixon’s desire to use the war on heroin as a pretext for a new superagency under White House control. Hence also the successive agreements between Nixon, Pompidou, and their cabinet officers to crack down on the old Corsican connection.

Once again, the U.S. press resistance to the subject matter of Kruger’s book suggests that there is something to his thesis. At least two books published in America, both obviously based on U.S. government sources, discussed the arrest of David at length, without mentioning either that he had worked for SAC/SDECE…

Again, it is part of Kruger’s thesis that the CIA, even after it had decided to eliminate the Ricord network of which David formed part, was unwilling to destroy the international drug connection which allowed its agents to gather intelligence about insurrectionary movements through the tactic of selling arms to them; and which at the same time financed the organization of counter‑revolutionary death squads and “parallel police” such as the Argentine AAA (Alianza Anticomunista Argentina). Undoubtedly, in Latin America, the stories of drugs and of death squads, such as that which arranged for the assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington, have been closely interwoven.

As support for his argument that the traffic once dominated by Ricord was simply redirected to Cuban exiles in touch with the CIA and with Santo Trafficante, Kruger points to the extraordinary story of Alberto Sicilia Falcon. Somehow Sicilia, a twenty‑nine‑year‑old Cuban exile from Miami, was able to emerge as the ringleader of the so‑called “Mexican connection” which promptly filled the vacuum created by the destruction of the Ricord network in 1972. Lucien Sarti, a top Ricord lieutenant, was shot and killed by authorities in Mexico on 27 April 1972, after being located there by U.S. agents.[18] The new Sicilia network, according to DEA Chief Peter Bensinger, was operating by May 1972, and had “revenues reliably established in the hundreds of millions of dollars” by the time of Sicilia’s own arrest in July 1975.[19]

Once again, it is virtually impossible to find any extensive treatment in the U.S. press of the mysterious Alberto Sicilia Falcon, even though his arrest led to no less than 104 indictments, 73 of them in the United States.[20] From the noted German magazine Der Spiegel, however, one learns that Sicilia told the Mexican authorities who arrested him that he was a CIA agent, and had been trained at Fort Jackson (as had at least one of Nixon’s Watergate Cubans) for possible guerilla activity against Cuba. Allegedly he had also worked in Chile against the socialist government of Salvador Allende until he returned to the U.S. in early 1973. He also, according to Mexican police, spoke of a special deal with the CIA; the U.S. government had turned a blind eye to his heroin shipments, while his organization supplied CIA weapons to terrorist groups in Central America, thereby forcing the host governments to accept U.S. conditions for security assistance.[21]

DEA Chief Bensinger was quite circumspect in his testimony about Alberto Sicilia Falcon, merely calling him “a Cuban national” and alluding to his possible “revolutionary activity in Central and South America.” From this it was easier to deduce that Sicilia was a Castro agent than the reverse.[22] In fact, Sicilia was a Cuban exile who had come to Mexico from Miami, where he had links to the Cuban exile community, and had personally negotiated for manufacturing rights to the celebrated 9mm Parabellum machine pistol, better known as the Ingram M‑10.[23]

Parabellum was a Miami‑based arms sales firm set up by soldier-of‑fortune Gerry Patrick Hemming, and headed by Cuban exile Anselmo Alliegro IV, whose father had been close to Batista.[24] Parabellum in turn was sales representative for Hemming’s friend Mitch WerBell III, a mysterious White Russian, OSS‑China veteran, small arms manufacturer, and occasional U.S. intelligence operative, with unexplained relations to the CIA, DEA, and the major drugs‑for‑arms deal for which he was indicted but acquitted.[25] (The government’s case failed after the chief government witness, arms and dope smuggler Kenneth Burnstine, was killed in the crash of his private plane.)[26] As we shall see, another client interested in producing the Ingram M‑10 machine pistol in Latin America, under license from WerBell, was the international

Kruger’s invaluable contribution is to have spelled out the pervasive role of narcotics in supplying finances, organization, and sanctions to this parafascist network, from the Argentine AAA to the World Anti‑Communist League (WACL) founded by KMT intelligence personnel on Taiwan. Before World War II the KMT regime in China was perhaps the best example of political manipulation of the narcotics traffic, under the guise of an “opium suppression campaign,” to finance both a political and an intelligence apparatus (under General Tai Li).[48] This practice spread after World War II to a number of other WACL member countries and groups. Today there is cause to fear that Nixon’s superagency, the Drug Enforcement Administration, has, like other narcotics enforcement agencies before it, come to use corrupt personnel who are actually part of the traffic, as part of a covert war against revolution.

The U.S. government’s narcotics Mafia connection goes back, as is well known, to World War II. Two controversial joint operations between OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and ONI (U.S. naval intelligence) established contacts (via Lucky Luciano) with the Sicilian Mafia;[53] and (via Tai Li) with the dope‑dealing Green Gang of Tu Yueh‑Sheng in Shanghai.[54] Both connections were extended into the post‑war period as the Luciano and KMT networks slowly resumed their pre‑war contacts. In Washington, in 1947, State Department official Walter Dowling noted with concern the efforts of an ex‑OSS officer to reactivate the wartime OSS‑mafia connection. Future CIA officer James Angleton (then in an interim agency, SSU) appears to have shared Dowling’s repugnance; but one of the principal ex‑OSS agents concerned, Max Corvo, now enjoyed influential private backing as a consultant to Italian‑American industries in Sicily.[55]

The deportation of Lucky Luciano to Sicily in 1946 was followed by that of more than sixty other American mafiosi, some of whom, like Frank Coppola, became not only key figures in the postwar Luciano‑Trafficante narcotics connection, but also political bosses whose Mafia muscle ensured the election of Christian Democrat M.P.s.[56] Coppola’s name has been linked, together with that of Interior Minister Mario Scelba, to a May Day 1947 massacre at Portella delle Ginestre, in which eight people were killed by machinegun fire, and thirty‑three were wounded. In all 498 Sicilians, mostly left wingers, were murdered in 1948 alone, a revealing footnote to former CIA operative Miles Copeland’s benign assurance that “had it not been for the Mafia the Communists would by now be in control of Italy.”[57]

Meanwhile, in the United States, KMT agents helped establish a powerful China Lobby, and collaborated with friends in U.S. agencies to target, and in some cases drive from government, old foes of the former U.S.‑KMT‑Tai Li alliance including those inside the OSS. A scholarly book in 1960 noted that “the narcotics business has been a factor in some activities and permutations of the China Lobby,” thus challenging the official Narcotics Bureau myth that KMT dope in this country was “Communist Chinese”.[58]

The Luciano and KMT networks had been in contact for U.S. dope distribution in the 1930s. Although there is no evidence of substantial collaboration between them in the 1950s, there are symptoms of increasing convergence, partly through agents who dealt with both. There is the example of George White, an FBN official and former OSS agent who testified to the Kefauver Committee that he had been approached on behalf of Luciano in 1943 by an old China trafficker, August del Grazio.[59] White worked closely with the CIA in the postwar years and (under FBN cover) ran one of their LSD experiments in Project MK/ULTRA.[60] In 1948 White was back in Europe, intending to check up personally on Luciano and his narcotics associate Nick Gentile, another former U.S. gangster who (like Vito Genovese) had worked for the Allied Military Government in Sicily.[61] Soon afterwards Mafia traffickers in the United States began to be arrested, but not men like Luciano, Gentile, or Coppola.

By the time of White’s visit to Marseilles, the CIA and AFL organizer Irving Brown were already subsidizing the use of Corsican and Italian gangsters to oust Communist unions from the Marseilles port. Brown’s CIA case officer, Paul Sakwa, has confirmed that by the time CIA subsidies were terminated in 1953, Brown’s chief contact with the Marseilles underworld, Pierre Ferri‑Pisani, no longer needed U.S. support, because of the profits his newly‑gained control of the port supplied from the heroin traffic.[62] Under the oversight of Ferri‑Pisani and the Guerini gang, Corsican traffickers worked with the Luciano network and in the 1950s were its chief source of refined heroin. This alone might help explain the apparent immunity of Luciano’s network, to which Le Monde alluded, along with that of its Corsican suppliers, about which Le Monde was silent.

Although White worked on the Luciano and Corsican cases, his FBN reputation had been made in 1937 by smashing a major distribution network headed by the pro‑KMT Chinese tong (gang) in San Francisco, the Hip Sings.[63] But by 1951 the CIA was closely allied with KMT drug operations in Burma and Yunnan, through a Miami-based proprietary, Sea Supply, Inc., organized by OSS veteran Paul Helliwell.[64] In 1959 the FBN and White again arrested a new generation of Hip Sing officials, but only after the ringleader (Chung Wing Fong, a former Hip Sing president and official of the San Francisco Chinese Anti‑Communist League, a KMT front) had yielded his passport to the U.S. consul in Hong Kong and then travelled as ordered to Taiwan.[65] In this way Fong became no more than an unindicted conspirator and the KMT disappeared from view; White, meanwhile, turned around and told the U.S. press the heroin came from Communist China (“most of it from a vast poppy field near Chungking”).[66] In China, if not in Italy, White’s concern about dope seems to have centered on networks within U.S. borders, not on the international suppliers.

In 1953‑54 the CIA drew on old China hands with exposure to KMT traffic (Chennault, Willauer, William Pawley, Howard Hunt) to set up the overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala, an operation which at least contemplated the use of “Puerto Rican and Cuban gangsters.”[67] As part of this operation, we see CIA officer Howard Hunt, a veteran with his friend Lucien Conein and Conein’s friend WerBell of OSS operations in China under Helliwell, helping in 1954 to set up what would eventually become the Latin American branch of the KMT‑backed World Anti‑Communist League. (Four years later the chairman of this group was the Guatemalan attorney of New Orleans Mafia leader Carlos Marcello.[68]) Nevertheless, in the late 1950s it seemed unlikely that the heroin connection, outside of countries directly involved, like Laos, would either have a major impact on U.S. policy or become a significant alternative to it. With the decline of cold war paranoia, events seemed to be moving towards normalization.

All this changed with the 1960s, when the CIA reassembled for the Bay of Pigs the old Guatemala team (including Hunt, Willauer, and Pawley, who oversaw Cuban recruitment). With the failure of the Bay of Pigs Cuba became to America what Algeria had been to France. The explosive political controversy meant that thousands of Cuban exiles, many of them with backgrounds in the Havana milieu, were trained by the U.S. as guerrillas and/or terrorists, then left in political limbo. Many of them soon turned to smuggling to augment their finances, and in some cases supplant their original political objectives. At least one CIA project growing out of Operation 40 (the control, element in the Bay of Pigs invasion force), had to be terminated, when the drug activities of its members became too embarrassing.[69] In 1973Newsday reported that “at least eight percent of the 1500‑man [Bay of Pigs] invasion force has subsequently been investigated or arrested for drug‑dealing.”[70]

By this time many Bay of Pigs veterans were working for either Vesco or Trafficante.[71] Both the lucrative drug traffic and its anti-Communist politics began increasingly to get out of U.S. control. This was particularly true when, after the death of President Kennedy, the U.S. lent a hand to military coups in Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Greece, nations which in turn became bases for further right wing activities in other countries. America’s lack of enthusiasm for the Fascist clients it had helped to procreate, only had the effect of encouraging them to plot more energetically with each other, and to lobby lavishly for more right wing policies in Washington. It was in this period that mercenary terrorism, illicit arms traffic, and drug traffic, consolidated into one increasingly global milieu. The long-delayed founding of the World Anti‑Communist League in Taiwan in 1967 may be a less significant symptom of this trend than the Greek coup of the same year, after which the KYP (the Greek CIA) became an active fomenter of para-fascist terror tactics in the rest of Europe.[72]

The official termination of the CIA MONGOOSE [headed by Ed Lansdale] project against Cuba in the same year left a colossal disposal problem: what to do with the estimated 7000 trained Cubans? Here America seems to have followed the example set by de Gaulle. Some of these Cuban exiles were absorbed into other CIA and Pentagon operations, some went to work as did David for intelligence services in Latin America, some were retained by the CIA to report on their former colleagues and even to eliminate the more troublesome of them. But each of these solutions ran the risk of giving more power to the very elements whom the CIA wished to disperse. This was the situation faced by Richard Nixon on his election.

Several studies of Richard Nixon have focused on his contacts since 1946 with elements from organized crime, mostly through his early political adviser Murray Chotiner, and his close friend and business associate Bebe Rebozo. Kirkpatrick Sale has suggested that “It is possible that Richard Nixon was one more of the large number of politicians in this country who have been bought or cajoled into the service of the ends of organized crime.”[73]

Yet this dark hypothesis is, I think, as oversimplified as its opposite. Like every one of his predecessors since at least World War II, Nixon, to become elected, had made accommodations to all of the prominent political forces in the coalition he represented, including the inevitable connection to organized crime. It may well be that in his early career these connections were more prominent than in the case of Lyndon Johnson, who started as FDR’s protege, or John F. Kennedy, who was born wealthy (and could leave dirty business connections to his father). But it was also apparent, even before he was elected in 1968, that Nixon sought to pursue a foreign policy that would be independent of the early KMT, and other money which had first helped him to become a national political figure.

Faced with the growing and closely related problems of right wing terrorism and of the international narcotics traffic, Nixon’s approach seems to have been that of a self‑perceived political realist: to gain control of, redirect, and manipulate the problem forces, rather than to somehow make them magically disappear. It is unlikely that these objectives were unrelated to his foreign policy efforts to establish links to main-land China, for this policy challenged the powerful China lobby which had supported him in the past. It may be no coincidence that the proclamation of the war on drugs, Kissinger’s secret trip to Peking, and the establishment in the White House of what the president called “a non‑legal team” (the Plumbers), including Hunt and Conein, all took place within a month of each other in mid‑1971. [emphasis added]

Thus in Miami Nixon appointed an energetic U.S. attorney, Robert Rust, who in June 1970 rounded up ex‑CIA Cubans like Juan Restoy in Operation Eagle: this unusual zeal, according to Hank Messick, made Rust an exception to the South Florida “don’t‑rock‑the‑boat” tradition.[74] But Nixon’s appointments to the Federal Court in the Miami area (one of whom was close to Paul Helliwell and had served as director of a bank accused of laundering money for Meyer Lansky) were not so gung‑ho; and eventually most of Rust’s indictments in Operation Eagle were overturned in court. Meanwhile the “non‑legal team” at the White House, thanks to Howard Hunt, began to recruit men like Frank Sturgis, whose FBI file linked him to possible “organized crime activities,” and Felipe de Diego, a colleague of Restoy in the CIA’s Operation 40 project which had to be closed down because of its narcotics involvement.

Nixon, following de Gaulle’s example, seems to have taken steps to restore control by the White House over a milieu which the U.S. government itself had helped to create. Like the French, he seems to have turned to elements of the milieu to work against it; but he seems to have had worse luck in those whom he picked. In his memoirs Nixon tells how, less than two weeks after the Watergate break‑in Haldeman said that the whole thing was so ludicrous that Dean had not discounted the possibility that we were dealing with a double agent who purposely blew the operation. Otherwise it was just too hard to figureout.[75]

Eight years of journalistic books on Watergate, most of which barely mention the narcotics responsibilities of the so‑called Plumbers, have not come up with any better explanation.

Edward J. Epstein’s book on Nixon’s drug policies, which ipso facto is a book about Watergate, analyzes this shortcoming of the journalists:

The White House timetable for consolidating its power over the investigative agencies of the government was rudely interrupted on June 17, 1972, when Washington, D.C., police arrested five men in the national headquarters of the Democratic Party in the Watergate apartment and office complex…. With Nixon’s impending reelection threatening the very independence of the power base of the investigative agencies, there were strong forces within the executive branch of the government which would not only refuse to help cover up the embarrassing connection but would actively work to disclose it…. Richard Helms… had been told that Nixon planned to replace him immediately after the election, and he feared, as he told me subsequently, that Nixon also planned “to destroy [his] agency.” … The “battle of the leaks,” as Colson called it… began to sink the Nixon Administration.…

Consider, for example, the problem of Woodward and Bernstein, of the Washington Post. Woodward was receiving information from Robert Foster Bennett, of Robert R. Mullen and Company, that focused the blame for Watergate on Charles Colson. If he had assumed that Bennett was providing him with this information for anything more than a disinterested purpose, he would have had to ask whom Bennett worked for, what the true business of Mullen and Company was, and why Bennett wanted him to steer his investigation away from the CIA and toward Charles Colson. He then would have found that Mullen and Company was a CIA front organization and was aware that Bennett was giving information to Woodward; and that the CIA was trying to divert attention from itself (and succeeding, in the Washington Post) because a number of the conspirators involved in the Watergate burglary had also been involved in operations that the CIA had directly supported, such as the Plumbers. Moreover, the very fact that a CIA front group was providing information that was undermining the Nixon administration pointed to a conflict between Nixon and the CIA. Woodward and Bernstein, however, could not have reported these implications and thus could not have depicted the power struggle between the president and the CIA without revealing one of their prime sources. For the same reason, the reporters who received Nixon’s tax returns from officials of the Internal Revenue Service could not have revealed this as evidence of a struggle between disgruntled members of the Treasury Department and the president without also revealing that they were no more than messengers for insurgents struggling against the president. By not revealing their sources, they received the Pulitzer Prize… [76]

Epstein views Watergate as optimistically as Edmund Burke saw the Whig Revolution of 1688 —as a restoration of decorum after tyrannous encroachment, a revolution not so much made as prevented: “The revolt of the bureaucrats thus succeeded in blocking Nixon’s plan to gain control over the investigative agencies of the government in his second term.”[77] This optimism assumes that Nixon himself was the problem, not the monster DEA agency which outlasted him or the CIA Cubans it recruited. It is true that the Watergate exposures put an end to Hunt’s little known “recruitment of a secret army of Cuban exiles [no fewer than 120, according to CBS], answerable only to the White House, and equipped to assassinate foreign leaders.”[78]

But some of the old China hands with network connections began moving to the new DEA. As we have seen, Hunt secured a post for his old OSS‑Kunming friend Lucien Conein in what eventually became DEA, and Conein in turn recruited his own band of CIA Cubans in Deacon I, at least one of whom, according to CIA reports, has already taken part in a death squad operation.[79]

Nor did Watergate have a good effect on narcotics enforcement. On the contrary, the Watergate disclosures were followed by a marked drop‑off in high‑level drug conspiracy arrests. Senate investigator Philip R. Manuel reported in 1975 that “from 1917 through early 1973 Federal narcotics enforcement had its period of greatest success,” but failed to hold its gains thereafter.[80] The new DEA soon came under both Senate and Justice Department scrutiny for a series of irregularities, including what one Senate staff report called “unprofessional conduct” in failing to pursue a Vesco narcotics lead.[81]

THE FATEFUL DAYS: A CHRONOLOGY OF THE HEROIN COUP 

“We have turned the corner on heroin,” declared a proud Richard Nixon after the massacre of the Corsican Mafia. But shutting off the pipeline of heroin from Marseilles did not produce the shortage he predicted. Except for a brief period in 1973, the supply increased, tremendously. By 1975 the heroin glut far surpassed even that of the Corsican heyday of the late sixties. According to a 1977 report of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse, heroin addiction had doubled in four years. One year later New York’s special narcotics prosecutor, Sterling Johnson, Jr. stated: “There is more dope on the streets now than at any time since the late sixties and early seventies, when we had an epidemic going. We’ve got another epidemic, and more critical.”[1]

When the heroin flow from Marseilles was shut off in 1972‑73, two new sources of supply immediately filled the vacuum. Southeast Asia ‑Laos, Burma and Thailand ‑suddenly produced vast amounts of white no. 4 heroin, the type that supposedly could only be produced by Marseilles chemists. The high quality heroin went primarily to the 40 percent of all U.S. heroin addicts who were living in New York, and who were accustomed to Marseilles heroin. The other new source was Mexico. But its product, the less pure “brown sugar,” served mainly to regulate the market and to generate new customers.

The remarkable switch from Turkey‑Marseilles‑U.S.A. to Southeast Asia‑Mexico‑U.S.A. shifted billions of dollars and the power that comes with it. Such a market revolution could not have happened without astute planning and direction, which demanded political savvy and political cooperation. The plans for this tremendous heroin coup were on somebody’s drawing board before Nixon and Georges Pompidou met in early 1970. They were made long before Attorney General John Mitchell and French Justice Minister Raymond Marcellin met in Paris on 26 February 1971, when they signed the antinarcotics agreement that led to the eradication of the Corsican drug Mafia. Most probably they were in place by 1968.

The occurrence of such a conspiratorial heroin coup is, of course, a hypothesis. In the following chapters I will trace the logic and the likelihood of its having transpired.

Involved in one way or another in the planning, the execution, or both, were: President Nixon and part of the White House staff; Meyer Lansky’s corporate gangster syndicate‑in particular its Cuban exile wing run by Florida capo Santo Trafficante, Jr.; the Cuba/China lobby; ultrareactionary forces in Southeast Asia, primarily the Kuomintang Chinese on Taiwan and in the Golden Triangle; and intelligence and law enforcement factions of the CIA and BNDD/DEA.

It was, needless to say, not a willful conspiracy of all the above. But we can assert with reasonable certainty that the CIA, Trafficante, and other mafiosi, certain Southeast Asians, and some people in the White House must have been in the know.

The plan took three years to execute. Though the major maneuvers began in 1970, one could detect the opening skirmishes soon after Nixon’s election victory in 1968:

* Henry Kissinger put pressure on Paraguay to extradite Auguste Ricord, the main Corsican supplier of narcotics to the U.S. market.[2] Paraguay’s President Alfredo Stroessner at first chose to ignore that pressure.[3]

* In 1968 the Mafia’s premier heroin importer, Santo Trafficante, Jr., travelled to Southeast Asia to check out possibilities for a new supply network involving Chinese opium merchants.[4] When he made the trip, the Corsican Mafia was supplying Trafficante with all the no. 4 heroin he could sell.

* Nixon and Pompidou met in January 1970 to restore close Franco‑American partnership. It was a crucial step in the destruction of the French narcotics apparatus that controlled 80 percent of the heroin trade.

* At the start of July 1970, White House staffer Egil Krogh proposed Operation Heroin, a major action against the narcotics smugglers. His idea was approved.

* U.S. Mafia capos held a summit July 4‑16 at the Hotel Sole in Palermo, Sicily. There they decided to pour money into Southeast Asia and transform it into the main source of heroin.[5]

* On 23 July 1970 Richard Nixon approved the Huston Plan to establish an espionage group that would supercede existing intelligence and enforcement agencies. The super‑group was to be steered from the White House, thus giving the president effective control over all intelligence ‑including domestic spying on U.S. citizens. The plan fell through, mostly due to the opposition of J. Edgar Hoover. However, the White House continued to develop the plan under cover of its fast‑growing, media‑hyped narcotics campaign.

* In August 1970 the Corsicans, apparently informed of the outcome of the Palermo meeting weeks earlier, called their Southeast Asian connections to an emergency meeting at Saigon’s Continental Hotel. Thereafter two loads of morphine base would be sent to Marseilles each month.[6] However, the shipments were continually sabotaged, and rarely arrived at their destination.

*Another major development in 1970 was the implementation of Nixon’s Vietnamization program, through which the controls in Vietnam were returned to the CIA. The program pumped a fortune into South Vietnam, much of it pocketed by officials. Investigations of endemic corruption among non‑coms and senior U.S. Army personnel led to a Hong Kong office run by a lieutenant of drug czar Trafficante.[7]

* Pure no. 4 heroin appeared in Saigon in 1970, creating an epidemic of addiction among GIs. All previously available heroin had been of the coarse form that could only be smoked. The new heroin wave was hushed up.

* There were two other significant developments in 1970: (1) to end persistent rivalry among customs, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), Nixon named the BNDD the sole U.S. representative on drug matters; and (2) the Mafia dispatched the notorious Tomasso Buscetta to Brazil to prepare a takeover of narcotics smuggling upon Auguste Ricord’s extradition to the U.S.

* On 26 February 1971 France and the United States signed the definitive agreement for a combined assault on heroin. Within days Ricord was sentenced in absentia. On April 6 Roger Delouette was picked up in New York. As detailed in chapter ten, after that the Corsican network collapsed quickly.

* On 27 May 1971 Congressmen Morgan Murphy and Robert Steele issued their report, The World Heroin Problem. Among their sensational findings was that some 15 percent of the GIs in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. The causes were easy to identify. Most obvious was the sudden appearance of enormous quantities of no. 4 heroin. Fourteen‑year old girls sold 90 percent pure heroin for peanuts. Pushers stuffed it into soldiers’ pockets free of charge. Add to that the crackdown that effectively eliminated marijuana and hash from the barracks.

* On the day the Murphy‑Steele report was issued, Nixon, John Erlichman, and Krogh agreed to secretly budget $100 million for a covert BNDD kidnaping and assassination program. Before that the White House had asked BNDD director John Ingersoll to draft a plan for “clandestine law enforcement” that would include assassination of major traffickers.[8]

* Days later Nixon set up a special narcotics action and intelligence group right in the White House. In the same period the Special Investigation Unit (the infamous Plumbers) set up shop in Room 16 of the Executive Office Building. The two groups overlapped, and several of their members were associates of Mafia kingpin Trafficante.

* On 17 June 1971 Nixon, on television, declared war on narcotics: “If we cannot destroy the drug menace in America, then it will destroy us. I am not prepared to accept this alternative.”

* On 30 June 1971 the United States and Turkey signed an agreement that would halt Turkish opium cultivation. In return the U.S. handed the Turkish government $30 million.

* On 1 July 1971 Nixon advisor Charles Colson recruited former CIA agent Howard Hunt as a White House consultant.[9] Hunt and Gordon Liddy would work out of Room 16 on narcotics intelligence, one of Hunt’s specialties.

* On 25 July 1971 the Asian Peoples Anti‑Communist League (APACL) and World Anti‑Communist League (WACL) met in Manila. The two international lobbies for the Nationalist Chinese, prime bankrollers of international opium and heroin smuggling, angrily attacked Nixon for his approaching trip to Peking. [10]

* In August 1971 the BNDD announced the location in Southeast Asia of twenty‑nine drug refineries, fifteen of them allegedly producing heroin. Among the largest was one in Vientiane, Laos, which was camouflaged as a Pepsi Cola plant. Nixon, representing Pepsi’s interests in 1965, had promoted its construction. Though the plant never capped a bottle, it continued to be subsidized by U.S.A.I.D.[11]

* In October 1971 top BNDD analyst John Warner told an interviewer that the continued flooding of the U.S. heroin market, despite the shutdown of French supply routes, indicated that more than the previously assumed 5 percent of U.S. heroin was originating in Southeast Asia.

* On 1 November 1971 BNDD agents arrested a diplomat attached to the Philippine embassy in Laos, and a Chinese journalist from Thailand, attempting to smuggle forty kilos of heroin into the U.S.A. That same year BNDD agents at JFK airport arrested the son of Panama’s ambassador to Taiwan with fifty kilos of heroin. Finally, and most dramatically, Parisian police nabbed the Laotian Prince Chao Sopsaisana attempting to smuggle in sixty kilos. Sopsaisana, the head Laotian delegate to the APACL, was about to become Laos’ emissary in Paris.[12]

The focus nevertheless remained on the French narcotics traffickers. Nixon could also produce results in the newly arisen Southeast Asian danger zone, but those amounted to the smashing of the remnants of the Corsican Mafia and their Southeast Asian supply network.

Through it all the U.S. supported Marshall Nguyen Cao Ky and other South Vietnamese politicians known to be making immense profits from the heroin traffic. When U.S. reporters exposed Ky’s narcotics airlift, the CIA station and U.S. embassy in Saigon issued blanket denials. [13]

* In late 1971 BNDD director Ingersoll issued the following statement: “The CIA has for some time been this Bureau’s strongest partner in identifying foreign sources and routes of illegal trade in narcotics. Liaison between our two agencies is close and constant in matters of mutual interest. Much of the progress we are now making in identifying overseas narcotics traffic can, in fact, be attributed to CIA cooperation.” [14]

The catch was that BNDD “progress” and CIA “cooperation” went only as far as the French Mafia. CIA cooperation on Southeast Asia was another matter. The agency hindered BNDD agents and kept the press in the dark, while itself smuggling large quantities of opium via Air America.[15] A notable discrepancy arose in 1972 between CIA and BNDD estimates of the heroin traffic. CIA reports had 25 percent of the heroin coming from Mexico, the rest from Marseilles. The BNDD estimated that Southeast Asia already supplied 30 percent of the heroin on the U.S. market.[16]

* In January 1972 Nixon created, again by decree, the Office for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE) to flush out pushers in thirty‑eight cities. Simultaneously, New York’s police narcotics squad was reorganized following revelations of blatant corruption. ODALE ceased to exist on 1 July 1973 when it, the BNDD and the narcotics intelligence branches of the Justice Department and Customs Bureau were merged to become the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which now operates in the U.S. and worldwide.

* On 17 July 1972 James McCord, Frank Sturgis, Bernard Barker, Eugenio Rolando Martinez, and Virgilio Gonzalez, led by Hunt and Liddy, broke into the Democrats’ Watergate offices in Washington. Of these seven men, four were from Miami, four were active or former agents of the CIA, four had been involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion, and three were closely linked to the Cuban narcotics Mafia.

* The same day Nixon telegrammed Pompidou his congratulations. Two days earlier, France had closed out a series of raids against the Marseilles heroin labs. The great heroin coup was well on its way to completion.

On 9 August 1972 Nixon made William C. Sullivan the director of the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence (ONNI), which would coordinate domestic drug intelligence. Sullivan had been the president’s choice to head the Huston Plan’s aborted super‑intelligence agency.[17]

With Egil Krogh executive director of the Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control, covering foreign narcotics intelligence,[18] complete control over narcotics management was in the president’s hands.

* In August 1972 U.S. troops were withdrawn from South Vietnam. The country was turned over to the CIA and a narcotics trafficking South Vietnamese government.

• In late August, in the midst of Nixon’s reelection campaign, the BNDD announced the first noticeable heroin shortage on the streets of America. Nixon’s battle with the French Mafia had borne fruit. Soon he would rid the U.S.A. entirely of the White Death. However, someone had forgotten to mention that returning GIs had helped triple the U.S. addict population from the 1969 figure of 250,000. In reality, then, the total heroin supply was appreciably greater than that prevailing prior to Nixon’s campaign against the French. Americans, however, would reelect Nixon, who cited apparent gains in foreign affairs and the struggle against the drug plague.

* On 12 August 1972 New York crime families decided at a Staten Island summit to resume the drug traffic they had supposedly abandoned in the fifties.[19] Citing “social responsibility,” they decried the Cuban and Black Mafias’ sale of heroin in the suburbs to children of “decent people,” and vowed that the drugs would thereafter remain in the ghetto. But the importance of the families had waned. Others, especially Trafficante’s Cuban organization, had become too strong.

The heroin coup was complete by 1973. The French were out, and new labs, routes, and buyer networks were in place, with Southeast Asia the main supplier. That year the U.S. heroin supply did fall noticeably, largely because part of the plan was about to fall through. South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were slipping out of U.S. hands, Forcing traffickers and bankrollers to regroup in safer surroundings, above all in Thailand. [20]

A final item of interest in 1973 was the appearance before a Senate committee of the international speculator and smuggler Frank Peroff, who had served as an undercover agent for the DEA against the Cotroni brothers of Montreal. He testified that the renegade international businessman, Robert Vesco — a major supporter of Richard Nixon — and his associate Norman Leblanc, were bankrollers of international heroin trafficking.[21]

to be continued …

Watergate Exposed: How the President of the United States and the Watergate Burglars Were Set Up (as told to Douglas Caddy, original attorney for the Watergate Seven), by Robert Merritt is available at TrineDay, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, The Book Depository, and Books-a-Million.