Part 1 The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World

The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt 
America and the World
By Douglas Valentine
Chapter 1  

HOW WILLIAM COLBY GAVE ME 

THE KEYS TO THE CIA KINGDOM 

JAMES TRACY: You’ve been doing historical research for close to 40 years and I wanted to ask how you orient yourself toward a project. How you know where to look for information that’s pertinent to a given story. 

VALENTINE: It’s complicated, and my experience was different from other writers and researchers I’ve spoken with about it. From the time I started college back in 1967, I wanted to be a writer. And since then my philosophy of life has been based on the study of language and literary criticism. I have a very broad approach. I started out studying Greek and Roman literature, reading the Norton anthologies of English and American literature, taking courses in classical myth and the Bible. Very early in my studies I was introduced to literary criticism, to people like Robert Graves, poet and author of The White Goddess, and Sir James Fraser who wrote The Golden Bough. Fraser brought a socio-anthropological way of looking at the world of literature. That led me to Carl Jung, Eric Newman, Northrop Frye and a few other people who approached literature from a variety of different perspectives – psychological, political, anthropological, sociological, historical, philosophical. All those things were of interest to me. When I look at a subject I look at it comprehensively from all those different points of view. 

Literary criticism teaches the power of symbolic transformation, of processing experience into ideas, into meaning. To be a Madison Avenue adman, one must understand how to use symbols and myths to sell commodities. Admen use logos and slogans, and so do political propagandists. Left or right; doesn’t matter. The left is as adept at branding as the right. To be a speech writer or public relations consultant one must, above all, understand the archetypal power of the myth of the hero. That way you can transform, through words, Joe the Plumber or even a mass murderer, into a national hero. 

When I decided to research and write about the CIA’s Phoenix program, 1 that was how I went at it. I went directly to William Colby, who’d been Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Colby was the person most associated with Phoenix, the controversial CIA “assassination” program that resulted in the death of tens of thousands of civilians during the Vietnam War. No one had written a book about it, so I wrote Colby a letter and sent him my first book, The Hotel Tacloban. I told him I wanted to write a book that would de-mystify the Phoenix program, and he was all for that. Colby liked my approach – to look at it from all these different points of view – so he got behind me and started introducing me to a lot of senior CIA people. And that gave me access from the inside. After that it was pretty easy. I have good interview skills. I was able to persuade a lot of these CIA people to talk about Phoenix. 

But I also approached it from an organizational point of view, which is absolutely essential when writing about bureaucracies like the CIA or the DEA. You really have to understand them as a bureaucracy, that they have an historical arc. They begin somewhere, they have a Congressional mandate, they have a purpose, and organizational and management structures. And in that regard I really lucked out. One of the first people I interviewed was the CIA officer, Nelson Brickham, who actually organized the Phoenix program. Brickham graduated magna cum laude from Yale and was something of an organizational genius. He explained to me how he organized Phoenix. He also explained the different divisions and branches of the CIA so I’d be able to understand it. 

So I lucked out. Through Colby I had access to the people in the CIA who created the Phoenix program, and I was able to find out what was on their minds and why they did what they did. That never would have happened if I had gone to the Columbia School of Journalism, or if I’d been involved with journalism for many years. I’d have had a much narrower way of going at the thing. But the CIA officers I spoke with loved the broad view that I was bringing to the subject. They liked me asking them about their philosophy. It enabled me to understand the subject comprehensively. 

TRACY: There’s an associate of William Colby’s whom you discuss and write about, also a CIA officer, Evan Parker. You were able to get a great many names from him and then you asked these people for interviews. The interview subjects, many of whom were CIA personnel, would go back to Colby or Parker and ask if it was okay to speak to you. Correct?

VALENTINE: That’s right. Once I had Colby’s approbation, many CIA officers thought I was in the CIA. No one had heard of me. I wasn’t Morley Safer or Seymour Hersh or someone who’d been a celebrity reporter in Vietnam. I was a Nobody, in the Eduardo Galeano sense of the word. I’d published a book about my father’s experiences in World War Two which some of these guys would read. Those who did read The Hotel Tacloban tended to like it, because it was sympathetic to soldiers and showed I understood what it means to be a soldier. Most CIA officers consider themselves to be soldiers. The CIA is set up as a military organization with a chain of command. Somebody tells you what to do, and you salute and do it. 

Evan Parker had that feeling about me – that I would understand him personally, why he did the things he did, because I’d written this sympathetic book about my father as a soldier, and because Colby sent me to him. I had an interesting experience with him. He invited me to his house for an interview and when I arrived, he invited me upstairs to his little den, which was stacked with bookshelves full of Welsh history and poetry books. Parker is a Welsh name. Because of my background in literature, I was able to talk to him about things like The Mabinogion, which is a book about Welsh mythology. I had this broad knowledge that helped me relate to people like him. I put him at ease. 

Also, for a year before I started interviewing people, I’d read everything I could find about Vietnam and the CIA. I was knowledgeable, plus I looked like a good Methodist. I wore a suit and a tie. We spoke for an hour and Parker got to like me. I hadn’t asked him anything about the CIA. We were just getting to know each other. But he had a stack of official-looking documents on his coffee table. He glanced at the documents and politely said he was going down to get us some tea and cookies. “It’ll take about fifteen minutes. I’ll be back.” He winked and went downstairs. 

I opened the top folder. It was a roster of everybody in the Phoenix Directorate from when Parker started it in the summer of 1967. I started furiously writing their names and ranks and the position they held in the program. Fifteen minutes later as I’m writing the last name, he yells from downstairs: “Doug, the tea is ready. I’m coming up.” I closed the file and put my notebook away. He came up with a tray with tea and cookies on it. He winked, and sat down, and I started to ask him about Phoenix. 

We never got to the documents on his desk. But he liked me and he referred me to people. That’s the way it went with most of the CIA people I met. They cooperated because Colby had sent me to them. Like Parker said, “(Colby) was the Director and we still consider him to be the Director. If he says you’re okay, we believe it.” 

He didn’t say, “Now I can waive my secrecy oath.” 

But that’s what they did. I talked to members of almost every branch of the CIA and I approached my interviews organizationally. What kind of a budget did you have? Who was your boss and how did you report to him? Who worked for you and what jobs did you give them? I had a big organizational chart in my den and I’d fill in names and positions. I never asked anyone, “Did you kill anybody? Did you do this kind of illegal thing?” And because I approached it in that benign way, they were confident I was de-mystifying the program and just sticking to the facts. It had the effect of reverse psychology. They trusted me because I didn’t ask them their secrets — so they told me their secrets. 

They didn’t like it in the end because I exposed all the secrets. I talked to so many people that eventually they all started thinking that I was CIA. Because the CIA compartmentalizes itself, I ended up knowing more about the program than any individual in the CIA. I got a rat-a-tat going and pitted them against each other. They started telling me secrets about their rivals. They all want to be the hero in their myth. 

TRACY: The interviews you conducted and the multitude of conversations you documented were placed alongside actual documentation which you had to acquire through a considerable amount of research?

VALENTINE: In the interviews, people were giving me original documents to confirm their assertions. Nelson Brickham was the CIA’s head of Foreign Intelligence Field Operations in Saigon (1965-1967). Brickham managed the liaison officers the CIA placed in the provinces to work with the South Vietnamese Police Special Branch, which is an organization like our FBI. The CIA created and funded the Special Police and sent them after the Viet Cong’s civilian leadership, and anyone else trying to undermine the American puppet government. Phoenix is political warfare. He managed the staff that ran all those operations in the provinces. 

In late 1966 the CIA station chief in Saigon, John Hart, was working on improving operations against the VC’s leadership with a CIA officer in Washington, Robert Komer. Komer was Lyndon Johnson’s personal aide on pacification in Vietnam, what was called “the other war”. Anyway, Hart gave Brickham the task of creating a general staff for pacification, at which point Brickham went to work for Komer. In creating a general staff for pacification, Brickham cobbled together the Phoenix program. And Brickham gave me, over the course of several interviews, copies of all the original documents he wrote for Komer and Hart. These were the enabling documents of the Phoenix program. 

That happened a lot. I’d ask a guy if he had any documents to back up what he was saying and if he did he’d give me copies of what he kept in his library. Everyone thought because Colby had sent me that somehow this was all going to be okay. I wasn’t going to reveal all this stuff or that Colby had decided it was okay to reveal all of it. 

The documents Brickham gave me showed in his own words what he was thinking when he created the Phoenix program. I posted all those documents online at Cryptocomb, along with the taped interviews with Brickham, Colby, Parker and several other CIA and military officers. They are part of the collection titled The CIA Speaks. I put them online so my critics can’t challenge me on the facts, other than by making up things, which they do all the time. I just quoted from these documents and my interviews. So it’s accurate reporting. 2 

TRACY: There is a Douglas Valentine Collection at the National Security Archives at George Washington University. 

VALENTINE: Yes, the collection contains my interview notes with close to 100 CIA officers and military officers involved in the Phoenix program. People kept referring me to people, and I made some great connections. I met a guy named Tullius Acampora who recently passed away; he was in his nineties. He’d been an army counterintelligence officer and worked for General Douglas MacArthur in Shanghai after World War Two. When the CIA was formed, Tully, like many army counterintelligence officers, started working with the counterintelligence staff at the CIA. He was detailed to the CIA. Although he kept his military rank, Tully was a CIA officer for many years. He went to Italy in 1958 and met and worked closely with Bureau of Narcotics agents in Rome. In the 50s and 60s, federal narcotic agents spent half their time doing favors for the CIA, and in exchange the CIA gave them intelligence on the mobsters they were going after. 

Tully was sent to Vietnam in 1966 and was involved in one of the “anti-infrastructure” programs that Phoenix was based upon. Tully’s program was called Cong Tac IV and, like Phoenix, it targeted civilians who were functioning as secret agents for the Viet Cong. When the CIA and military created Phoenix, Evan Parker moved into Tully’s office. Tully knew the top Vietnamese officials and CIA officers in Vietnam, and he also knew the Italian Americans who were prominent in the Bureau of Narcotics and later the DEA. Tully and I became personal friends and he introduced me to senior people from the Bureau of Narcotics and the DEA.

The same way I had entrée through Colby into the CIA, I had an entrée through Tully into federal drug law enforcement at a high level. I met historically important people and got historically important documents, most of it new history. I haven’t gotten around to digitizing the tapes of the federal drug law enforcement officers I interviewed, but there are separate collections at the National Security Archive, for both my CIA/Phoenix program materials and my federal drug law enforcement materials. 

TRACY: I’m wondering how the former governor of Pennsylvania and Bush administration officer, Tom Ridge, fits into all this. Was he not involved in Operation Phoenix? 

VALENTINE: I’m not sure about Ridge. He was in an infantry unit in Vietnam from late 1969 into 1970. He worked in a team with four Americans and seven Vietnamese soldiers going after insurgents, not North Vietnamese regulars. So he was part of the pacification program. He got a bronze star for killing a young man carrying a sack of potatoes. He may have been a sniper and he may have been involved in one of the programs Phoenix coordinated, but it doesn’t seem like he was a Phoenix advisor. 

Ridge had been a governor and had executive management experience when he was appointed to run the Office of Homeland Security and later the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). He was a political cadre who could be trusted to implement Republican Party policy. 

At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security was based on the Phoenix program model Nelson Brickham developed in Vietnam. Ridge may have had some related pacification experience, which is what homeland security is; but he certainly understood how to manage organizations. The key word is coordination. When the National Security Establishment wanted to centralize the War on Terror here in the United States, through the DHS, they copied how Phoenix had coordinated multiple agencies in order to streamline and bureaucratize the war against the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI). 

Phoenix proved an incredibly successful model for pacification in South Vietnam. It was the silver lining in the Vietnam War. Politically the war was a disaster, but bureaucratically the Phoenix program succeeded. It became the model for CIA operations in Central America – the Salvador Option. 

The Phoenix program established Intelligence Operations and Coordinating Centers in the provinces and districts (PIOCCs and DIOCCs) of South Vietnam. Similarly, the Department of Homeland Security has created “fusion centers” in every state and major city across the country. The fusion centers coordinate all the agencies in an area exactly like IOCCs did in Vietnam; systematized and computerized, they coordinate contributing intelligence analysts and operating units. It’s the same highly bureaucratized system for dispensing with anything and anyone who can’t be assimilated. 

TRACY: That’s an ominous set of observations for someone who has studied the Phoenix program in such great depth. You are saying the Phoenix template is something that has been grafted onto the American homeland. 

VALENTINE: Absolutely. And I’m not the only one that talks about it. David Kilcullen was a counterinsurgency advisor to the Bush and Obama administrations and in 2004 he called for a global Phoenix operation. 3 

Tom Hayden described Kilcullen as the “chief advisor on counterinsurgency operations” to General David Petraeus “in planning the 2007 US troop surge (in Iraq). He also served as chief strategist in the State Department’s counterterrorism office in 2005 and 2006, and has been employed in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and Southeast Asia. In the section titled ‘A Global Phoenix Program’ in his 2004 article, Kilcullen describes the Vietnam Phoenix program as ‘unfairly maligned’ and ‘highly effective.’ Dismissing CIA sponsorship and torture allegations as ‘popular mythology,’ Kilcullen calls Phoenix a misunderstood ‘civilian aid and development program’ that was supported by ‘pacification’ operations to disrupt the Vietcong, whose infrastructure ruled vast swaths of rural South Vietnam. A ‘global Phoenix program,’ he wrote, would provide a starting point for dismantling the worldwide jihadist infrastructure today.” 4 

TRACY: How did Kilcullen want to see a Phoenix program imposed upon the world? 

VALENTINE: If he understood it correctly, he’d know that the strength of the Phoenix program was in the IOCC centers, which allowed for political control. Through a network of Phoenix centers, management is able to control targeting and messaging. I imagine Kilcullen wanted such highly bureaucratized centers set up in or near nations in which the CIA and military are hunting terrorists. Such centers would allow the White House to direct the CIA to direct the military to target the right terrorists. Leave ours alone. 

Seymour Hersh is always looked to for insight into the CIA. In December 2003 he wrote an article in The New Yorker in which he said the Special Operations people in the military were going to use Phoenix as a model in Iraq. 5 True to his high-toned style, Hersh focused on the sensational “death squad” aspect of Phoenix, not the revealing organizational aspect. He keeps the focus narrow. 

Phoenix is greater than the sum of its parts because it has symbolic meaning. But its lurid aspects – like the death squads Hersh emphasizes – grab everyone’s attention. In Iraq, the CIA handed out decks of “playing” cards featuring pictures of “High Value” Sunni officials in the Saddam Hussein government. That psywar gimmick and jargon was right out of the Phoenix program. 

The purpose of the Phoenix program was to “neutralize” the civilian members of the underground revolutionary government in South Vietnam. Neutralize was a broad term that included a number of measures. The first step was to identity a suspected subversive. After that, Nelson Brickham, the CIA officer who created Phoenix in 1967, explained the process to me as follows: “My motto was to recruit them; if you can’t recruit them, defect them (that’s Chieu Hoi); if you can’t defect them, capture them; if you can’t capture them, kill them. That was my attitude toward high-level VCI.” 

VCI was the acronym for Viet Cong Infrastructure – the name the CIA gave to the members of the revolutionaries’ underground government and guerrilla support system. 

As part of its Congressional mandate, the CIA has the job of counter subversion outside the United States. Thus, when the US is waging a counterinsurgency in a nation like Iraq or Afghanistan, the CIA pursues a political order of battle, while the US armed forces pursue a military order of battle. In practice, however, counter-subversion during a counterinsurgency is a paramilitary police function. Thus, in South Vietnam, the US military supported the CIA’s Phoenix program with troops and equipment. 

In 1969, the CIA ostensibly turned the Phoenix program over to the US military, at which point soldiers first began to pursue a political order of battle and conduct systematic counter-subversive operations against foreign civilians. The creation of Phoenix was a watershed. Prior to it, military people were only allowed to target civilians if they were secret agents or guerrillas attacking military bases or personnel. But in its fanatical pursuit of victory in Vietnam, the military deliberately blurred the lines between subversives and innocent civilians, and killed anyone who got in the way, including children, like it did at My Lai and a thousand other places. 

Following its ignoble defeat in Vietnam, America was driven by a reactionary impulse to reassert its global dominance. The justifications used to rationalize Phoenix were institutionalized as policy, as became evident after 9/11 and the initiation of the War on Terror. Since then the CIA and US military have been conducting joint Phoenix-style operations worldwide without any compunctions, most prominently in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Also evolving was the relationship between the CIA, the military and the media. In Vietnam, there was more press freedom and the carnage was filmed and shown on TV every night. But the CIA and military felt those images turned the public against the war, so by the time America invaded Iraq in 2003, reporters were embedded in military units. The media became a PR unit of the military and the CIA, with the Orwellian result that the public did not see images of the mangled bodies. The public was denied access to the truth of what its government was actually doing, and when Chelsea Manning leaked the Collateral Murder video to Wikileaks, she was summarily tried and imprisoned. 6 

When I was doing my interviews for The Phoenix Program, certain CIA people would tell me how a particular correspondent from CBS or The New York Times would come into their offices and ask about the programs they managed. The CIA officers would talk openly about their operations, but the Vietnam-era correspondents wouldn’t publish the details, because their editors had a gentlemen’s agreement with the CIA not to reveal the secrets. They could know the secrets and as long as they didn’t reveal them, they could continue to have access. 

While I was researching Phoenix, I went to people like Seymour Hersh and Gloria Emerson but they wouldn’t talk to me. I had a harder time getting reporters to talk to me than I did CIA people, because as soon as they expressed any knowledge about Phoenix, the follow up question was: Why weren’t you writing about it? Then they’d have to reveal this gentlemen’s agreement with the CIA. 

The “old boy” network existed in Vietnam but it’s gotten a lot worse; it’s impossible now for anyone to interview mid-level CIA people on the record and reveal the facts. Since Iran Contra, the bureaucracies have instituted incredible obstacles that make it impossible for people to see what’s going on inside their private club. The public is totally reliant now on whistle-blowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who are then vilified, imprisoned, and/or chased into exile. 

TRACY: We see what, for example, happened to Gary Webb in the mid-1990s. He had some people who had divulged significant information to him and yet the CIA denied it, and that more or less cost him his career. He had no one, no colleagues of his, who actually went to bat for him to any significant degree to keep him in the industry because what he was doing is what investigative journalists and historians, such as you, should be doing. 

VALENTINE: Yes. Gary Webb was an investigative journalist whose “Dark Alliance” series in 1996 exposed the link between the CIA’s “Contras” in Central America and a crack cocaine dealer in Los Angeles. The story rattled the CIA. Members of the black community were up in arms. Then the CIA’s old boy network sprang into action and Webb was nit-picked to death by fellow journalists for minor inaccuracies in his work. But his real sin was revealing the CIA’s criminal involvement in systematic racial oppression through the war on drugs. 

Webb committed suicide in 2004. But he wasn’t the first American citizen to be attacked for telling the truth about the CIA’s central role in drug trafficking. In his 1972 book The Politics in Heroin in Southeast Asia, Al McCoy detailed much of the CIA’s drug network in Vietnam and the Golden Triangle region of Laos, Burma and Thailand. When the CIA found out what McCoy was doing, one of its most senior executives, Cord Meyer, tried to get McCoy’s publisher to suppress the book. When that didn’t work, the CIA tapped McCoy’s phone and the IRS audited his income tax. Behind the scenes, the CIA forced McCoy’s sources to recant. The famous Church Committee, which exposed a lot of the CIA’s secrets, investigated McCoy’s allegations and found the CIA innocent of any involvement in drug trafficking. McCoy moved to Australia and didn’t return to America for eleven years. 

The CIA’s control of international drug trafficking is America’s darkest secret, and after the Webb scandal, the old boy network imposed even more restrictions on the media. The pressures the CIA imposes on the media amount to political warfare directed against the American public. It’s no different than how the CIA mounts counter-subversion operations overseas. 

Nowadays, the only way you can discern what’s going on is by studying and understanding the historical arc of these bureaucracies. Where did the CIA come from? Where is it going? If you look at it historically, you can see beyond the spin and it becomes de-mystified. And that is not a happy story. As power gets more concentrated in the security services, the media is no longer simply compliant, it’s functioning as their public relations arm. It simply ignores anything that contradicts the official line. 

TRACY: There is almost a complete blackout of Jade Helm in the mainstream media. It is only getting coverage and discussion and analysis in the alternative media. 

VALENTINE: Yes. Jade Helm was a military training exercise in Texas, Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Utah. Military and local officials set up Phoenix-style coordination centers, as a way of giving Special Operations and “Civil Affairs” personnel experience working with para militarized police forces in what was called a realistic “war experience” in domestic counterinsurgency operations. The media blackout was an essential part of the plan. The censorship was symbolic of how, as a function of the concentration of capital, the communications/media industry has been centralized and is now part of the political warfare apparatus. The media industry has been reduced to a few huge corporations that control most of the outlets. Control of information has become the key to the oligarchy’s success. Very few independent news organizations are able to compete with the giants, or get information out across the country, so people really have to search for facts on the Internet 

TRACY: Even some of the alternative progressive left media that were good twenty or so years ago are increasingly dependent upon foundation money that comes with strings attached, and they’re not as inclined to push the envelope as I think they once were. 

VALENTINE: Sure. As a person who is interested in how the CIA uses language and mythology to control political and social movements, I see this development as ominous. People like Glenn Greenwald who take money from billionaires insist it has no editorial influence on them. But media people who are taking money from billionaires and CIA-connected foundations must realize that their sugar daddies can sink their operations in a moment because of something they write, and that knowledge surely impacts what they are willing to do and say. 

Taking money from a billionaire also has tremendous symbolic meaning. It means the person taking the money approves of one person having eight billion dollars when three billion people barely survive. Through their example, celebrity media figures like Greenwald are telling their followers that they support the exploitation and imperialism their benefactors engage in. 

As all advertising people know, symbolic messages don’t have to be articulated, they’re understood subliminally. Greenwald’s followers like it that way. It means they don’t have to consciously confront their tacit support for an unjust system. That self-censorship allows celebrity journalists like Greenwald and his sidekick Jeremy Scahill to promote themselves as heroic adversaries of the system. And they’ll continue to get away with the double game until their followers start challenging their own basic assumptions. The system will never change until people climb out of their comfortable darkness and start rejecting the system’s inequalities, instead of just feeding off of them. 

TRACY: You mention Greenwald. There are other prominent figures on the left who fashion themselves as freedom fighters in the informational sphere, where that’s arguably not the case. This is something that I think goes back over forty years to Daniel Ellsberg. The most important case in freedom of the press in the twentieth century, if not the country’s history, was the Pentagon Papers, and yet Ellsberg himself was a member of the CIA. 

VALENTINE: Well, Greenwald and Ellsberg certainly aren’t “left”, and Ellsberg was not a fully integrated, back-stopped employee of the CIA. But for a period of time in 1965 and 1966, he did work for the CIA’s station chief in Saigon, John Hart (whom I mentioned earlier as having initiated the Phoenix program), gathering intelligence on what prominent South Vietnamese politicians and officials were thinking. I was told that Ellsberg could recall conversations verbatim, and that he was introduced to these important political people at social events and then reported to Hart about their thoughts. He was also working at a high level in the pacification programs upon which Phoenix was based. Ellsberg worked with CIA officers Edward Lansdale and Lucien Conein, and US Information Service officer Frank Scotton, about whom more remains to be said. 

The problem is that Ellsberg presented himself in his autobiography as having been working with the State Department. That was his cover. And in the movie about him, he’s pictured in an army uniform on patrol. He misrepresented himself. He wasn’t honest. All of his work with the CIA is absent. Why? 

It goes back to the fact that Ellsberg was a full-fledged hawk who turned against the Vietnam War. But after he leaked the Pentagon Papers, the left adopted him as a symbol of someone who saw the light. The left takes credit for ending the war, and Ellsberg is a central character in its narrative. So the antiwar movement in particular and the left (whatever that is) in general goes along with the cover story. 

But people can’t understand the significance of the Pentagon Papers, or the true nature of the Vietnam War, without understanding Ellsberg’s work for the CIA. His worldview was defined by his intimate relationships with his mentor, Ed Lansdale, 7 and the other political warfare people he worked with in Vietnam, especially Frank Scotton. Ellsberg, Scotton, and a handful of other experts prepared America’s organizational blueprint for pacifying South Vietnam’s civilian population in the seminal “Roles and Missions” report in August 1966. That study sets the stage for the Phoenix program. 

All this loops back to the issue of access. I didn’t know who Scotton was until Colby referred me to him in 1986. Like the other people Colby referred me to, Scotton thought I was CIA-approved. He tried to impress me, and when I interviewed him at his home in McLean, Virginia, he said “we” (which could only have meant him and Colby) had instructed Ellsberg to release the Pentagon Papers. Scotton has since written an autobiography in which he denies having told Ellsberg to do it. He now says Ellsberg merely showed him the Pentagon Paper documents in 1970. 

All this also loops back to CIA drug trafficking. A moment ago I mentioned that Al McCoy’s sources had recanted. Chief among McCoy’s sources who recanted was Dan Ellsberg’s former comrade, Lou Conein. When McCoy spoke to him in the summer of 1971, Conein confessed to having arranged a truce between the CIA and Corsican drug traffickers in 1965, at the same time he was working with Ellsberg. 

The summer of 1971 was a busy time as well. Colby was due to testify to Congress about the Phoenix program in July, but a larger event grabbed the headlines. On June 13, 1971, The New York Times began printing lengthy excerpts from the Pentagon Papers – that painstakingly edited stack of documents that, even by name, deflected attention away from the CIA. Consequently, little public attention was paid when, on July 15, 1971, the Times reported: “Previously classified information read into the record of a House Government Operations subcommittee today disclosed that 26,843 non-military Vietcong insurgents and sympathizers were neutralized in 14 months through Operation Phoenix.” 

All these threads weave together to create the myths Americans believe about the CIA; and Ellsberg’s cover story is part of the fictionalized tale.

TRACY: The reluctance of certain editors to publish what you’ve researched and revealed about Ellsberg, do you think in part that has to do with just a wish to sustain the legend of Ellsberg, the symbol of what he’s become? 

VALENTINE: Sure. They’re part of the same network of management level media people the CIA influences; what CIA officer Cord Meyer dubbed “the Compatible Left”. 

Let me tell you about my experience with the Compatible Left. William Morrow & Company published The Phoenix Program in 1990, but before it hit the bookstands, The New York Times gave it a terrible review. After that, the media wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. As far as the left was concerned, the book presented new material they couldn’t digest. I guess it threatened their proprietary claim on Vietnam War history. 

The militant Right was never going to acknowledge it anyway. But the left’s leadership is part of the CIA’s old boy network and like all American intellectuals, they look to the Times for direction and validation. So the word went out to ignore the book, not just because it revealed CIA secrets, but because it identified the media, and the Times in particular, as the reason why the public can’t see the CIA clearly for what it is: a criminal conspiracy on behalf of wealthy capitalists. 

I had also noted that the release of the Pentagon Papers distracted attention from Congressional hearings into Phoenix. In subsequent books I added that it distracted attention from reports on CIA drug trafficking as well. 

In any event, all my access to the CIA was meaningless. The CIA through its friends in the media was able to “neutralize” me. Only a handful of people recognized the book’s historical value – people like Al McCoy, who called the book “the definitive account” in a blurb for the iUniverse edition. 

But my supporters all had the same response: I’d crossed the line and would never get another book published in the United States. So I learned the hard way that the CIA has a strategic intelligence network of management level people in the information industry who know, through instruments like the Times Book Review section, what books and authors to marginalize. 

Peter Dale Scott had also been marginalized as a result of his 1972 book, The War Conspiracy, and his 1993 book, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. Peter supported me, and a few years after the Phoenix book was published, I mentioned to him that I was writing an article, based on my interviews with Scotton and Conein, about Ellsberg’s deep political association with the CIA. Peter is Ellsberg’s friend, and even though the article had the potential to embarrass Ellsberg, he arranged for me to interview him. Peter gave me Ellsberg’s number and I called at a pre-arranged time. And the first thing Ellsberg said to me was, “You can’t possibly understand me because you’re not a celebrity.” 

If you want to understand the critical role celebrities play in determining what society accepts as real and valuable, read Guy Debord’s books The Society of the Spectacle and its sequel, Comments. Debord explains the symbolic role celebrities play (at times inadvertently) in maintaining the illusions we confuse with reality. 

Debord cites the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who famously said: “But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence . . . illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.” 

When Ellsberg told me he was a celebrity, he was saying that he underwent a symbolic transformation the moment he leaked the Pentagon Papers, and landed in a social realm that alienated him from non-celebrities like me. He became an icon, and nobody on the left is about to say, “Oh, my god! Valentine had this revelation about Ellsberg. Let’s rethink everything we believe is true.” 

Like its doppelgangers on the right, the management class on the left is invested in celebrity heroes who represent their business interests. They focus on the symbol and ignore any contradictory but essential facts, the way Greenwald and Scahill ignore Pierre Omidyar’s funding of the Center for the United Action in Kiev, which was a Phoenix-style coordination center for covert political action. 8 

If the owners of a symbol are forced to talk about an embarrassing fact that undermines their business interests, they interpret the fact narrowly. This is one of the methodologies the political parties and their compatible media outlets employ: they summarize and misrepresent a problematic subject in nine seconds and then repeat the summary over and over again. They don’t take the approach of a literary critic; they don’t look honestly at what the government’s carefully chosen words mean. They don’t look for what’s not said. In fact, they play the same game. Their methods are identical. 

I experienced the same thing when I wrote my article about Ellsberg. No one on the American left would publish it. Eventually Robin Ramsay published it in Lobster magazine in Great Britain. The article was titled “The Clash of the Icons” and demonstrated that Ellsberg and Al McCoy held contradictory positions about the CIA’s relationship with drug traffickers in Vietnam. 9 McCoy accused CIA officers Ed Lansdale and Lou Conein of collaborating with Corsican drug smugglers in 1965, at the same time Ellsberg was working closely with them. But when I interviewed him, Ellsberg insisted that these CIA officers were not involved in the drug traffic, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. 10 

Several years later Alex Cockburn and Jeff St. Clair published my Ellsberg article in Counterpunch. They were having fun ridiculing whacky left assumptions and sacred cows, like Israel. They loved my Phoenix program book and my article on Ellsberg, which we renamed “Will the Real Daniel Ellsberg Please Stand Up.” 11 They featured it in Counterpunch, and of course everyone on the left ignored it. 

Maintaining Ellsberg’s image is mostly a business decision, because Ellsberg is what the Mafia calls “a money-maker.” If one of these Compatible Left media outlets has Ellsberg talk at a peace conference it’s sponsoring, a hundred fans will pay cash to see him. The Compatible Left is a business venture that’s dependent on the capitalist society within which it operates. At the same time, Ellsberg is a symbol of the illusion that change is possible within the system. He calls for reform, yes, and like the Compatible Left, he backs many important progressive programs. But more importantly, by covering up his own CIA connections, he’s reassuring the bourgeoisie that subscribes to these media outlets that everything they assume about their leaders is right. And that’s how symbolic heroes mislead the way. 

This is Ellsberg’s symbolic function; as a certified hero who has achieved celebrity status, he proves the system works. He leaked the Pentagon Papers and stopped the war. And he suffered for it. President Nixon wanted to put him on trial for treason. Nixon’s staff pulled all sports of dirty tricks to intimidate and discredit him, but he soldiered on. That’s the myth of the hero. 

But there are no heroes, and the system doesn’t work for everyone, like it rewards Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! Or like it rewards Greenwald and Scahill. 

If Ellsberg were to reveal the CIA’s secrets, he would no longer have the same reassuring effect on the liberal bourgeoisie. So his sponsors never mention that he had an affair with the mistress of a Corsican drug smuggler in Saigon. That’s not in the book or the movie. He denies his CIA buddies were involved in the drug trade, even though they were. He won’t talk about the CIA war crimes he witnessed or the contradictions of capitalism. Like Seymour Hersh and other liberal media icons, he avoids naming CIA officers or detailing the CIA’s class functions. He’s an expert who tells the bourgeoisie it’s all under control. He serves this symbolic function and he’s been doing it for forty years. And if, like me, you violate his sanctity by revealing the truth, you’ll never get published by the Compatible Left. You lose access. 

TRACY: A recent incarnation of Daniel Ellsberg might be Jeremy Scahill. You mentioned Democracy Now! a moment ago. He was a correspondent for them in the early 2000s when the Iraq war was ramping up along with the War on Terror. 

VALENTINE: Ellsberg was never a reporter or media mogul like Scahill, but they are both celebrities; Ellsberg with the older generation, Scahill with naïve millennials. They are also similar in that Scahill made a grandiose documentary film about himself, in which he characterized himself as a hero. He barely mentioned the CIA in the film, and his publication, The Intercept, avoids any analysis of the CIA as an instrument of capitalism and imperialism. 

Scahill and Greenwald have the same pacifying effect on the liberal bourgeoisie as Ellsberg. They rile them up a bit with recycled exposés, but symbolically they’re part of the system. They style themselves as alternative, but they’re not about to engage in self-criticism or risk revealing the critical evidence that would indict individual CIA officers. 

It’s a Catch-22. Until the media stops covering for the CIA, people will never understand how illegal, covert operations systematically distort our basic assumptions about everything. Meanwhile, these media celebrities perpetuate all the myths upon which the class system is based. Greenwald and Scahill are too busy grabbing for the candy and portraying themselves as heroes and winners who made it big. 

TRACY: The War on Drugs, as you chronicle in your books, fundamentally changes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Can you provide us an overview of the CIA’s increased involvement up to the present? 

VALENTINE: The Bureau of Narcotics was removed from Treasury and recreated as the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in the Justice Department in 1968, because it had gathered indisputable evidence that the CIA was running the Golden Triangle narcotics business. The heroin being sold to American soldiers in Vietnam was coming from the CIA’s clients in Laos. Al McCoy wrote about this back in 1972. The CIA was protecting the major opium producers in the Golden Triangle, just like they’ve been protecting the major drug dealers in Afghanistan for the last fifteen years. They were funneling heroin and opium to their warlords in South Vietnam as a payoff for advancing the US policies that were detrimental to their own country. The CIA bought their services by allowing them to deal narcotics, and a lot of the dope made its way back to the homeland through enterprising soldiers and various criminal organizations. It was a criminal conspiracy of the highest order. 

The National Security Establishment realized the conspiracy was on the verge of being exposed in 1968, so it pulled various executive management, enforcement and intelligence functions out of the BNDD and gave them to the CIA, so the CIA could protect its drug smuggling assets around the world. At that point federal drug law enforcement became an adjunct of national security. 

TRACY: So this firewall that theoretically exists between the CIA operations abroad and in the United States has been by-passed in the war on drugs. 

VALENTINE: Yes. And by studying the relationship between the CIA and federal drug law enforcement, you can see why I refer to the CIA as the organized crime branch of the US government. Nowhere is that more evident than in how it controls international drug networks. If you’re a general in Bolivia and you’re assassinating leftists, the CIA will allow you to deal drugs. 12 If you’re Manuel Noriega and you’re providing intelligence on revolutionaries in Central America, you’re allowed to deal drugs. If you’re a South Vietnamese general or an Afghan warlord, you’re allowed to deal drugs because you’re furthering the national security interests of the United States, which means its corporate, as well as political and social interests. 

In order for this to happen, two things are important: the CIA has to control certain branches of the DEA, and it has to control the media. And it has systematized its control over these institutions.

Chapter 2  

ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER: 

MY RARE ACCESS IN INVESTIGATING 

THE WAR ON DRUGS 

RYAN DAWSON: Let’s discuss the relationship between crime and law enforcement. You talked about this in an article about an experience you had growing up in New York. 1 Let’s start off with what you learned in your young adulthood, and do tell about the relationship between crime and law enforcement, if there can even be a line. 

VALENTINE: What I learned is that there isn’t a line. The story I’m going to tell about my experience is allegorical. It’s a microcosm of the way the world works, how propaganda and Madison Avenue advertising convince people that there are forces of good fighting forces of evil. But if people saw through the propaganda, they’d have different attitudes and our country would be structured differently. But the law-making branch of our government is in the hands of professional criminals. Everything they do is in the service of crime, of holding down or stealing from the poor and protecting or giving to the rich. I came to realize all this as a young person, thanks to my father. 

The lesson my father taught me occurred in 1968, just 23 years after World War Two. It’s almost fifty years since then, so the experience I had was contextually closer to the “good” war than the “bad” Vietnam War. Adult men in 1968 viewed America as having saved the world for democracy. It was easier to be rebellious back then, when millions of middle class white males had to reeducate themselves and support one another in order to avoid being killed for Dow Chemical and Dow Jones in Vietnam.

My father worked in the Post Office in the village where he’d lived as a child. He worked the graveyard shift and I worked for a tree company in town. I was home from college for the summer and I worked for the Coggeshall Tree Company, climbing trees. 

My father and I didn’t get along. But I ate breakfast in the same diner where my father had a cup of coffee after getting off the graveyard shift. These were the days of the “generation gap”. He sat on one side of the diner by the kitchen door with the cops and the older blue collar workers. They’d talk about how much they hated Muhammad Ali, who’d refused to go to Vietnam, and Joe Willy Namath. My friends and I had long hair and resisted the war. We were smoking dope and taking acid, and our girlfriends were young and pretty and sexually liberated thanks to the pill, so they hated us too. 

One day my father and I met at the cash register. He was waiting for me when I got outside. “I want you to meet me tomorrow at the bank,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you. Come about an hour early.” 

We didn’t get along, but he was my father so I did what he said. 

The bank was at the other end of Wheeler Avenue, but not far from the diner. My great Uncle Tom Colligan worked there as a security guard. Tom had been a cop in town for many years. My father’s father had been a cop in town too, during Prohibition. 

Anyway, we met at the bank the next morning and walked down Wheeler Avenue toward the diner. The sun was just coming up and nobody was on the street. We got to the corner store at the end of Wheeler Avenue and turned right up Manville Road. The diner was a few steps up the street and I could see the bread delivery truck parked in front of it. Another car was parked beside it. I knew who the car belonged to. 

My father walked into the street with me following behind. He stood behind the delivery truck, flung the back doors open, and said to me: “Take a good look. This is the true relationship between crime and law enforcement.” 

Inside was the bakery truck driver, the Mafia representative who picked up the money and slips from the local bookie. The bookie worked at the diner and was sitting beside the bread truck driver. In the back of the truck were three village cops. I’d known them all my life. I went to school with their kids. I knew their names. 

They’d been caught red-handed and their mouths were hanging open. When they started muttering curses, my father abruptly closed the doors. He walked away and went about his business. Me too. 

The next day I was back in the diner and nobody said a word. It was like I’d been initiated into a secret society. Most of the people in town had no idea this was going on. They thought the cops give you a speeding ticket. They don’t see the cops associating with professional criminals and making money in the process. They believe that when a guy puts on a uniform – a guy who was a bully in school and didn’t develop the skills to be a plumber or go to college – he becomes virtuous. But the guys who go into law enforcement relate more to the crooks they associate with on a daily basis than the citizens they’re supposed to protect and serve. They’re corrupted. 

The CIA is populated with the same kind of people. Nelson Brickham, whom I mentioned in the previous chapter as the CIA officer who created the Phoenix program, told me this about his colleagues: “I have described the intelligence service as a socially acceptable way of expressing criminal tendencies. A guy who has strong criminal tendencies but is too much of a coward to be one, would wind up in a place like the CIA if he had the education.” Brickham described CIA officers as mercenaries “who found a socially acceptable way of doing these things and, I might add, getting very well paid for it.” 

Occasionally the cops have to arrest criminals and put them in jail, but it’s generally the ones who aren’t in the Mafia or Mafia guys who broke some agreement. If you’re black or a minority, you’re rarely going to benefit from this accommodation the cops have with organized crime. 

What I witnessed was mind-boggling, and being 18 years old, I wasn’t ready to think about it then. But I did think about it over the ensuing twenty years. And as I started researching and writing, that experience, and some similar ones I had, got me interested in the underworld; things like the Mafia’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination. I wanted to learn about those things. 

In 1981 my father gave me the lesson that got me writing. We hadn’t spoken in ten years. But he’d just gotten out of the hospital after his second open heart surgery, and his defenses were down. He called me up and said, “I understand you want to be a writer. Come on home. I’ve got a story to tell you.” 

Turns out he’d been a prisoner of war in World War Two. He hadn’t told anyone, but he’d been a POW in the Philippines in a camp with around 120 Australian and 40 English soldiers. My father was the only American and aligned with the Aussies. The camp commandant, a major in the British army, made a deal with the Japanese; in exchange for having control over discipline in the camp, he would ensure that there would be no escape attempts. 

The Australians didn’t care what this English major said, and four of them tried to escape. But the major found out and informed on them. The four Australians were brought back to camp and beheaded on Christmas Day 1943. 

A couple of days later, two Australians, along with my father, murdered this English major in retaliation. Nothing happened until the camp was liberated in October 1944, at which point the existence of the camp was covered up. The military gave my father a new military record and warned him that if he ever told anyone about the camp, he’d be prosecuted for his role in the murder of the English major. 

I wrote about that in my first book, The Hotel Tacloban. 2 

I’d seen the true relationship between crime and law enforcement and after my father told me his story about the prison camp, I knew the military can rewrite history. It can coerce someone into a silence so deep and damaging it causes heart disease. That was a turning point for me. I realized how deeply entrenched the corruption is, and I began to observe the forms it takes in our society, including racism. The double standard associated with racism allows one group to get away with breaking the laws, and unfairly punishes another group for breaking the same laws. That’s corruption. It’s organized crime. 

Meanwhile the CIA, the military and the cops are covering their collective asses through their propaganda outlets. They’re corrupting our understanding of the world by controlling the information we receive. They create the myths we believe. If we were allowed to understand the CIA, we’d realize it’s a criminal organization that is corrupting governments and societies around the world. It’s murdering civilians who haven’t done anything wrong. The military does the same thing in a more violent way. Cops too. 

The Vietnam War had greatly affected my generation, and I wanted to find what sort of secret things the CIA did in Vietnam. As a first step I spoke to the director of a veteran’s organization in New Hampshire, where I was living at the time. I asked if there was any facet of the war that hadn’t been written about. Without hesitation he said the Phoenix program. 

So I decided to write about Phoenix. I sent a copy of Tacloban to William Colby, who’d been director of the CIA and was closely associated with Phoenix. Colby read Tacloban and liked it. His reaction was, “Well, you have a basis to understand what happened in Vietnam.” We did two interviews and he introduced me to some senior CIA people who were involved in facets of the Phoenix program. 

It was incredibly eye-opening for me. I wrote about all that in The Phoenix Program.

In the course of investigating the CIA in Vietnam, I learned that huge amounts of narcotic drugs were flowing from the Golden Triangle area in Burma, Thailand and Laos. The network began after World War Two, when the CIA had set up a Kuomintang army in Burma. The Kuomintang was the ruling party of the Nationalist Chinese who’d been chased out of China by the Communists in 1947. 

The CIA watched while the Nationalist Chinese massacred about 30,000 people in Taiwan in 1947. The Kuomintang had fantasies of reconquering China and the CIA played on those fantasies; it established a Kuomintang army in Burma and used it to attack China. At the same time the CIA was conspiring with the Thai government, which was up to its eyeballs in drug trafficking. Opium trafficking wasn’t frowned upon in that part of the world, the way it is here, and the press here took little notice. 

By the 1960s the CIA also had a secret army in Laos under Vang Pao, the leader of the Hmong tribe, who supported themselves by growing opium, with considerable CIA assistance. The Hmong were looked down upon by the ruling ethnic Laotians, who ran a CIA-protected heroin processing operation. The CIA worked with the Hmong and Laotians just like the cops and the Mafia ran that bookie operation in suburban New York. 

Opium from the Kuomintang army in Burma was moved by mule caravan to Houei Sai, Laos, next to the CIA’s 118A base at Nam Yu, and from Houei Sai it was flown to Taiwanese middlemen who worked with the Mafia. Opium from the Hmong was converted into heroin in Vientiane. The CIA controlled the operation and made sure that some of the heroin and opium got to Saigon. Top generals in Vietnam controlled various provinces and regions like warlords. The CIA made sure the drugs got to these generals. They each had a distribution franchise and they’d sell the drugs in their area and make huge profits off it; which is why they supported American policy and gave the CIA a free hand. 

By the late 1960s, most of the drugs were going to American soldiers. By 1970 the Nixon administration was aware that thousands of soldiers were addicts and that the problem was affecting the course of the war. Veterans returned to America with their habits, and the CIA was underwriting the whole thing. 

I was curious about how US drug law enforcement dealt with the fact that American soldiers were being addicted and that tons of drugs were pouring into the US thanks to the CIA. The DEA had to be involved in this CIA drug smuggling operation, and I was determined to write a book about that. 

My next two books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, focus on the corruption the CIA fosters within US law enforcement. 3 Those books are about the role the federal drug agencies play in protecting the CIA and its drug smuggling assets. I did interviews with agents and I provide a lot of documentation. Most of that material is archived at the National Security Arcives. 4 The books also show how the drug law enforcement agencies make sure drugs get to despised minorities, people our rulers want to see in prison and politically disenfranchised. I show how drug law enforcement serves the national security function of making sure the right people get the drugs. 

Essential to this arrangement is the CIA’s accommodation with organized crime. The gangsters are allowed to import and distribute the drugs in the major cities, in exchange for telling drug agents which street dealers they’re supplying. The hoods get rich by informing, and when the CIA has no more use for them, they’re discarded like the generals in Vietnam. 

DAWSON: Let’s talk about plausible deniability. 

VALENTINE: The CIA doesn’t do anything it can’t deny. A senior CIA officer named Tom Donohue told me about this. Colby introduced me to Donohue and he was very forthcoming. Some of the guys Colby referred me to were hoping for the opportunity to tell their stories. It has to do with grandiosity; there’s no point doing dangerous things unless the guys talk about your heroics in saloons. They saw me as a chance to memorialize themselves as heroes. But in the process they had to explain a bit about how the CIA works – if not sources, at least its methods. 

Donohue was a prime example. He’d studied Comparative Religion at Columbia University and understood symbolic transformation. He was a product and practitioner of Cook County politics who joined the CIA after World War Two when he perceived the Cold War as “a growth industry.” He’d been the CIA’s station chief in the Philippines at the end of his career and when I spoke to him, he was in business with a former Filipino Defense Minister. He was putting his contacts to good use, which is par for the course. It’s how corruption works for senior bureaucrats. 

Donohue said the CIA doesn’t do anything unless it meets two criteria. The first criterion is “intelligence potential.” The program must benefit the CIA; maybe it tells them how to overthrow a government, or how to blackmail an official, or where the report is hidden, or how to get an agent across a border. The euphemism “intelligence potential” means it has some use for the CIA. The second criterion is that it can be denied. If they can’t find a way to set it up so they can deny it, they won’t do it. 

Most everything the CIA does is deniable. It’s part of their Congressional mandate. Congress doesn’t want to be held accountable for the criminal things the CIA does. The only time something the CIA does becomes public knowledge – other than the occasional accident or whistleblower – is when Congress or the President think it’s helpful for propaganda reasons to let people know the CIA is doing this. 

Torture is a good example. After 9/11, and up until and through the invasion of Iraq, the American people wanted revenge. They wanted to see Muslim blood flowing. So the Bush administration let it leak that they were torturing evil doers. They played it cute and called it “enhanced interrogation,” but everyone understood symbolically. 

DAWSON: They may have tortured people for four years. 

VALENTINE: They’ve always tortured people. Look at slavery. In America the bosses cover it up, which goes back to what I was telling you in the beginning. If you visit Thomas Jefferson’s estate at Monticello, you won’t see the slave quarters. It’s a cover up, like The Hotel Tacloban. But, unfortunately, many people like it that way; they prefer not to know. They prefer a poster with a happy cliché on it – if we all join hands and drink Pepsi there will be peace in the world. Like any other kind of advertising, propaganda is meant to delude not inform. But it’s better to face the facts. 

While I was researching Phoenix, I found out about the CIA’s involvement in drug trafficking. I also learned that as the Vietnam War was winding down, the CIA started reducing the number of officers serving in Laos and Vietnam. The CIA felt it had the situation under control there and was looking for new homes for those guys. I discovered that over one hundred officers were funneled into the BNDD and DEA. These recycled CIA officers had been involved in Phoenix and associated programs, and I wondered, “Why are they going into the DEA, and who are they really working for?” 

One of my CIA contacts was a fascinating man named Tully Acampora. Tully was a World War Two veteran who started working for the CIA in Korea and ended up being detached to the CIA for most of his career. In Vietnam, starting in 1966, he was General Nguyen Ngoc Loan’s advisor. Loan was famous as the guy who was photographed shooting a VC guerrilla in the head during the Tet offensive in 1968. 

Al McCoy described Loan at length in The Politics of Heroin. Loan, McCoy explained, was Air Marshall Nguyen Cao Ky’s deputy. After Ky was appointed Premier in July 1965, he appointed Loan to head the National Police, the Military Security Service, and the Central Intelligence Organization. Loan established and managed Ky’s political machine by “using systematic corruption to combat urban guerrilla warfare.” Corruption financed cash rewards for agents. Loan “systematized the corruption, regulating how much each particular agency would collect, how much each officer would skim off for his personal use, and what percentage would be turned over to Ky’s political machine.” 5 

As McCoy noted, “the opium traffic was undeniably the most important source of illicit revenue.” And my friend Tully was Loan’s CIA advisor until 1968, until the CIA decided to replace Ky’s political machine with one under President Nguyen Van Thieu. 

Tully was one of the people that started funneling CIA officers into the DEA in the early 1970s. I don’t want to bore you with details, but it’s important to know why he was in position to do that. From 1958 until 1965, Tully worked for the CIA in Italy, and while he was there he became close friends with three federal narcotic agents stationed in Rome. They were agents in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). They were Italian-Americans like Tully, and were making cases on the Mafia and its associates throughout Europe and the Middle East. 

Tully formed friendships with FBN agents Charlie Siragusa, Hank Manfredi, and Andy Tartaglino. Siragusa was the boss. He’s been in the OSS and had worked with James Jesus Angleton in Italy during World War Two. As chief of counterintelligence in the CIA, Angleton became dependent on Siragusa for his Mafia contacts. You might have wondered how it is that the CIA can reach into the underworld and compel mobsters to do its dirty work (like the assassination attempts on Castro); well, the CIA often does it through senior law enforcement officials like Charlie Siragusa. 

According to Tully, Angleton “kissed Siragusa’s ass in Macy’s window at noon.” 

Hank Manfredi had been in the Army CID in World War Two and was actually a CIA officer working under FBN cover. He spent his entire career in Italy until 1968, when he had a crippling heart attack and returned to the US. The FBN had been reformed as the BNDD by then, and Andy Tartaglino was one of its deputy directors. Tartaglino arranged for Manfredi to join the BNDD first as an inspector and later as a manager in its foreign operations division. 

Siragusa and Manfredi were no longer alive when I started researching the CIA and the DEA, but Tartaglino was. I told Tully that I want to learn about the CIA’s involvement in drug trafficking, and he sent me to Andy. 

Andy became the DEA’s Deputy Director of Administration when the organization was formed in 1973. He was one of the most knowledgeable guys about how the CIA corrupted federal law enforcement. So meeting Andy was like meeting Colby; I now had an entrée into the highest levels of the DEA. 

Tully sent me to Andy and Andy said, “Okay, I’ll talk to you as a favor for Tully, but first you have to start at the beginning with the Bureau of Narcotics. Spend a year, talk to as many people as you can, and then come back and I’ll talk to you.” 

That’s what I did and it was amazing what I found out. Tartaglino had led a corruption investigation that lasted from 1965 to 1968. It resulted in 32 agents having to resign for committing all manner of crimes. Twenty-seven informants had been murdered, allegedly by FBN agents. None of the agents were prosecuted for those murders, but the ones who were suspected were allowed to resign – it was a cover up like happened at the Hotel Tacloban POW camp. Four or five agents were indicted for other crimes, and in 1968 the Bureau of Narcotics was taken out of Treasury and put in the Justice Department. It was merged with other agencies and reorganized as the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) as a result of Tartaglino investigation into corruption, mostly in New York City. 

The media loves to talk about corruption in foreign countries, but if you want to understand corruption, you have to study the relationship between crime and law enforcement in New York City. Siragusa, Manfredi and Acampora were from New York. I’m from the suburbs, but my mother and her Italian-American family are from the city. 

Frank Serpico was a cop who exposed corruption in the NYPD in the early 1970s. He was a narcotics detective and was shot in the face by fellow cops. He survived and went to the Knapp Commission and revealed the extent of corruption within the NYPD. It was tied into what happened within the FBN, and Tartaglino was involved in that investigation too. It uncovered rampant corruption among judges, prosecutors and politicians, but they covered most of that up too. Because everyone involved in law enforcement depends on corruption so they can send their kids to college, move to the suburbs, and take vacations in Mexico. They don’t get paid enough otherwise. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As you’re probably aware, opiates were legal until 1914 when Congress passed the Harrison Narcotic Act and the federal government started to regulate opium and cocaine. The Act was a tax revenue measure; people who were importing opium and cocoa leaves into the US had to report how much they were importing so they could be taxed and the government could make some money. The government regulated how much they brought in and which companies could manufacture it. This explains how it was that the Bureau of Narcotics was first set up in the Treasury Department! 

Within a few years, Congress decided that it should be a law enforcement issue. It was a way of giving doctors, drug manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies a monopoly and sending anyone else who used or sold regulated drugs to jail. They created a narcotics law enforcement agency to find out who the addicts and their suppliers were, and to put them in prison. They gave narcotics agents guns. This is during Prohibition and anyone who knows anything about Prohibition knows that a lot of booze was coming into the country in police vans, and that cops were out on the beaches protecting the gangsters unloading the ships and making sure the police chief got the best bottle of scotch. Prohibition was the genius invention of Congress that allowed crime to become organized under the direction of law enforcement in the United States. 

DAWSON: They made it the biggest black market ever. 

VALENTINE: All of a sudden crime becomes as big an industry as the oil industry. As Meyer Lansky famously said, “We’re bigger than General Motors!” 

DAWSON: The same thing happened in Russia when they had Prohibition. 

VALENTINE: The demand was huge. So illegal drugs became a big moneymaking facet of our business society and the guys smuggling booze and dope became politically powerful. People like Arnold Rothstein, the Jewish mobster who bankrolled most of the bookie operations in America. Rothstein was extorting labor organizations in New York City. He controlled the booze coming in from Canada and by ship from Europe and Asia. He had the alcohol smuggling infrastructure so he controlled narcotics too. He had a network of Jewish gangsters working for him out of Eastern Europe and as far away as Shanghai. The first international drug smuggling network consisted of Jews who’d been relegated to certain illegal occupations, like smuggling, through discrimination. They got pushed into this business and excelled at it. 

Rothstein’s organization ended in 1928, when the Mafia and a group of younger Jewish mobsters got upset because he had a monopoly. Lucky Luciano joined forces with Meyer Lansky and they bumped off Rothstein and divvied up his empire. They incorporated crime and started dealing with the Kuomintang Chinese. 6 That’s the original syndicate. Before there was a CIA, the US government was protecting the Nationalist Chinese because they were fighting Communists. The government protected Kuomintang opium and heroin routes into Mexico and the US West Coast, which was another boon for this drug smuggling syndicate run by the Mafia. 

Luciano and Lansky organized crime on the totalitarian corporate model. They set up banks and created shell companies and paid off the cops at every step of the way. That’s their plausible deniability. The CIA hired some of these drug traffickers in World War Two for their expertise at creating false identities, crossing borders with contraband, and eluding policemen. The Mafia also controlled many unions the ruling class wanted to subvert and use for its own purposes. Hiring drug traffickers was no big deal when you consider that the military and CIA recycled a slew of Nazis, like Werner Von Braun and Reinhard Gehlen, and used them in the secret war against the Soviets after World War Two. 

DAWSON: They consolidated power too. They had Bugsy Siegel kick off a couple of Dons. It really became a syndicate, La Cosa Nostra. Like you said, it became a real corporate enterprise. They consolidated Mafia power. 

VALENTINE: Believe me it’s not actually called La Cosa Nostra. That’s an FBI invention. Nobody had heard the phrase until the FBI told Joe Valachi to introduce it to the public during Congressional hearings in 1963. La Cosa Nostra means The Our Thing. That’s the literal translation of La Cosa Nostra: The Our Thing. 

I’ll try to explain how corruption evolves. When Rothstein was assassinated, the cops ran to his office. He lived in a suite at the Park Central Hotel, but had an office elsewhere. Unfortunately, someone else got there first and grabbed Rothstein’s accounting books. Maybe that’s one of the reasons he was killed? Anyway, panic ensued in New York because everyone was on his payroll. The state Republicans started an investigation that tracked back to Tammany Democrats. Republicans were running for Congress saying, “My opponent was on Rothstein’s payroll and here are the documents.” 

Eventually it tracked back to Republicans as well. The scandal also tracked back to the top federal narcotics agents in New York City, and to Colonel Levi Nutt, who had been appointed in 1920 to run the Narcotics Division of the IRS Prohibition Unit. The Prohibition Unit was notoriously corrupt. It was in the Treasury Department and Levi Nutt was in charge of its narcotics unit, and his agents were famous for being more corrupt than the Prohibition agents. The investigation of Rothstein ended up showing that narcotics investigator Levi Nutt’s son-in-law was Rothstein’s tax attorney. 

Village cops running the numbers racket with a Mafia hood in the back of a bread truck is Corruption 101. The PhD level course is the son-in-law of the chief of the Narcotics Division writing tax returns for the world’s biggest drug smuggler. One narcotics agent told me there wasn’t a drug deal that went down in Chicago in the ‘40s and ‘50s that didn’t go through the cops to the politicians. That’s still the case today, except they’ve gotten better at disguising it. They’re able to hide the CIA’s fifty billion dollar budget. They’re better at fooling the public too, so you’d never in your wildest dreams think that your protectors are dealing with the people preying upon you. But that is a fact, and that accommodation between crime and law enforcement is the glue that holds the system together. 

Their most egregious crime is the systematic falsification of history. What starts out as an agent padding reports becomes, when all those reports are assembled, the myth of the cop or soldier or CIA agent as hero. 

FBN Agent Frankie Waters explained it to me. “One of my talents was testifying in court,” Waters said. “It was a situation that terrified me at first, but then I did it a few times and realized I liked it, because it fueled all the grandiose ideas I had about myself. And I was good at it. I could testify about a case made in Chicago!” Waters smiled exuberantly. “They called us pinch hitters.” 

It didn’t matter that some agents couldn’t testify well, Waters added, especially in big cases where 20 agents were involved. “Say agent Joe Blow seizes the most crucial piece of evidence, a note that’s essential for the jury to understand the case. Joe’s a great agent but he freezes if he has to speak in front of a crowd. A block away is his articulate partner. I’m the case agent, to whom they both submit their memos. So when I write up the final report, guess who seized the note?” 

As a way of justifying the systematic falsification of reports, Waters evoked the myth of the seasoned investigator who must bend the rules to get the bad guys. “There’s a bigger picture you’ve got to see,” he stressed. “There was a war between good and evil, and we were losing it, and it seemed that when justice triumphed, it was by accident. So let me tell you about integrity. On the one hand you had the critics who couldn’t make cases for moral reasons or because they were inept. On the other hand were the case-makers, who knew we had to be the superior force, because the only thing that kept the criminals from over-running us was that they knew that our goon squad would wipe out their neighborhood if they tried.” 

To show success to the politicians who control their budgets, top managers in every bureaucracy rely on fictionalized reporting. The essential fictions, like the need to bend the rules, are taught to new agents. The agents must learn them by heart to advance. Over time the agents come to believe the fictions, which reinforce all their false assumptions about society and their role in it. For example, black agents in the FBN weren’t allowed to supervise whites. The bosses said the blacks couldn’t write well enough, because in their reports they didn’t ascribe to the fiction of white supremacy. 

Not until 1968 was a black agent made a group leader in the FBN. The organization, like American society in general and its security services in particular, accepted white superiority as gospel, and compulsory belief in that gospel paved the way for the political cadre at the top of the organizations to propagate other myths, like the myth that the Communist Chinese were pushing drugs on Americans as a kind of psychological warfare, and the myth that pot was as dangerous as heroin. 

The most important fiction of all is the need for secrecy to preserve our national security. From time to time that is true, but far more often officials use secrecy to conceal their corruption and crimes. 

So, Levi Nutt was shuffled off to Buffalo and given a sinecure job in upstate New York. And then the political bosses hired Harry Anslinger to run the Bureau of Narcotics, which was formed in 1930.

Anslinger became the Commissioner of the FBN when it was created. His job was to clean up corruption and one way he did it was to limit the inspections staff. There were approximately 300 agents in the FBN around the country and Anslinger had only two Inspectors on his staff; one for agents east of the Mississippi River, and one for agents west of it. Periodically they hopped on a train and visited offices around the country and made sure nobody was getting exposed in the newspapers for being corrupt. The corruption, obviously, continued apace. 

I met agents who had been in the FBN in the late 1930s. Most of the FBN agents I interviewed had joined after World War Two. These were the people Andy Tartaglino introduced me to – old agents who knew how things really worked. If anyone out there wants to know all the details, read my books The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack. 

Tartaglino, however, only introduced me to the “straight” agents who had worked with him trying to root out corruption. I soon realized that was not how I was going to get the story. But through Tartaglino and his clique I knew who the corrupt agents were, so I went to them and presented them with a deal. These were the “case-making” agents Frankie Waters talked about, the guys who brought down the Mafia and its French connection. 7 These guys had no fear and no ethics and that’s why the first book is called The Strength of the Wolf. 

I went to this group of agents, maybe ten of them, and told them individually what I wanted to do. I told them the story about my father and the bread truck, and what I knew about the CIA. I promised I wouldn’t link them to any murders or felonies. And on that basis they agreed to talk to me. They talked about how they went about making cases. So if you want to understand the situation from their point of view, read the books. I can’t explain it all to you in an hour. But I’ll try to summarize it. 

Narcotics agents are agent provocateurs. They “create a crime” by setting up a series of undercover buys, which they do largely through informants who get paid or otherwise compensated for buying or selling drugs to people the agents bust. The best undercover agents would shoot heroin so they could pose as addicts and traffickers. These guys would do anything. But they had to provide heroin to their informants. An agent wasn’t looking to cure an addict. He was looking to use an addict as an informant and sustain his habit while working “up the ladder” to his or her supplier. So the agents became suppliers of heroin. They became an instrumental part of the problem at the basic level. And that’s still the case today but on a grander scale: agents are in the illicit narcotic business, in both an official and unofficial capacity. 8 

Within the old FBN, a certain amount of illicit drug distribution was officially allowed. But behind the scenes, the case-making agents were competing with each other to make cases. In New York City there were five groups of agents, maybe ten agents in a group, and they were all trying to get promoted so they didn’t have to be street agents forever, so they could become the bosses. Ideally, an ambitious agent latched onto an informant who could make a big case on a member of the Mafia. Doing that guaranteed a successful career. But the competition was fierce and sometimes an ambitious agent in one group would intentionally arrest another agent’s informant for dealing junk. One case-making agent would subvert another case-making agent, and now you have life and death conflict between wolves.

This is how informants ended up getting killed. The agents started bumping off each other’s informants, and then each other. They killed each other. This was what got Andy Tartaglino so upset; agents were giving other agents “hot shots”. They’d slip heroin into someone’s beer or tie him down and give him an injection of heroin and kill him. There were instances of this happening. So that’s the level of corruption that permeated drug law enforcement. Without centralized control, it was a Hobbesian War. 

To make big cases, case-making agents needed to acquire heroin unofficially. They knew where the big dealers kept their stash, so they would burglarize an apartment and steal the drugs. They would cut the dope and resell it through their informants, share the profits, and make more cases. If they didn’t get caught, they got promoted and became the bosses. 

Agents were raping women. A lot of addict informants were prostitutes and the corrupt agents would force them to have sex to avoid going to jail. Agents were stealing money from floating crap games and gamblers. They were ripping off everybody left and right. They were murdering people. So the FBN was dissolved in 1968 and reformed as the BNDD in the Justice Department. 

John Ingersoll, who had been chief of the Charlotte, North Carolina police department, became the director of the BNDD. The Johnson administration charged him with eliminating corruption and the first thing Ingersoll did was ask CIA Director Richard Helms for help. Ingersoll told Helms that the senior managers of the BNDD, most of whom were former FBN agents, were still up to their eyeballs in corruption. The BNDD had 16 regional offices and most were headed by a former FBN agent, and Ingersoll was worried they were spreading corruption throughout this new organization. 

Helms exploited the situation. He wanted to take over federal drug law enforcement, so he slipped a group of CIA officers into the BNDD ostensibly to investigate the corrupt bosses. This actually made it into the 1975 Rockefeller Commission Report about illegal domestic CIA operations. It’s worth reading the two pages they devoted to this. 

I wrote an article about it called Operation Twofold. 9 The CIA infiltrated around 20 officers into the BNDD. Each one of these guys was given a job in a region. They were put in proximity to the regional boss and told to spy on him. Ingersoll thought the CIA was doing him a favor, which was very naïve, because the CIA used this secret program for its own nefarious purposes. You know the old adage about the camel that put its nose in the tent; pretty soon the whole camel is inside. That applies here, and pretty soon the CIA had taken over certain facets of the BNDD. 

It was 1970 and people like Al McCoy were becoming aware of the CIA’s drug connections in Southeast Asia. The CIA had to protect its drug smuggling operations in Vietnam, or risk losing the war. It was not like the ‘50s and ‘60s. Press people were flying all over the world. They weren’t taking boats anymore. They could communicate faster and learn things they didn’t know before. Suddenly the monstrous things the CIA had done for twenty years were in danger of being exposed. For twenty years the CIA had been working with the criminal underworlds in every nation, doing exactly what the old narcotic agents did – creating crimes and covering them up. 

That’s why the CIA wanted to commandeer federal drug law enforcement. Through Operation Twofold, the CIA infiltrated the BNDD’s inspections staff and intelligence division. It created and staffed the BNDD’s office of special operations. It took over the BNDD’s foreign operations and executive management staffs, and it still runs them today within the DEA. 

DAWSON: The US was getting opium from Afghanistan? 

VALENTINE: When the United States took over drug law enforcement in Afghanistan, opium production increased dramatically. All of a sudden Afghan heroin is flooding the US and Europe. It still is. You can say it’s a coincidence, except all the opium warlords are on the CIA payroll. The DEA sends six hundred agents to Afghanistan to make sure that nobody knows about it. 

DAWSON: It’s important to show what the money finances. It’s more than personal profit. They use that black-market money from the drugs to get into other shenanigans, supporting rent-a-terrorist groups. 

VALENTINE: The CIA is the most corrupting influence in the United States. It corrupted the Customs Bureau the same way it corrupted the DEA. It corrupts the State Department and the military. It has infiltrated civil organizations and the media to make sure that none of its illegal operations are exposed. Many CIA officers spent their careers posing as federal narcotics agents. 

DAWSON: They’re the managerial arm of the cartel. 

VALENTINE: It’s the untold part of the Gary Webb story – where the hell was the DEA? Well, the DEA was making sure no one made a case against CIA drug dealers. They make sure the drugs go to the black and Latino communities. In my opinion, that’s the National Security Establishment’s deepest, darkest secret. Exposing it was what got Webb in trouble, not a few inaccuracies in his reporting. 

The media’s job is to bury stories about corruption, whether it’s in Congress, law enforcement or the CIA. It sticks to the fictionalized script and spreads disinformation about how things are organized and how they operate. They do it by telling the story in a certain way, just like Frankie Waters described how the FBN group leaders wrote reports. The DEA has a public affairs branch staffed by creative writers who filter out anything bad and tell you only what the bosses want you to know. The media echoes what the DEA and CIA PR people say. But it’s a big lie and it’s pervasive.

notes
Chapter 1 
1 Phoenix is Phụng Hoàng in Vietnamese. 
2 <http://www.cryptocomb.org/Phoenix%20Tapes.html> 
3 See David Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency”, Small Wars Journal, September-November 2004. 
4 Tom Hayden, “Reviving Vietnam War Tactics”, The Nation, 13 March 2008. 
5 Seymour Hersh, “Moving Targets: Will the counter-insurgency plan in Iraq repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?”, The New Yorker, 15 December 2003. Hersh said, “According to official South Vietnamese statistics, Phoenix claimed nearly forty-one thousand victims between 1968 and 1972; the US counted more than twenty thousand in the same time span.” 
6 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0> 
7 Lansdale is known as the father of US counterinsurgency strategies and tactics. He is famous for putting down the Communist insurrection in the Philippines (1950-1953), and for installing the repressive Catholic regime under President Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, where he managed the counterinsurgency from 1954-1957. He was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations from 1957 until November 1963. 
8 To be discussed at greater length in Chapter 9: The CIA in Ukraine. 
9 “The Clash of the Icons”, Lobster #40 (Winter 2000/1). 
10 The aforementioned Church Committee noted in its report on page 336 that Lansdale was instrumental in the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and subvert Cuba, and that in 1962, he proposed the introduction of cheap marijuana into Cuba’s underground economy, and falsely accusing Cuba of drug trafficking. In a memo to his staff, Lansdale said: “Gangster elements might prove the best recruitment potential for actions [murders] against police G-2 [intelligence] officials.” Lansdale added that, “CW [Chemical Warfare] agents should be fully considered.” 
11 “Will the Real Daniel Ellsberg Please Stand Up!”, Counterpunch, 2003. 
12 Michael Levine, The Big White Lie: The Deep Cover Operation That Exposed the CIA Sabotage of the Drug War, 1990. 

Chapter 2 
1 Douglas Valentine, “The True Relationship between Crime and Law Enforcement”, Counterpunch, 2 January 2015. 
2 The Hotel Tacloban was published by Lawernce Hill & Company in 1984, Angus & Robertson Publishers in Australia in 1985, and Avon Books in 1986. It is now available through iUniverse. 
3 Verso published Wolf in 2004 and TrineDay published Pack in 2009. 
4 <https://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2011/10/03/no-foia-requestneeded-the-douglas-valentine-u-s- government-drug-enforcementcollection/ 
5 Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Lawrence Hill Books, 1991, p. 211. 
6 Douglas Valentine, “The CIA and Drugs: A Covert History”, Counterpunch, 7 November 2014. 
7 See Douglas Valentine, “The French Connection Revisited: The CIA, Irving Brown, and Drug Smuggling as Political Warfare”, Covert Action Quarterly, 1999. <https://www.scribd.com/document/212247684/Valentine-Douglas-The-French-Connection-RevisitedThe-CIAIrving-Brown-And-Drug-Smuggling-as-Political-Warfare-1999> 
8 Compton Affidavit given to US Attorney John E. Clark in Texas in August 1975. 9 Douglas Valentine, “Operation Twofold”, Counterpunch, 25 January 2008.

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THE VIETNAM WAR’S SILVER LINING: A BUREAUCRATIC MODEL FOR POPULATION CONTROL EMERGES

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