Part 7:The CIA as Organized Crime...Creating a Crime,How the CIA Commandeered The DEA

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

HOW THE CIA CO-OPTED AND 

MANAGES THE WAR ON DRUGS 

“The whole history of spectacular society called for the secret services to play the pivotal role; because it is in them that the characteristics and means of execution of such a society are concentrated to the highest degree.” 

Guy Debord, Comments on 

The Society of the Spectacle  

Chapter 12  

CREATING A CRIME: 

HOW THE CIA COMMANDEERED 

THE DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION 

The outlawing of narcotic drugs at the start of the 20th century coincided with Secretary of State John Hay’s “Open Door” policy toward China. This is one of the ironies of American history, given that the Open Door policy originated with Great Britain’s First Opium War (1839–1842) against China. 

At the time, the British insisted that “free trade” civilized the world by making it wealthier. Free trade, they said, gave them the divine right to push Indian opium on China in exchange for tea. They shared this principle with Confederate Americans who fought for their “right” to own slaves. 

America’s “Open Door” policy placed it in competition with the world’s other imperial powers. From that point on, the federal government was committed to maintain, through military might, open markets in every nation in the world on behalf of American businesses. 

Not coincidentally, the outlawing of narcotic drugs turned the issue of addiction from a matter of “public health” into a pretext for expanding police forces and reorganizing the criminal justice and social welfare systems. The new health care industry was placed in the hands of businessmen seeking profits at the expense of despised minorities, the poor and working classes. 

Private businesses established civic institutions to sanctify this policy. Public educators developed curriculums that doubled as political indoctrination promoting the Business Party line. Bureaucracies were established to promote the expansion of corporate interests abroad, while suppressing resistance to the oligarchy that benefited from it. 

It takes a library full of books to explain the economic foundations of the war on drugs, and the reasons for America’s laissez faire regulation of its medical, pharmaceutical and drug manufacturing industries. Suffice it to say that investors used the government to unleash and transform their economic power into political and military might; and by World War Two, the “free trade world” was relying on the United States for its opium derivatives, under the guardianship of Harry Anslinger, the Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). 

Narcotic drugs are a strategic resource, and when Anslinger learned that Peru had built a cocaine factory, he unilaterally confiscated its stash before it could be sold to Germany or Japan. In another instance, Anslinger and his counterpart at the State Department prevented a drug manufacturer in Argentina from selling drugs to Germany. 

At the same time, according to Douglas Clark Kinder, Anslinger permitted “an American company to ship drugs to Southeast Asia despite receiving intelligence reports that French authorities were permitting opiate smuggling into China and collaborating with Japanese drug traffickers.” 1 

Federal drug law enforcement’s relationship with the espionage establishment matured with the creation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Prior to World War Two, the FBN was the government agency most adept at conducting covert operations at home and abroad. As a result, OSS chief William Donovan asked his friend Harry Anslinger to provide senior FBN agents to help organize the OSS. FBN agents trained OSS agents to manage agent networks, engage in sabotage and subversion, and work undercover to avoid security forces in hostile nations. 

The relationship grew during the war when FBN executives and agents assisted OSS scientists in “truth drug” experiments involving marijuana. The “extra-legal” nature of the relationship continued after the war: when the CIA decided to test LSD on unsuspecting American citizens, FBN agents were chosen to operate the CIA safe houses where the experiments were conducted. 2 

The relationship was formalized overseas in 1951, when Agent Charlie Siragusa opened an office in Rome and began to develop the FBN’s foreign operations. In the 1950s, FBN agents posted overseas spent half their time doing “favors” for the CIA, such as investigating diversions of strategic materials and Marshall Plan largesse behind the Iron Curtain. A handful of FBN agents were actually recruited into the CIA while maintaining their FBN credentials as cover. 

Officially, FBN agents set limits. Siragusa, for example, claimed to object when the CIA asked him to mount a “controlled delivery” into the US as a way of identifying the American members of a smuggling ring with Communist affiliations. In his autobiography, Siragusa said, “The FBN could never knowingly allow two pounds of heroin to be delivered into the United States and be pushed to Mafia customers in the New York City area, even if in the long run we could seize a bigger haul.” 3 

In 1960 the CIA asked Siragusa to recruit assassins from his stable of underworld contacts. Siragusa again claimed to have refused. But Mafia drug traffickers, including most prominently Santo Trafficante Jr, were soon participating in CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. 

Siragusa did open a CIA safe house in 1960. FBN agents in New York maintained the MKULTRA “pad” and used it to make cases and debrief informants. When the CIA wanted to use the pad, it would call the district supervisor in New York City and tell him to keep the agents away for a few days. 

FBN Agent Arthur Fluhr served as New York District Supervisor George Belk’s administrative assistant from 1963-1968. As Fluhr recalled, “Belk was given a CIA contract. George said that he never actually met anyone from the CIA, but that Siragusa told him to cooperate if and when he was contacted. Later the CIA did call. They told Belk: You’ll have this checking account, but don’t write any checks other than for rent and the maintenance of the 13th Street apartment.” 

The CIA used Belk’s account – which at times held a million dollars and at other times was empty – as a slush fund for foreign officials on its payroll. “Sometimes we were told to baby sit people for the CIA while they were in town,” Fluhr said. “One time it was a group of Burmese generals. They came for a few days and when they weren’t at the UN, they used the money in Belk’s account to go on a shopping spree. They went down to the electronics shops on Canal Street and filled suitcases full of stuff.” 

The CIA chaperoned the visiting Burmese generals through Customs without their bags being checked. One can imagine what they brought into New York City in those same suitcases. 

The CIA used the safe houses to conduct all manner of illegal domestic operations behind the FBI’s back. Indeed, in the course of investigating illegal FBI wiretaps in January 1967, Senator Edward Long learned that the FBN was managing the CIA’s safe houses. No one in Congress knew about it. Treasury officials held meetings with the CIA’s Assistant Deputy Director of Plans, Desmond FitzGerald, and MKULTRA boss Sid Gottlieb. After a few days of dissembling, Gottlieb admitted that the CIA had used the pads to obtain information “which was of obvious interest to us in connection with our own investigative work.” 4 

That particular pad was shut down. “We gave the furniture to the Salvation Army,” Fluhr recalled, “and took the drapes off the windows and put them up in our office.” 

And FBN Agent Andrew Tartaglino opened a more luxurious CIA safe house on Sutton Place. 

As the dominant partner in the relationship, the CIA exploited its affinity with the FBN. “Like the CIA,” FBN Agent Robert DeFauw explained, “narcotics agents mount covert operations. We pose as members of the narcotics trade. The big difference is that we’re in foreign countries legally and through our police and intelligence sources, we can check out just about anyone or anything. Not only that, we’re operational. So the CIA jumped in our stirrups.” 

Jumping into the FBN’s stirrups afforded the CIA deniability. To further ensure that the CIA’s criminal activities are not revealed to the public, narcotics agents are organized militarily within the sacred chain of command. Highly indoctrinated, they blindly obey on a “need to know” basis. This institutionalized ignorance sustains the illusion of American righteousness, in the name of national security, upon which their motivation to commit all manner of crimes depends. 

But, as FBN Agent Martin Pera explained, “If you’re successful because you can lie, cheat, and steal, those things become tools you use in the bureaucracy.” 

Institutionalized corruption originated at headquarters in Washington, where FBN executives provided cover for CIA assets engaged in drug trafficking. In 1966, Agent John Evans was assigned as an assistant to FBN Enforcement Chief John Enright. “And that’s when I got to see what the CIA was doing,” Evans told me. “I saw a report on the Kuomintang saying they were the biggest drug dealers in the world and that the CIA was underwriting them. Air America was transporting tons of Kuomintang opium.” Evans bristled. “I took the report to Enright. He said, ‘Leave it here. Forget about it.’ 

“Other things came to my attention,” Evans added, “that proved that the CIA contributed to drug use in America. We were in constant conflict with the CIA because it was hiding its budget in ours, and because CIA people were smuggling drugs into the US. We weren’t allowed to tell and that fostered corruption in the Bureau.” 

Heroin smuggled by “CIA people” into the US was channeled by Mafia distributors primarily to African American communities. Local narcotics agents then targeted disenfranchised blacks as an easy way of subduing or criminalizing them, reducing their community organizing and voting power, and thereby preserving the white ruling class’s privileges. 

“We didn’t need a search warrant,” explained former New Orleans narcotics chief Clarence Giarusso. “It allowed us to meet our quota, and it was ongoing. If I find dope on a black man, I can put him in jail for a few days. He’s got no money for a lawyer and the courts are ready to convict. There’s no expectation on the jury’s part that we have to make a case. So rather than go cold turkey, the addict becomes an informant, which means I can make more cases in the neighborhood, which is all we’re interested in. We don’t care about Carlos Marcello or the Mafia. City cops have no interest in who brings dope in. That’s the job of the federal agents.” 

The Establishment’s race and class privileges have always been equated with national security, and FBN executives preserved the social order. Not until 1968 were black FBN agents allowed to become group supervisors and manage white agents. 

The war on drugs is a projection of two conditions peculiar to America. First is the institutionalized white supremacy that has defined it since slave owner Thomas Jefferson declared “All men are created equal.” Second is the policy of allowing anti-Communist allies to traffic in narcotics. These deniable but official policies reinforce the belief among CIA and drug law enforcement officials that the Bill of Rights is an obstacle to national security. [ yes you did just read that correctly DC]

Blanket immunity from prosecution for bureaucrats who translate these policies into practice fosters corruption in other forms. The FBN’s premier “case-making” agents, for example, routinely “created a crime” by breaking and entering, planting evidence, using illegal wiretaps and falsifying reports. They tampered with heroin, transferred it to informants for sale, and even murdered “straight” agents who threatened to expose them. 

All of this was known at the highest level of government and in 1965 the Treasury Department launched a corruption investigation of the FBN. Headed by Andrew Tartaglino, the investigation ended in 1968 with the resignation of 32 agents and the indictment of five. That same year the FBN was reconstructed in the Department of Justice as the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD). 

But, as Tartaglino said to me, dejectedly, “The job was only half done.” 

The First Infestation 

Richard Nixon was elected president based on a vow to restore “law and order” to America. To prove, symbolically, that it intended to keep that promise, the White House launched Operation Intercept along the Mexican border in early 1969. There were, however, unintended consequences; the massive “stop and search” operation so badly damaged relations with Mexico that National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger formed the Ad Hoc Committee on Narcotics (aka the Heroin Committee) to coordinate drug policy and prevent further diplomatic disasters. 

The Heroin Committee was composed of cabinet members represented by their deputies. James Ludlum represented CIA Director Richard Helms. A member of the CIA’s Counterintelligence staff, reporting directly to James Angleton, Ludlum had been the CIA’s liaison officer to the FBN since 1962. 

“When Kissinger set up the Heroin Committee,” Ludlum recalled, “the CIA certainly didn’t take it seriously, because drug control wasn’t part of their mission.” 

As John Evans noted above, and as select members of Congress were aware, the CIA for years had sanctioned the heroin traffic from the Golden Triangle region of Burma, Thailand and Laos into South Vietnam as a way of rewarding top officials for advancing US policies. This reality presented the White House with a dilemma; either curtail the CIA and risk losing the war, or allow tons of heroin to be smuggled into the US for use by rebellious middle-class white kids dabbling in cultural revolution. 

Nixon’s compromise solution was to make drug law enforcement part of the CIA’s mission. This decision forced the CIA to target its clients in South Vietnam. Although reluctant to do so, CIA Director Richard Helms told Ludlum: “We’re going to break their rice bowls.” 

This betrayal occurred incrementally. Fred Dick, the BNDD agent assigned to Saigon, passed the names of complicit South Vietnamese military officers and politicians to the Heroin Committee. But, as Agent Dick recalled, “Ambassador [Ellsworth] Bunker called a meeting in Saigon at which CIA Station Chief Ted Shackley appeared and explained that there was ‘a delicate balance.’ What he said, in effect, was that no one was willing to do anything.” 

Meanwhile, to protect its global network of drug trafficking assets, the CIA began infiltrating the BNDD and commandeering its executive management, internal security, intelligence and foreign operations branches. This act of bureaucratic piracy required the placement of CIA officers in influential positions in every federal agency concerned with drug law enforcement.[And do not think for a second this has stopped DC]

CIA Officer Paul Van Marx, for example, was assigned as an assistant on narcotics control to the US Ambassador in France. Van Marx thereafter ensured that BNDD conspiracy cases against European traffickers did not compromise CIA operations and assets. He also vetted potential BNDD assets to make sure they were not enemy spies. 

The FBN had never had more than 16 agents stationed overseas, but Nixon dramatically increased funding for the BNDD with the result that hundreds of agents were soon posted abroad. The success of these overseas agents depended entirely on CIA intelligence and cooperation, as BNDD Director John Ingersoll understood. 

BNDD agents soon felt the sting of CIA involvement in drug law enforcement operations within the United States. Operation Eagle was the flashpoint. Launched in 1970, Eagle targeted anti-Castro Cubans smuggling cocaine from Latin America to the Trafficante crime family in Florida. Of the dozens of Cuban traffickers arrested in June, many were found to be members of Operation 40, a CIA terror organization active in the US, the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America. 

Operation 40 was one of several narco-terrorist groups created, funded and directed by the CIA. 

The revelation that CIA narco-terrorists were operating within the US led to the assignment of CIA officers as “advisors” to mid-level BNDD enforcement officials, including Latin American Division chief Jerry Strickler. CIA officers tasked to work with the enforcement division served as political cadre; their job was not to make cases, but to protect CIA drug trafficking assets from exposure and prosecution, while facilitating the recruitment of these assets as informants for the BNDD. 

Many of the anti-Castro Cuban exiles arrested in Operation Eagle were indeed hired by the BNDD and sent throughout Latin America to expand its operations. They got “fantastic information,” Strickler noted. But many were playing a double game. 

The Second Infestation 

By 1969, Ingersoll’s inspections staff had gathered enough evidence to warrant the investigation of several corrupt FBN agents who had risen to management positions in the BNDD. But Ingersoll could not investigate his top managers without subverting the organization’s drug investigations. So he asked CIA Director Helms for help building a “counterintelligence” capacity within the BNDD. 

The result was Operation Twofold, in which 19 CIA officers were infiltrated into the BNDD to spy on corrupt BNDD officials. According to Chief Inspector Patrick Fuller, “A corporation engaged in law enforcement hired three CIA officers posing as private businessmen to do the contact and interview work.” 

CIA Officer Jerry Soul, a former Operation 40 case officer, was the primary recruiter. In selecting CIA officers for Twofold, Soul chose junior officers whose careers had stalled due to the reduction of forces in Southeast Asia. Those hired were put through the BNDD’s training course and assigned to spy on the BNDD’s 16 regional directors. No records were kept and some participants have never been identified. 

Chuck Gutensohn was one of several Twofold “torpedoes” I interviewed. Prior to his recruitment into the BNDD, Gutensohn had spent two years at the CIA’s base in Pakse, a major heroin transit point between Laos and South Vietnam. “Fuller said that when we communicated, I was to be known as Leo Adams for Los Angeles,” Gutensohn said. “He was to be Walter DeCarlo, for Washington, DC.” 

Gutensohn’s cover, however, was blown before he got to Los Angeles. “Someone at headquarters was talking and everyone knew,” he recalled. “About a month after I arrived, one of the agents said to me, ‘I hear that Pat Fuller signed your credentials’.” 

Twofold existed at least until 1974 and was deemed by the Rockefeller Commission to have “violated the 1947 Act which prohibits the CIA’s participation in law enforcement activities.” It also, as shall be discussed later, served as a cover for clandestine CIA operations. 5 

The Third Infestation 

The Nixon White House blamed the BNDD’s failure to stop international drug trafficking on its feeble intelligence capabilities, a condition that opened the door to further CIA infiltration. In late 1970, CIA Director Helms arranged for his recently retired Chief of Continuing Intelligence, E. Drexel Godfrey, to review BNDD intelligence procedures. Among other things, Godfrey recommended that the BNDD create Regional Intelligence Units (RIUs) and a Strategic Intelligence Office (SIO). 

The RIUs were up and running by 1971, with recycled CIA officers assigned as analysts, prompting regular BNDD agents to view the RIUs with suspicion, as repositories for Twofold torpedoes. 

The SIO was harder to implement, given its arcane function as a tool to help senior BNDD managers formulate plans and strategies “in the political sphere.” As SIO Director John Warner explained, “We needed to understand the political climate in Thailand in order to address the problem. We needed to know what kind of protection the Thai police were affording traffickers. We were looking for an intelligence office that could deal with those sorts of issues, on the ground, overseas.” 

Organizing the SIO fell to CIA officers Adrian Swain and Tom Tripodi, both of whom were infiltrated into the BNDD. In April 1971, Swain and Tripodi accompanied Ingersoll to Saigon, where they were briefed by Station Chief Ted Shackley. Swain had worked in Laos and Vietnam, and through former CIA contacts, he surreptitiously obtained maps of CIA-protected drug smuggling routes in Southeast Asia. 

Upon their return to the US, Swain and Tripodi expressed frustration that the CIA had access to people capable of providing the BNDD with additional intelligence, but these people “were involved in narcotics trafficking and the CIA did not want to identify them.” 6 

Seeking a way to finesse the situation, Swain and Tripodi recommended the creation of a “special operations or strategic operations staff” that would function as the BNDD’s own CIA “using a backdoor approach to gather intelligence in support of operations.” Those operations would rely on “longer range, deep penetration, clandestine assets, who remain undercover, do not appear during the course of any trial and are recruited and directed by the Special Operations agents on a covert basis.” 7 

The White House approved the plan in May 1971, along with a $120 million proposal for drug control, of which $50 million was earmarked for BNDD special operations. Three weeks later Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” at which point Congress responded with funding for the SIO and authorization for the extra-legal operations Swain and Tripodi envisioned. 

Director John Warner was given a seat on the US Intelligence Board so the SIO could obtain raw intelligence from the CIA. But, in return, the SIO was compelled to adopt CIA security procedures; a CIA security officer was assigned to establish the SIO’s file room and computer system; safes and steel doors were installed; and witting agents had to obtain CIA clearances. 

Three active-duty CIA officers were assigned to the SIO as desk officers for Europe and the Middle East, the Far East, and Latin America. Tripodi was assigned as the SIO’s chief of operations. Tripodi, notably, had spent the previous six years in Florida with the CIA’s Security Research Services, where his duties included the penetration of peace groups, as well as setting up “notional” private investigation firms to conduct black bag jobs. It is of historical importance that White House “Plumber” E. Howard Hunt inherited Tripodi’s Special Operations unit, which included several of the Watergate burglars. 

SIO ops chief Tripodi liaised with the CIA on matters of mutual interest, including the covert collection of intelligence outside of routine BNDD channels. As part of his operational plan, code-named Medusa, Tripodi proposed that SIO agents hire foreign nationals to blow up contrabandista planes while they were refueling at clandestine air strips. Another proposal called for ambushing traffickers in America, and taking their drugs and money – which, as I’ve reported elsewhere and in my books on the subject, case-making agents had been doing for decades, albeit unofficially. 8 

Enter Lucien Conein 

The creation of the SIO coincided with the assignment of CIA officer Lucien Conein to the BNDD. As a member of the OSS, Conein had parachuted into France to form resistance cells that included Corsican smugglers. As a CIA officer, Conein in 1954 was assigned to Vietnam to organize anti-Communist forces in the North, and in 1963 he achieved infamy as the intermediary between the Kennedy White House and the cabal of generals that murdered President Diem and his brother Nhu. 

In The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, historian Alfred McCoy alleged that in 1965, Conein arranged a truce between the CIA and drug trafficking Corsicans in Saigon. Conein apparently knew some of these gangsters from his work with the French resistance. The truce, according to McCoy, allowed the Corsicans to traffic in narcotics as long as they served as contact men for the CIA. The truce also endowed the Corsicans with “free passage” at a time when Marseilles’ heroin labs were turning from Turkish to Southeast Asian morphine base. 9 

In a letter to McCoy’s publisher, Conein denied McCoy’s allegation and insisted that his meeting with the Corsicans was solely to resolve a problem caused by Daniel Ellsberg’s “peccadilloes with the mistress of a Corsican.” 10 

It is impossible to know who is telling the truth. Ellsberg denies that his CIA friends were involved in drug trafficking; McCoy and all the evidence indicate they were. What is definitely known is that in July 1971, on Howard Hunt’s recommendation, the White House hired Conein as an expert on Corsican traffickers in Southeast Asia. Conein was assigned as a consultant to the SIO’s Far East Asia desk, then under CIA officer Walter Mackem, a veteran of Vietnam. Conein’s activities will be discussed in greater detail. 

The Parallel Mechanism 

In September 1971, the Heroin Committee was reorganized as the Cabinet Committee for International Narcotics Control (CCINC) under Secretary of State William Rogers. The CCINC’s Congressional mandate was to “set policies which relate international considerations to domestic considerations.” By 1975, its budget amounted to $875 million and the war on drugs had become a boondoggle for bureaucrats. 

Concurrently, the CIA formed a unilateral drug unit in its operations division under Seymour Bolten. Known as the Special Assistant to the Director for the Coordination of Narcotics, Bolten directed CIA division and station chiefs in unilateral drug control operations. In doing this, Bolten worked with Ted Shackley, who in 1972 was appointed head of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division. Bolten and Shackley had worked together in post-war Germany, as well as in anti-Castro operations, including Operation 40, in the early 1960s. Their collaboration would grease federal drug law enforcement’s skid into moral and legal oblivion. 

“Bolten screwed us,” BNDD’s Latin American Division Chief Jerry Strickler said bitterly. “And so did Shackley.” 

Bolten also screwed the judicial system by setting up a “parallel mechanism” using a computerized register of international drug traffickers and a CIA-staffed communications crew that intercepted calls from drug traffickers in the US to their accomplices around the world. The International Narcotics Information Network (INIS) was modeled on the Phoenix information system (PHMIS) the CIA had used to terrorize the underground resistance in South Vietnam. 

Bolten’s staff also “re-tooled” dozens of CIA officers and slipped them into the BNDD. Several went to Lou Conein at the SIO for clandestine, highly illegal operations. 

Factions within the BNDD, CIA and military were opposed to Bolten’s parallel mechanism, but CIA Executive Director William Colby supported Bolten’s plan to preempt the BNDD and use its agents and informants for unilateral CIA purposes. The White House also supported the plan for political purposes related to Nixon’s reelection. As part of the CIA’s secret government, BNDD officials who resisted were expunged; those who cooperated were rewarded. 

The Bureau of Narcotics Covert 
Intelligence Network: BUNCIN 
In September 1972, DCI Helms (then immersed in Watergate intrigues), told BNDD Director Ingersoll that the CIA had prepared files on specific drug traffickers in Miami, the Florida Keys and the Caribbean. Helms said the CIA would provide Ingersoll with assets to pursue the traffickers and develop information on tangential targets of opportunity. The CIA would also provide operational, technical, and financial support. 

The result was the Bureau of Narcotics Covert Intelligence Network (BUNCIN) whose methodology reflected Tripodi’s Medusa Plan and included unconventional warfare tactics like “provocations, inducement to desertion, creating confusion and apprehension.” 11 

Some BUNCIN intelligence activities were directed against “senior foreign government officials” and were “blamed on other government agencies or even on the intelligence services of other nations.” 12 Other BUNCIN activities were directed against American civic and political groups. 

BNDD officials managed BUNCIN’s legal activities, while Conein at the SIO managed its extra-legal jobs. According to Conein’s administrative deputy, Rich Kobakoff, “BUNCIN was an experiment in how to finesse the law. The end product was intelligence, not seizures or arrests.” 

CIA officers Robert Medell and William Logay were chosen to manage BUNCIN operations in the field. 13 

A Bay of Pigs veteran born in Cuba, Medell was initially assigned to the Twofold “counterintelligence” program. Medell was BUNCIN’s “covert” agent and recruited its agents from the anti-Castro Cuban drug smuggling underworld. All of his assets had previously worked for the CIA, and all understood that they were working for it again. 

Medell started running agents in March 1973 with the stated goal of penetrating the Santo Trafficante organization in Florida. To this end the BNDD’s Enforcement Chief, Andy Tartaglino, introduced Medell to Sal Caneba, a retired Mafioso who’d been in business with Trafficante in the 1950's.

Caneba in one day identified the head of the Cuban side of the Trafficante family, as well as its organizational structure. But the CIA refused to allow the BNDD to pursue the investigation, because it had employed Trafficante in its assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, and because Trafficante Operation 40 associates were performing similar functions for the CIA around the world. 

Medell’s Principal Agent was Bay of Pigs veteran Guillermo Tabraue, whom the CIA paid a whopping $1,400 a week. While receiving this princely sum, Tabraue participated in the “Alvarez-Cruz” drug smuggling ring. 

Medell also recruited agents from Manuel Artime’s anti-Castro organization. Howard Hunt, notably, had been Artime’s case officer, and many members of Artime’s narco-terror organization had worked for Bolten and Shackley while Shackley was the CIA’s station chief in Miami in the early 1960's. 

Bill Logay was the “overt” agent assigned to the BUNCIN office in Miami. A member of the CIA’s “jeweler” program for junior officers, Logay had been Shackley’s bodyguard in Saigon in 1969. From 1970-1971, Logay served under Tully Acampora as the CIA’s special police liaison and drug coordinator in Saigon’s Precinct 5. Logay was asked to join Twofold, but claimed to have refused. 

Medell and Logay’s reports were hand delivered to BNDD headquarters via the Defense Department’s classified courier service. The military was in charge of emergency planning and provided BUNCIN agents with special communications equipment. The CIA supplied BUNCIN’s assets with forged IDs that enabled them to work for foreign governments, including Panama, Venezuela and Costa Rica. 

Like the Twofold canard, BUNCIN had two agendas. The first, according to Chief Inspector Fuller, “was told” and had a narcotics mission. The second provided cover for the Plumbers and their dirty tricks. Orders for the domestic subversive political facet emanated from the White House and passed through Conein to Gordon Liddy and his “Operation Gemstone” squad of anti-Castro Cuban narco-terrorists from the Artime organization. 

BNDD enforcement chief Tartaglino was unhappy with the arrangement and gave Agent Ralph Frias the job of screening the anti-Castro Cubans the White House sent to the BNDD. Frias was assigned to the BNDD’s international affairs staff. When Nixon’s chief of staff Bob Haldeman sent three Cubans to the BNDD, Frias discovered they were “plants” who, once in possession of BNDD credentials, were to act on behalf of their political patrons at the White House. Those three were not hired, but, Frias told me, many others were successfully infiltrated inside the BNDD and other federal agencies. 

Under BUNCIN cover, CIA assets reportedly kidnapped and assassinated people in Colombia and Mexico. The Nixon White House sponsors also used BUNCIN assets to gather dirt on Democratic politicians in Key West. 

Thanks to the CIA, through BUNCIN, federal drug law enforcement sank to new lows of political repression and corruption. 

Novo Yardley 
The Nixon White House exploited the “operations by committee” management method to ensure political control over its illegal drug operations. As the various agencies involved in drug law enforcement “pooled” resources, the BNDD’s narcotics mission was further diluted and diminished. 

As the preeminent agency in the federal government, the CIA used Bolten’s “parallel mechanism” to commandeer the BNDD’s global network of agents. The process advanced in South America when, at their introductory meeting in Mexico City in 1972, Western Hemisphere Division chief Shackley ordered the BNDD’s Latin American Division chief Jerry Strickler to hand over all BNDD files, informant lists, and cable traffic. 

“Bad things” happened as a result, according to Strickler. The worst abuse was that the CIA allowed drug shipments into the US without telling the BNDD. 

“Individual stations allowed this,” SIO Director John Warner confirmed. 

In so far as evidence acquired by CIA electronic surveillance is inadmissible in court, the CIA was able to protect its controlled deliveries simply by monitoring them. The significance of this strategy cannot be overstated. The courts have terminated numerous investigations as a result of the CIA spying on traffickers. Likewise, dozens of narcotics prosecutions have been dismissed on national security grounds due to the participation of CIA assets operating in trafficking organizations around the world. 

Strickler knew by name which CIA people were guilty of sabotaging cases in Latin America and wanted to indict them. He brought his list to BNDD headquarters, but at Bolten’s insistence, Strickler was immediately kicked out of the enforcement division. Meanwhile, CIA assets from Bolten’s unilateral drug unit were kidnapping and assassinating traffickers as part of Operation Twofold. 

Ingersoll confirmed the existence of this covert facet of Twofold. Its purpose, he told me, was to put agents under deep cover to develop intelligence on drug trafficking from South America. The regional directors weren’t aware of the program. Ingersoll said he got approval from Attorney General John Mitchell and passed the operation on to his successor, John Bartels, the first administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Ingersoll said the unit was not supposed to operate inside the US, which is why he thought it was legal. 

Ingersoll said he was surprised that no one from the Rockefeller Commission asked him about it. 

I was fortunate to interview Joseph DiGennaro, a member of this covert operation. 

Joey DiGennaro’s entry into the covert facet of Twofold began when a family friend, who knew Jim Ludlum, suggested that he apply for a job with the BNDD. Then working as a stockbroker in New York, DiGennaro met Chief Inspector Fuller in 1971 in Washington. Fuller gave DiGennaro the code name Novo Yardley, based on his posting in New York and as a play on the name of the famous codebreaker. 

After DiGennaro obtained the required clearances, he and several other recruits were “spun-off” from Twofold into the CIA’s “operational” unit. The background check took 14 months, during which time he received intensive combat and tradecraft training. 

In October 1972 DiGennaro was assigned to a New York City enforcement group as a cover for his CIA activities. His paychecks came from BNDD funds, but the program was reimbursed by the CIA through the Bureau of Mines. The program was authorized by the “appropriate” Congressional committee. 

DiGennaro’s unit was a component of the Special Operations Division, which at the time was managed by former Phoenix program director Evan Parker. The US military provided assets within foreign military services to keep exfiltration routes (air corridors and roads) open. The military cleared air space when captured drug trafficking suspects were brought into the US. DiGennaro spent most of his time in South America, but the unit operated worldwide, including in Lebanon, France, and the Far East. The unit numbered about 40 men, including experts in printing, forgery, maritime operations and telecommunications. 

DiGennaro would check with Fuller and take sick time or annual leave to go on missions. There were lots of missions. As his BNDD group supervisor in New York, Joseph Quarequio, said, “Joey was never in the office.” 

The job involved tracking, kidnapping and, if they resisted, killing traffickers. Kidnapped persons were incapacitated by drugs and dumped in the US. As DEA Agent Gerry Carey recalled, “We’d get a call that there was ‘a present’ waiting for us on the corner of 116th Street and Sixth Avenue. We’d go there and find some guy, who’d been indicted in the Eastern District of New York, handcuffed to a telephone pole. We’d take him to a safe house for questioning and, if possible, turn him into an informer. Sometimes we’d have him in custody for months. But what did he know?” 

If you’re a Corsican drug dealer in Argentina, and men with police credentials arrest you, how do you know it’s a CIA operation? 

DiGennaro’s last operation in 1977 involved the recovery of a satellite that had fallen into a drug dealer’s hands. Such was the extent of the CIA’s “parallel mechanism.” 

The Dirty Dozen 
With the formation of the DEA in July 1973, BUNCIN was renamed the DEA Clandestine Operations Network (DEACON). A number of DEACONs were developed and funded as Special Field Intelligence Programs. As an extension of BUNCIN, DEACON 1 developed intelligence on traffickers in Costa Rica, Ohio and New Jersey; politicians in Florida; terrorists and gun runners; the sale of boats and helicopters to Cuba; and the venerable Trafficante organization. 

Under DEA boss John Bartels, administrative control of the DEACONs fell under DEA intelligence chief George Belk and his assistant for special projects, Phil Smith. Through Belk and Smith, the Office of Special Projects became a major facet of Bolten’s “parallel mechanism”. It housed the DEA’s air wing (staffed largely by CIA officers), conducted “research programs” with the CIA, provided state-of-the-art technical aids and false documentation to agents, and handled fugitive searches. 

As part of DEACON 1, Smith sent covert agent Bob Medell “to Caracas and Bogota to develop a network of agents.” As Smith noted in a memorandum, reimbursement for Medell “is being made in backchannel fashion to CIA under payments to other agencies and is not counted as a position against us.” 14 

Thoroughly suborned by the CIA, DEA Administrator Bartels established a priority on foreign clandestine narcotics collection. Thus, when Belk proposed a “special operations group” in the office of intelligence, Bartels immediately approved it. In March 1974, Belk assigned the special operations group to Lou “Black Luigi” Conein. 

As chief of the Intelligence Group/Operations (IGO), Conein administered the DEA’s Special Operations Group (DEASOG) and its National Intelligence Officers (NIO) program. The chain of command, however, was “unclear” and while Medell reported administratively to Smith at Special Projects, Conein directed him through a separate chain of command reaching to William Colby, who had risen to the rank of CIA Director in the summer of 1973, concurrent with the formation of the DEA. 

Conein had worked for Colby in Vietnam, and through Colby’s personnel assistant, Jack A. Mathews, he hired a “dirty dozen” CIA officers to staff DEASOG. As NIOs (not regular DEA agents), the DEASOG crew did not buy narcotics or appear in court, but instead used standard CIA operating procedures to recruit assets and set up agent networks for the long-range collection of intelligence on trafficking groups. They had no visible connection to the DEA and were housed in a safe house outside headquarters in downtown Washington. The space was provided by Conein’s drinking buddy from Vietnam, John “Picadoon” Muldoon, who had formed a private investigative firm as cover for CIA domestic ops. Muldoon’s PI firm was located in the same building. 

The first DEASOG recruits were CIA officers Elias P. Chavez and Nicholas Zapata. Both had paramilitary and drug control experience in Laos. Jack Mathews had been Chavez’s case officer at the Long Thien base, where General Vang Pao ran his secret drug-smuggling army under Laos station chief Ted Shackley’s auspices from 1966-1968. 

A group of eight CIA officers followed: Wesley Dyckman, a Chinese linguist with service in Vietnam, was assigned to San Francisco; Louis J. Davis, a veteran of Vietnam and Laos, was assigned to the Chicago RIU; Chris Thompson from the CIA’s Phoenix program went to San Antonio; Hugh E. Murray, veteran of Pakse and Bolivia (where he participated in the capture of Che Guevara) was sent to Tucson; Thomas D. McPhaul had worked with Conein in Vietnam and was sent to Dallas; Thomas L. Briggs, a veteran of Laos and a friend of Shackley’s, went to Mexico; Vernon J. Goertz, a Shackley friend who had participated in the Allende coup, went to Venezuela; and David A. Scherman, a Conein friend and former manager of the CIA’s interrogation center in Da Nang, went to sunny San Diego. 

Gary Mattocks, who ran the CIA counterterror teams in Vietnam’s Delta, and interrogator Robert Simon were the eleventh and twelfth members. Terry Baldwin, Barry Carew and Joseph Lagattuta joined later. 

According to Lou Davis, Conein created DEASOG specifically to do Phoenix program-style jobs overseas: the type where a commando breaks into a trafficker’s home, steals his drugs and slits his throat. The NIOs were to operate overseas and target traffickers the local cops couldn’t touch for political reasons – the prime minister’s son or the police chief in Acapulco if he was the local drug boss. If the NIOs couldn’t assassinate the target, Conein and the CIA would arrange to bomb his labs or use psychological warfare to make him look like he was a DEA informant, so his own people would kill him.

The DEASOG people “would be breaking the law,” Davis observed, “but they didn’t have arrest powers overseas anyway.” 

Conein envisioned 50 NIOs operating worldwide by 1977. But a slew of Watergate-related scandals forced the DEA to curtail the program and reorganize its covert operations staff in ways that have since corrupted federal drug law enforcement beyond repair. 

Assassination Scandals 15 
The first scandal focused on DEACON 3, which targeted the Aviles-Perez organization in Mexico. Eli Chavez, Nick Zapata and Barry Carew were the NIOs assigned. 

A veteran CIA officer who spoke Spanish, Carew had served under Tully Acampora as a special police advisor in Saigon before joining the BNDD. Carew was assigned as Conein’s Latin American desk officer and managed Chavez and Zapata (aka “the Mexican Assassin”) in Mexico. According to Chavez, a White House Task Force under Howard Hunt started the DEACON 3 case. The Task Force provided photographs of the Aviles-Perez compound in Sinaloa, from whence truckloads of marijuana were shipped to the US. 

Funds were allotted in February 1974, at which point Chavez and Zapata traveled to Mexico as representatives of the North American Alarm and Fire Systems Company. In Mazatlán, they met with Carew, who, according to Chavez, stayed at a fancy hotel and played tennis every day, while Chavez and Zapata, whom Conein referred to as “pepper-bellies,” fumed in a flea-bag motel. 

Eventually a female informant arranged for Chavez, posing as a buyer, to meet Perez. A deal was struck, but DEA chief John Bartels made the mistake of instructing Chavez to brief the DEA’s regional director in Mexico City before making “the buy.” 

At this meeting, the DEACON 3 agents presented their operational plan. However, when the subject of “neutralizing” Perez came up, analyst Joan Bannister took this to mean assassination. Bannister reported her suspicions to DEA headquarters, where the anti-CIA faction gleefully leaked her report to Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson. 

Anderson’s sensational allegation that the DEA was providing cover for a CIA assassination unit was supported by revelations that the Senate had investigated Conein for shopping around for assassination devices, including exploding ashtrays and telephones. Conein kept his job, but the investigation exposed Muldoon and led to Conein’s comrade from the OSS, Mitch Werbell. 

A deniable asset Conein used for parallel operations, Werbell had sold silenced machine pistols to DEACON 1 target Robert Vesco. Then living in Costa Rica, Vesco was surrounded by drug trafficking Cuban exiles from the Trafficante organization. Trafficante was also, at the time, living in Costa Rica as a guest of President Figueres. Figueres’ son had purchased weapons from Werbell and used them to arm a death squad he had formed with DEACON 1 asset Carlos Rumbault, a notorious anti-Castro Cuban narco-terrorist and fugitive drug smuggler. 

Meanwhile, in February 1974, DEA Agent Anthony Triponi, a former captain in the army Special Forces and a Phoenix program veteran, was admitted to a hospital in New York “suffering from hypertension.” DEA inspectors found Triponi in the psychiatric ward, distraught because he had broken his “cover” and now his “special code” would have to be changed. 

Thinking he was insane, the DEA inspectors called former chief inspector Patrick Fuller in California, just to be sure. As it turned out, Triponi was an active member of Operation Twofold and everything he said was true! The incredulous DEA inspectors called the CIA and were stunned when they were told: “If you release the story, we will destroy you.” 16 

By 1975, Congress and the Justice Department were investigating the DEA’s nefarious relations with the CIA. In the process they stumbled upon Tripodi’s Medusa Program, as well as DEA plots to assassinate Moises Torrijos (brother of Panamanian President Omar Torrijos) and Panama’s chief of military intelligence, Manuel Noriega. 

In a draft report, DEA Inspector Richard Salmi described Medusa as follows: “Topics considered as options included psychological terror tactics, substitution of placebos to discredit traffickers, use of incendiaries to destroy conversion laboratories, and disinformation to cause internal warfare between drug trafficking organizations; other methods under consideration involved blackmail, use of psychopharmacological techniques, bribery and even terminal sanctions.” 

The Cover-Up 
Despite the flurry of investigations, Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, reconfirmed the CIA’s arrangement with DEA. The CIA continued to have its way. Much of its success is attributed to Seymour Bolten, whose staff, perhaps not coincidentally, handled all requests for files from the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. The Church Committee, as it was known, was investigating the CIA’s many and varied illegal activities. But rather than bring about the total destruction of the Agency, the Church Committee concluded that allegations of drug smuggling by CIA assets and proprietaries “lacked substance.”[What a crock of S#*T DC] 

The Rockefeller Commission likewise gave the CIA a clean bill of health, falsely stating that Operation Twofold was terminated in 1973. As Ingersoll noted, the Commission completely ignored the existence of the CIA’s operational unit hidden within the inspections program. 

However, as a result of the DEASOG assassination scandals, Ford did task the Justice Department to investigate “allegations of fraud, irregularity, and misconduct” in the DEA. Under US Attorney Michael DeFeo, the ensuing investigation examined allegations that DEA officials had discussed killing Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega. In March 1976, Deputy Attorney General Richard Thornburgh announced there were no findings to warrant criminal prosecutions. 

In 1976, Congresswoman Bella Abzug submitted questions to Ford’s CIA director, George H.W. Bush, about the CIA’s role in international drug trafficking. Bush’s response was to cite a 1954 agreement with the Justice Department that gave the CIA the right to block prosecution and keep its crimes secret in the name of national security. In its final report, the Abzug Committee wryly noted: “It was ironic that the CIA should be given responsibility of narcotic intelligence, particularly since they are supporting the prime movers.” 17 

Acknowledging the operational realities, Congress in 1976 through the Mansfield Amendment sought to curtail extra-legal activities by prohibiting DEA agents from kidnapping suspects without the consent of the host government. The CIA, of course, was exempt and continued to sabotage DEA cases against its “prime movers” while further tightening its stranglehold on DEA executive management. 

In 1977, having reached the end of his rope, the DEA’s enforcement chief, Daniel Casey, sent a memo co-signed by the enforcement division chiefs to DEA Administrator Peter Bensinger. The memo stated, “All were unanimous in their belief that present CIA programs were likely to cause serious future problems for DEA, both foreign and domestic.” 18 

Casey and his division chiefs specifically cited CIA “controlled deliveries” into the United States, and the fact that the CIA “will not respond positively to any discovery motion,” as the biggest impediments. 

“Many of the subjects who appear in these CIA-promoted or controlled surveillances,” the DEA officials complained, “regularly travel to the United States in furtherance of their trafficking activities.” The “de facto immunity” from prosecution the traffickers enjoyed, due to the CIA’s “electronic surveillance” of the controlled deliveries, enabled the CIA assets to “operate much more openly and effectively.” 

But Bensinger suffered the CIA at the expense of America’s public health and the DEA’s integrity. Under Bensinger, the DEA created its CENTAC program to target trafficking organization worldwide. But the CIA subverted CENTAC too: as CENTAC chief Dennis Dayle famously said, “The major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.” 19 

Murder and Mayhem 
DEACON 1 inherited BUNCIN’s anti-Castro Cuban assets from Brigade 2506, which the CIA had organized to invade Cuba in 1960. Controlled by Nixon’s secret political police, these CIA assets, operating under DEA cover, had parallel assignments involving “extremist groups and terrorism, and information of a political nature.” 20 

DEACON 1’s downfall, however, had more mundane origins and began when overt agent Bill Logay charged that covert agent Bob Medell’s anti-Castro Cuban assets had penetrated the DEA on behalf of the Trafficante organization. In other words, the CIA was using its narco-terrorists to spy on the DEA, so it could better protect its anti-Castro Cuban narco-terrorist networks. 

DEACON 1 secretary Cecelia Plicet fanned the flames by claiming that Conein and Medell were using Principal Agent Tabraue to circumvent the DEA, and thus more easily bring drugs into the country. In what amounted to an endless succession of controlled deliveries, all monitored by the CIA, Tabraue financed loads of cocaine and used DEACON 1 assets to smuggle them into the US. Plicet told me that Medell and Conein worked for “the other side” and wanted the DEA to fail. These accusations prompted yet another cover-up, in which Logay was reassigned to the DEA’s Inspections staff and Medell was replaced by Gary Mattocks, an NIO member of the Dirty Dozen. 

According to Mattocks, Western Hemisphere Division Chief Ted Shackley (whom Mattocks had worked for in Vietnam) helped Colby set up DEASOG and brought in “his” people, including Tom Clines, whom Shackley placed in charge of the CIA’s Caribbean Operations Group. Clines, like Shackley and Bolten, knew all the exile Cuban narco-terrorists on the DEASOG payroll. CIA officer Vernon Goertz, notably, worked for Clines in Caracas as part of the CIA’s parallel mechanism under DEASOG cover. 

As cover for his DEACON 1 activities, Mattocks set up a front company designed to improve relations between Cuban and American businessmen. Meanwhile, he hired members of the Artime organization, including Watergate burglars Rolando Martinez and Bernard Barker, and Che Guevara’s killer, Felix Rodriguez. These anti-Castro narco-terrorists were allegedly part of a hit team that Shackley and Clines employed for private as well as professional purposes – a distinction no longer relevant in the 21st century. 

In late 1974, DEACON 1 finally expired when Robert Simon’s daughter was murdered in a drive-by shooting by Mattocks’ crazed anti-Castro Cubans. Simon at the time was managing the CIA’s drug data base and had linked the exile Cuban narco-traffickers with “a foreign terrorist organization.” As Mattocks explained, “It got bad after the Brigaders found out Simon was after them.” 

It was bad, yes, but it was business as usual, and none of the CIA’s narco-terrorists were arrested for murdering Simon’s daughter. Instead, Conein issued a directive prohibiting DEACON 1 assets from reporting on domestic political affairs or terrorist activities. The murder was swept under the carpet for reasons of national security. 

DEACON 1 unceremoniously ended in 1975 after Fred Dick was assigned to head the DEA’s Caribbean Basin Group. In that capacity Dick, who hated Seymour Bolten, visited the DEACON 1 safe house and found, in his words, “a clandestine CIA unit using miscreants from Bay of Pigs, guys who were blowing up planes.” Dick hit the ceiling and in August 1975 DEACON I was terminated. 

No new DEACONs were initiated and the rest quietly ran their course. Undeterred, the CIA redeployed its anti-Castro Cuban miscreants to the terror organization CORU in 1977. Others would go to work for Ollie North in the Reagan regime’s Iran-Contra narco-terror network. 

Conein’s IGO was disbanded in 1976 after a grand jury sought DEACON I intelligence regarding several drug busts. But, as noted earlier, CIA-acquired intelligence cannot be used in prosecutions, and the CIA refused to identify its assets in court, with the result that 27 prosecutions were dismissed on national security grounds. 

Gary Mattocks was thereafter unwelcome at the DEA. But his patron Ted Shackley had become DCI George H. W. Bush’s assistant deputy director for operations, at which point Shackley rehired Mattocks into the CIA and assigned him to the CIA’s narcotics unit in Peru. 

At the time, drug kingpin Santiago Ocampo was purchasing cocaine in Peru and his partner Matta Ballesteros was flying it to the usual Cuban miscreants in Miami. One of the receivers, Francisco Chanes, an erstwhile DEACON asset, owned two seafood companies that allegedly served as fronts in North’s Contra supply network, receiving and distributing tons of Contra cocaine. 

Mattocks soon joined the Contra support operation as Nicaraguan guerrilla leader Eden Pastora’s case officer. In that capacity Mattocks was present in 1984 when a CIA case officer handed pilot Barry Seal a camera and told him to take photographs of Sandinista official Federico Vaughn loading bags of cocaine onto Seal’s plane. A dual CIA/DEA “special employee,” Seal was running drugs for Jorge Ochoa Vasquez and using Nicaragua as a transit point for his deliveries. 

North asked DEA officials to instruct Seal to steal $1.5 million in cash from Ochoa and deliver the money to the Contras instead. When the DEA officials objected, North leaked a blurry photo to the right-wing Washington Times. Purportedly taken by Seal, the photo showed Vaughn loading cocaine onto the plane. 

For partisan political purposes, North blew the DEA’s biggest case at the time. And the DEA did nothing about it, even though DEA Chief Jack Lawn said in 1988, in testimony before the Subcommittee on Crime of the Committee on the Judiciary, that leaking the photo “severely jeopardized the lives” of agents. 21 

The criminal conspiracy climaxed in 1989 when the CIA instructed Gary Mattocks to testify as a defense witness at the trial of DEACON 1’s Principal Agent Gabriel Tabraue. Although Tabraue had earned $75 million from drug trafficking while working as a CIA/DEA asset, the judge declared a mistrial based on Mattocks’ testimony. Tabraue was released without a scratch. Some people inferred that President George H.W. Bush had personally ordered Mattocks to torpedo the case. 

Other examples of the CIA’s use of narco-terrorists abound. In 1981, for example, DEA Agent Dick Salmi recruited Roberto Cabrillo, a drug smuggling member of CORU, another organization of crazed Cuban exiles formed by Frank Castro and Luis Posada while George Bush was Director of Central Intelligence. 

The DEA had arrested Frank Castro in 1981, but the CIA engineered his release and hired him to establish a Contra training camp in the Florida Everglades. Castro’s colleague, Luis Posada, reportedly managed drug shipments for the Contras in cahoots with Felix Rodriguez. Charged in Venezuela with blowing up a Cuban airliner and killing 73 people in 1976, Posada was shielded from extradition by President George W. Bush in the mid-2000s.

Having been castrated by the CIA, DEA officials could only ask their CORU assets to please stop blowing up people like Orlando Letelier in the US. They could maim and kill people anywhere else, just not here in the Happy Homeland. By then, Salmi noted, the Justice Department had a special “gray-mail section” to fix cases involving CIA terrorists and drug dealers. 

The Joke Is On You 
Director of Central Intelligence William Webster formed the CIA’s CounterNarcotics Center (CNC) in 1988. Staffed by over 100 agents, it ostensibly became the springboard for the covert penetration of, and paramilitary operations against, top traffickers protected by high-tech security firms, lawyers and well-armed private armies. 

Under CIA political control, the CNC brought together every federal agency involved in the illusory war on drugs. Former CIA officer and erstwhile Operation Twofold member, Terry Burke, then serving as the DEA’s Deputy for Operations, was allowed to send one liaison officer to the CNC. 

The CNC quickly showed its true colors. In late 1990, Customs agents in Miami seized a ton of cocaine from Venezuela. To their surprise, a Venezuelan undercover agent said the CIA had approved the delivery. DEA Administrator Robert Bonner ordered an investigation and discovered that the CIA had, in fact, shipped the load from its bulging warehouse in Venezuela. 22 

The “controlled deliveries” were managed by CIA officer Mark McFarlin, a veteran of Reagan’s terror campaign in El Salvador. Bonner wanted to indict McFarlin, but was prevented from doing so because Venezuela was in the process of fighting off a rebellion led by leftist Hugo Chavez. This same scenario has been playing out in Afghanistan for the last 15 years, largely through the DEA’s Special Operations Division (SOD), whose sole purpose is to provide cover for CIA operations worldwide. 

The ultimate form of imperial corruption, the SOD’s job is not simply to “create a crime” as freewheeling FBN agents did in the good old days, but to “recreate a crime” so it is prosecutable, despite whatever extra-legal methods the CIA employs to obtain the evidence. That way, law enforcement agencies can make arrests without probable cause. 

As Reuters reported in 2013, “The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.” 23 

The utilization of information from the SOD, which like DEASOG operates out of a secret location in Virginia, “cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function” according to a DEA document cited by Reuters, which added that officials are specifically directed “to omit the SOD’s involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony.” 

Agents are told to use “parallel construction” (my italics) to build their cases without reference to SOD’s tips, which may come from sensitive CIA “intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records,” Reuters reported. 

Citing a former federal agent, Reuters reported that SOD operators would, like Joey DiGennaro’s CIA unit, tell law enforcement officials in the US to be at a certain place at a certain time and to look for a certain vehicle which would then be stopped and searched on some pretext. “After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said.” 

An anonymous DEA official told Reuters that this “parallel construction” approach is “decades old, a bedrock concept” for law enforcement seeking to avoid probable cause requirements. 

The SOD’s approach does indeed replicate techniques from the early 1970s used in Operation Twofold and Bolten’s parallel mechanism. But it is a “bedrock concept” only in so far as revising reports in order to convict defendants, which was always conducted as unstated policy, is now official policy: no longer considered corruption, it is how your government manages the judicial system on behalf of the rich political elite. 

As FBN Agent Bowman Taylor caustically observed, “I used to think we were fighting the drug business, but after they formed the BNDD, I realized we were feeding it.” 

The corruption was first “collateral” – a function of national security performed by the CIA in secret – but has now become “integral,” the essence of an empire run amok. I’ll elaborate on that, below.

next
BEYOND DIRTY WARS: THE CIA/DEA CONNECTION AND MODERN DAY TERROR IN LATIN AMERICA 

notes
Chapter 12 
1 Douglas Clark Kinder and William O. Walker III, “Stable Force in a Storm: Harry J. Anslinger and United States Narcotic Policy, 1930-1962.” 
2 See my article “Sex and Drugs and the CIA” for the intimate details of the MKULTRA Program; see The Strength of the Wolf for how the impending exposure of the FBN’s role in providing safe houses for the CIA’s illegal domestic operations contributed to the dismantling of the FBN and its rebirth as the BNDD. 
3 Charlie Siragusa with Robert Wiedrich, On The Trail of the Poppy: Behind The Mask of the Mafia, Prentice Hall Inc., New Jersey, p. 108. 
4 30 January 1967 Memorandum for the Record, by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, available at the Douglas Valentine Collection at the National Security Archive. 
5 Report to the President by the Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, GPO, Washington, DC, June 1975, pp. 232-4. 
6 Adrian Swain, The Time of My Life: Memoirs Of A Government Agent From Pearl Harbor To The Golden Triangle, Axelrod Publishing, Tampa, 1995, p. 465. 
7 Ibid, p. 467. 
8 Tom Tripodi with Joseph P. DeSario, Crusade: Undercover Against the Mafia & KGB, Brassey’s, Washington, DC, 1993, p. 179. 
9 Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Lawrence Hill Books, Brooklyn, 1991, p. 249. 
10 Conein letter to Harper Row President Winthrop Knowlton, October 10, 1972. See Douglas Valentine, “Will The Real Daniel Ellsberg Please Stand Up.” 
11 Special Agents William Logay and Robert Medell to Andrew Tartaglino, Deputy Director for Operations, “Project BUNCIN — Operational Plan”, November 2, 1972, p. 2. 
12 Ibid, p. 3. 
13 Lou Conein referred me to Medell, while Tully Acampora referred me to Logay. 
14 Phillip R Smith Acting Deputy Assistant Administrator for Intelligence to George M Belk, Acting Assistant Administrator for Intelligence, July 19, 1973, “DEACON I: Drug Enforcement Administration Clandestine Operations Network (SEC-SI-73-2506)”, p. 2. 
15 See Cockburn and St. Clair, “The CIA’s Secret Killers”, Counterpunch, 19 December 2014. 
16 Interview with DEA Inspector Mortimer Benjamin. 
17 Jack Anderson and L. Whitten, Boston Globe, 3 October 1977. 
18 Daniel P. Casey, Assistant Administrator for Enforcement, to Peter B. Bensinger, Administrator, re: Central Intelligence Agency. 
19 Peter Dale Scott & Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, Berkeley: U. of CA Press, 1991, pp. x-xi. 
20 Cocaine Politics, p. 28. 
21 Senate Committee on Foreign Operations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, 100th Congress, 2nd Session, GPO, Washington, DC, 1989, p. 135. 
22 Interview with Robert Bonner. 
23 John Shiffman and Kristina Cooke, “U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans”, Reuters, 5 August 2013. 

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