Drug War: Covert Money, Power & Policy: CIA/Syndicate

The CIA had the legal authority to command Johnson's attention every single day, and it told him exactly what it wanted him to hear. Johnson was only two cars behind JFK in Dallas. He literally heard the bullets whiz by his head. He also knew that, contrary to all established procedure, Kennedy's entire cabinet was directed to be out of Washington on November 22. They were all at a conference in Hawaii. This prevented the formation of a Cabinet quorum on the day of the assassination. The subject of that conference, conducted by the CIA, was the need to escalate the Vietnam War.

CIA/KMT Heroin

We can now understand Johnson's deep reluctance to accept the 1964 Presidential nomination, despite the fact that he knew he'd win in a landslide. He also knew, as he told Lady Bird on the day of the nomination on those tapes she gave to Michael Beschloss, that he had no chance of controlling basic policy.

Johnson's first National Security Action Memorandum, 273, stated that "The objectives of the United States with respect to the withdrawal of U.S. military personnel remain as stated in the White House statement of October 2, 1963," that is, in Kennedy's last NSAM, 263. But 263 predicated withdrawal on military progress, consonant with the successful "Vietnamization" of the war.

Immediately after Kennedy's death, the CIA decided that no military progress had been made, that complete "Vietnamization" was not possible. As NSAM 273 put it, "It remains the central objective of the United States in South Vietnam to assist the people and Government of that country to win their contest against the externally directed and supported communist conspiracy."

Less than a month after the assassination, Chairman of the JCS Maxwell Taylor was ordering Vietnam commander Westmoreland to "fight the war right, the way we did in France. It's a big war and we'll fight it like one. We must bring enough firepower and bombs down on the Vietcong to make them realize they're finished; only then will they toss in the sponge." When Taylor said that, we had only 16,000 troops in Vietnam, most technical support personnel, not fighters. Unless he were planning it, how could he know it was going to be "a big war"?

As Prouty puts it, "In the hands of Lemnitzer, NSAM #55 [for whom it was originally intended] meant no more clandestine operations, or at least no more unless there were most compelling reasons. In the hands of Maxwell Taylor, this meant ....the new military force of response, of reaction, and of undercover activity - all summed up in the newly-coined word 'counterinsurgency.'"

Taylor's rosy projections of easy victory, on which Kennedy's plans for withdrawal were based, were withdrawn at that strange Hawaii conference - 2 days before Kennedy's death. Johnson was fed a steady stream of grim reality. After many months of unrelenting VC progress, Johnson, despite his best political instincts, was willing to accept that without American troops, South Vietnam would collapse. Withdrawal, if it had ever been, was no longer an option.

Maj. Gen. Victor Krulak's Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities staff was charged with coordinating the inexorable escalation within the Department of Defense. Col. Prouty was Krulak's lead officer on the SACSA staff: "His contacts in this select circle in the Office of the Secretray of Defense, were such men as Major General Edward D. Lansdale, who was McNamara's special assistant for all matters involving the CIA and special operations; William Bundy, who appears throughout the Pentagon Papers as one of the key men of the Secret Team and was at that time a recent alumnus of the CIA, with ten years in that agency behind him; John T. McNaughton, another member of the ST and a McNamara favorite; Joseph Califano, who moved from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to the White House...and others."

Johnson terminated the counter-productive Cuba operation in April of 1964. This interrupted the efforts of Joe Califano. Califano was in charge of overall Defense Department liaison with the Cuban exiles, 1963-64, both before and after the assassination. Lt. Col. Alexander Haig worked under Califano. Joe Trento, in the Wilmington News-Journal, 1/10/81: "Califano and Haig worked hand in hand in keeping the nationalists from the Cuban Brigade happy. They even checked out potential members for the hit teams with older members of the Cuban Brigade." This was confirmed by both Ricardo Canette, a leading member of the hit teams, and a top official of the Defense Intelligence Agency who was Haig's Marine liaison in 1963-64.

Califano reported directly to Secretary of the Army Cyrus Vance. The "older members of the Cuban Brigade" Califano and Haig were so concerned to keep happy included the hard core of Santos Trafficante's Batistiano assassins, the former leaders of Batista's secret police. When the Cuba operation was discontinued, military intelligence sent Califano to the White House as Johnson's advisor.

On June 21, 1970, the Bureau of Narcotics announced the dénouement of Operation Eagle, "the largest roundup of major drug traffickers in the history of federal law enforcement." 105 of the 150 dealers arrested were Cuban veterans of the Bay of Pigs. They were defended by Frank Ragano, Santos Trafficante's lawyer. Attorney General Mitchell said that this was "a nationwide ring of wholesalers handling about 30 percent of all heroin and 75 to 80 percent of all cocaine sales in the United States."

Trafficante toasts Carlos Marcello, left, and Frank Ragano, right,1966; AP/WW

Operation Eagle is yet another example of "poor communications" between the Feds and the CIA. Nixon's CIA proceeded to sabotage most of the Eagle indictments, and nearly all the heroes of Brigade 2506, who had originally been recruited under Vice-President Nixon, went right back to work for Don Santos.

Califano is a key to understanding the drug propaganda not only by virtue of an analysis of his intentional sophistry[in the "Propaganda" chapter], but by virtue of his covert relationships. Is it a coincidence that a high-level CIA agent who helped run Santos Trafficante's dope-dealing assassins became the country's leading anti-drug propagandist? I don't think so. The centers of power responsible for dealing the drugs are the same centers of power disseminating the artificial hysteria necessary for their continued criminalization. That keeps the retail a hundred times higher than the natural value and the trade exclusively in the hands of the muscle. Another name for the muscle is military intelligence.

For American military intelligence, the Vietnam War, to a very large extent, was a drug war, and, just as in Cuba, we were the dealers. Oil and other mineral wealth, of course, played a major role, as did the great defense contractor boondoggle. The Vietnam War was worth $240 billion to defense contractors in overt appropriations, and at least another $300 billion in covert and indirect appropriations. The artificial value of the opium from Laos, Burma and Thailand became, therefore, a major factor in the Indochinese military equation - the means by which our clients could pay for our arms. Drug Prohibition has made the illegal drug trade the economic basis of military power - that is, the legitimate business of military intelligence -  throughout much of the world.

Califano's propaganda tactics for today's Drug War are identical to those he used to promote the Vietnam War. He pulls the emotional trigger with a staccato barrage of snow-statistics, weeping for the babies that will die if we don't ESCALATE THE WAR RIGHT NOW! As Prouty puts it, "...alumni of the intelligence community - a service from which there are no unconditional resignations. All true members of the Team remain in the power center whether in office with the incumbent administration or out of office with the hard core set. They simply rotate to and from official jobs and the business world or the pleasant haven of academe."

By late August, 1964, the Joint Chiefs were realistically insisting that "accelerated and forceful action with respect to North Vietnam is essential to prevent a complete collapse of the US position in Southeast Asia." The planted axiom, of course, was that continued incremental escalation could be effective.

As the deep rage of Prouty, Shoup, Ridgway, MacArthur and many other ranking intelligence officers indicates, they equated lying through your teeth to the Commander-in-Chief with treason. Strategically speaking, withdrawal was the only option. The Vietminh had made that point long ago. They were the overwhelming majority, therefore there was no military option but to treat them as such. That had always been perfectly clear to American military intelligence. Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, Matthew Ridgway, Omar Bradley and David Shoup did not consider 60,000 American dead, or genocide, an option.

Support for Saigon's dope dealers was rationalized by the same Nazi-like counterinsurgency double-speak that rationalized support for Trafficante's sluggers. I remember hearing Secretary of State Dean Rusk rationalize Johnson's Vietnam escalation as a necessity to prevent the whole region from going communist. That was the official rationalization contained in NSAM 288, March 17, 1964. That speech became an anti-war poster when someone noticed that it was, virtually word for word, the 1940 speech given by Joseph Goebbels in defense of the Nazi invasion of Russia, with "Vietnam" substituted for "Russia." The Nazis were very concerned about the domino effect of "Bolshevism." They were also, like the Japanese, and U.S. military intelligence, great dope dealers.

Califano's Vietnam era playmates, William Colby, Edward Lansdale, Ted Shackley, Thomas Clines, Edmund Wilson, Lucien Conein, Richard Secord, Richard Armitage, John Singlaub, Felix Rodriguez, Barry McCaffrey and Oliver North, engineers of the Vang Pao-Laotian Opium connection, went on to engineer Reagan's Trafficante-supported Contra-Cocaine connection.

Mainstream critics of the war, ever fearful of media blacklist, obsequiously called our ruthless mass-murder "an excess of righteousness and disinterested benevolence," and "defending the South" (John King Fairbank) or "blundering efforts to do good." (Anthony Lewis).

Only hippie crackpots like Allen Ginsburg, a practicing pharmaco-shaman, insisted that we were doing good by financing mass murder with dope. Time, Feb. 9, 1959, derided Ginsburg for making that claim, but in 1972 the intrepid Alfred W. McCoy proved it was true with the publication of his seminal The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia.

Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky in Time, 2/9/1959. Time captioned this “Don’t shoot the wart hog.”

Wrote McCoy, "It was not only General Belleux who convinced me that the Vietnam drug problem needed investigation. At a street demonstration in New Haven for Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, I met the beat poet Allen Ginsburg, who insisted that the CIA was deeply involved in the Southeast Asian opium trade. To back his claims and aid my research, he mailed me a carton containing years' worth of unpublished dispatches from Time-Life correspondents that documented the involvement of America's Asian allies in the opium traffic." That Ginsburg was an enthusiastic pharmaco-shaman and McCoy rather pharmaco-phobic is beside the point. Both were anti-fascist.

Nixon's much-touted "war on drugs" took the media focus off his escalation of the Vietnam War. This included the genocidal B-52 carpet-bombing of much of Vietnam and Cambodia, and the simultaneous invasion and overthrow of the neutralist Cambodian government. Nixon's incredible brutality was an attempt to outrun the visceral rage the obvious genocide was producing back home. The Drug War was also a way of turning the police loose on the anti-war demonstrators, many of whom considered pot sacramental.

"If we cannot destroy the drug menace, then it will destroy us. I am not prepared to accept this alternative," intoned President Nixon in June of 1971. That same year, 8 kilos of General Ouane Rattikone's Double U-O Globe Laotian heroin was seized by Customs in New Jersey from the U.S. military postal system. A Filipino diplomat was arrested with 15 kilos of Double U-O Globe heroin. Another with forty kilos. The son of Panama's ambassador to Taiwan was arrested with fifty kilos. And a Laotian prince, the Royal Laotian ambassador to France, was arrested with sixty kilos of Double U-O Globe heroin he had attempted to bring into Paris under his diplomatic pouch. These were all anticommunist allies financed by Richard Nixon.

The Laotian prince, Sopsaisana, was the head of the Asian Peoples Anti-Communist League, the chief political advisor of Vang Pao, military commander of the CIA's Laotian Hmong army. The heroin itself was refined from Hmong opium at Long Tieng, the CIA's headquarters in northern Laos, and given to Sopsaisana on consignment by Vang Pao. The consignment made its way from Vang Pao in Long Tieng to Sopsaisana in Vientiane via General Secord's Air America. That, apparently, was an alternative Richard Nixon was willing to accept.

Vang Pao points out a target

The "French Connection" was convenient not only as Nixon snow, but as security to France's pro-American President Georges Pompidou, who needed to break the independent power of France's far-right secret services. These were led by the SDECE, the Service de Documentation Extérieure et du Contre-Espionage. Its streetfighting arm was SAC, the Service d'Action Civique. The Deuxieme Bureau, the Second Bureau, is the military intelligence branch of the French Expeditionary Corps.

When the U.S. took Indochina from France, the Corsicans kept their Marseille labs humming by aligning themselves with the new powers and adding Turkey as a major supplier of morphine base. This enabled them to keep their vast distribution apparatus supplied with Marseille's famous snow-white #4 heroin.

Most of Marseille's heroin was turned into cash via the French distribution apparatus in South America. France's ambassador to Uruguay in the late 60's was Colonel Roger Barberot, a very dangerous top-level SDECE agent, as was France's ambassador to Bolivia. Both were mortal political enemies of Pompidou. These men functioned as politico-military liaison to the huge South American dope-arms-terror network of Auguste Ricord, which supplied most of the snow-white Marseille heroin on American streets.

Ricord, a former Gestapo agent, was particularly powerful in Argentina, Peru, Paraguay and Bolivia, strongholds of his old Nazi-Gehlen allies. These included arms dealer Klaus Barbie, who boasted the Bolivian Army's Chief of Staff, Alfredo Ovando Candia, on the board of his shipping company Transmaritima. Ovando became Bolivian president on Gen. Barrientos' convenient death in a 1969 helicopter crash.

Ricord could also count on Frederich Schwend in Peru, who had been involved in Operation Bernhard, the SS attempt to forge enough Bank of England notes to turn itself into an independent economic power. Like Barbie, Schwend was a post-war beneficiary of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps.

Schwend and Barbie teamed up to keep South America's right-wing death squads well-supplied with high quality German arms - from Merex and Gemetex. These were first-line NATO heavy arms - tanks, rocket launchers, air cannon - the works. That this was an American, French and German-driven effort, or at least an effort of their cooperating secret services, is demonstrated by the fact that the Israelis worked right alongside the Nazis. Ovando of Bolivia, Laugerud of Guatemala, D'Aubuisson of El Salvador and countless others had Israeli training and were loyal customers of the Israelis as well as the Germans.

Unfortunately for Ricord, when Pompidou decided to use the CIA to gain control of French intelligence, the French Connection was doomed. Nixon's ally pulled the political protection out from under the Marseille labs and Ricord's SDECE distribution network. According to the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics, Pompidou's police busted at least ten major SAC heroin distributors in France in 1970-71.

On April 5, 1971, an SDECE agent named Roger de Louette was intercepted on the Elizabeth, New Jersey dock with 45 kilos of Marseille heroin. De Louette led investigators to Col. Paul Fournier, one of the SDECE's commanding officers, who was formally indicted in November, 1971. Major bust followed major bust as the joint BNDD-CIA-French intelligence operation unravelled the Corsican-SDECE structure. Between 1971 and 1973 virtually the entire Ricord network was destroyed. It made great publicity for Nixon, of course, but it actually increased the volume of heroin coming into the U.S., since it destroyed the American Syndicate's only competition.

Nixon bought off Turkish opium production for a pittance in foreign aid, but that only strengthened the KMT-connected Chinese gangs running Southeast Asian dope. Efforts were made by a DEA team in Bangkok to stem heroin exports from there, but these amounted to little more than public relations for Thailand's dope-dealing military. Besides, Mexican heroin production was ready to pick up any slack let drop by the Asians. By 1975, Mexico was supplying 90% of U.S. heroin.

Eagle-Earth opium, the Shah’s brand

Afghanistan and Pakistan, responding both to American pressure on the Golden Triangle and a 2-year drought in Southeast Asia, soon captured the European heroin market. Then Nixon's ally, the Shah, announced that Iran would resume opium production, putting 50% more land under poppies than Nixon had just bought off in Turkey. This move was wildly popular in Iran - hailed as a defense of traditional Iranian culture. The Iranians, of course, were thinking of gum opium, not diacetylmorphine.

Scoring the opium seed capsules, Shiraz, Persia, c.1920. An elegant Teherani lady enjoys the results; Asia, c.1925

By the early 80's Southeast Asian production had recovered, so that the sum total of Nixon's pressure on Turkey and the "French Connection" was to vastly strengthen the world's heroin production capacity. And Nixon left the geographically flexible American Syndicate distribution apparatus, controlled largely by Teamster partner Santos Trafficante, a long-time Nixon financier, almost completely untouched. These were the conclusions of the 1977 House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse, as well as virtually every other expert.

Paraguay simply became a German-American rather than a German-French operation. Ricord himself was extradicted to the U.S. in 1973, but his Paraguayan partner, Pastor Coronel, the chief of Stroessner's secret police, was left stronger than ever, the recipient of a mountain of Nixon's "anti-drug" and "anti-terrorism" aid. Pastor Coronel was very "anti-drug" and "anti-communist." He attended all the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation meetings, along with most of the CIA's Latin American station chiefs.