-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
The Great Heroin Coup - Drugs, Intelligence, & International Fascism
Henrik Kruger
Jerry Meldon, Translator
South End Press�1980
Box 68 Astor Station
Boston, MA 02123
ISBN 0-89608-0319-5
240pps - one edition - out-of-print
Orginally published in Danish
Smukke Serge og Heroien
Bogan 1976
--[19]--
TWENTY-ONE
THE COUP
This chapter contains my personal interpretation of the great heroin coup.
Errors are possible on any or all points, inasmuch as the clandestine
operations treated in this book transpire in a closed world infested with
lies and cover-ups. There will always be loose ends.
The coup itself, which transferred control over the heroin gold mine from one
part of the world to another, I regard as a fact of life. Similarly do I
regard the involvement of elements of the White House staff. Just how high up
it went the reader can decide for him or her self.
Of the many heretofore mentioned details in the coup's planning and
execution, I find the following essential:
1) Prior to the coup, Lansky syndicate narcotics boss Santo Trafficante, Jr.
had made the necessary arrangements in Southeast Asia and Mexico, and had
started a war with the Corsican Mafia.
2) Trafficante's old partner, the CIA, had long since assumed control over
Southeast Asia opium smuggling, following Ed Lansdale and Lucien Conein's
defeat of the local branch of the Corsican underworld.
3) In 1971, when the coup's execution was seriously under way, Cuban exiles,
a group with which Trafficante enjoyed a unique rapport, appeared in the
White House's mysterious narcotics operation. They were tied especially to
Conein and E. Howard Hunt.
4) Through a succession of bureaucratic reorganizations the White House
assumed control over narcotics intelligence and enforcement.
5) U.S. narcotics officials waged an all-out war against the Corsicans'
Turkey/ Marseilles/ U.S.A. network, while warnings of a serious heroin threat
from Southeast Asia were all but dismissed.
6) When the Corsican Mafia was neutralized the narcotics enforcement
apparatus was suddenly reorganized as the DEA, and shortly thereafter heroin
began flowing into the United States from Southeast Asia and Mexico.
7) The CIA-infiltrated DEA grabbed control of Latin America's political
repression apparatus, was accused of protecting major narcotics dealers, and
was exposed as an accomplice to gun-running financed with the profits from
the narcotics traffic.
8) The White House protected Robert Vesco, who appears to be a central figure
in the scheme of heroin smuggling and gun-running.
In these eight points we find the will, the power and the motives, not for
the once proclaimed victory over the traffickers, but for the dramatic
transfer of underworld power that suddenly became a reality in 1973.
The Syndicate was in on it. The White House, the CIA, and special lobby
groups were in on it, too, at least indirectly. But we still need ask who in
particular and why. We will rely on logic and guesswork, only to identify
individual accomplices and their particular contributions and motives.
Let us first consider the Lansky Syndicate, represented by Santo Trafficante
and his Cuban narcotics Mafia. In addition to motives he might have shared
with the CIA, Trafficante had many other reasons to take part in the heroin
coup. First, it meant cheaper heroin deliveries and therefore greater
profits. Second, he wanted the Corsicans out because, behind his and the rest
of the Syndicate's backs, they had begun setting up their own U.S.
distribution network. Finally, Traffiicante's drug Mob did not want to see a
repeat of BNDD Operation Eagle-U.S. drug enforcement's last effective raid
against his network.
What were the possibilities for Traffiicante's playing an active role in the
coup's execution, apart from preparation of the Southeast Asia -and
Mexico-based networks? Without help from the CIA and powerful lobbies, his
chances were slim. With their assistance he could infiltrate the narcotics
nerve center, the White House. Here we might discuss just who in fact helped
him.
If it is true that Traffiicante fought the Corsicans so bitterly from 1971
on, how can it be that Marcel Boucan and his shrimpboat were seized in
February 1972 with 425 kilos of pure heroin, en route to Trafficante in
Florida? There is only one explanation, which Boucan himself offered in court
-that Boucan was set up by his American client. How else can the
unprecedented seizure by French Customs following a tip from the CIA be
explained? If it was a plot to exhaust the stocks of the remaining French
heroin rings, and thereby cause panic among the Corsicans, then it worked.
How guilty was Richard Nixon, who presided over the heroin coup? Personally,
I believe that, under strong pressure, he was a more or less willing tool,
rather than the force behind it all. Pointing to Nixon's guilt are his close
association with the Cuba Lobby, with people connected to Lansky and
Trafficante, and with Robert Vesco. In addition, his dirty tricks department
relied heavily on Cuban exiles.
The Cubans would never have supported him with dangerous criminal acts,
demonstrations, donations and votes, if he had really been out to eliminate
their most profitable business. Nixon would have been ruining the Cuban
Mafia, and to an extent the Syndicate as well�and thereby his friends in
Florida. He would have been digging his own grave. Thus Nixon tackled the
drug problem as he did every political problem�he followed the path of least
resistance. And that meant ignoring his criminal allies in Florida and
Southeast Asia while he hounded the Corsicans � who had no constituency � to
death.
That Nixon might have been involved in the heroin coup for his own personal
gain is lent credence by the following quote from Dan Moldea's respected
book, The Hoffa Wars (Charter Books, 1978): "A former Nixon aide, not privy
to the Haig investigation, says that one of his associates in the White House
mentioned to him sometime 'during the impeachment summer,' that someone high
up, maybe [White House chief of staff, General Alexander] Haig,' was
interested in Nixon's possible 'organized crime involvements.' That
conversation involved 'a massive payoff 'from those in 'Army service club
scandals in Vietnam' during 1969 or 1970. The aide says that the service club
ripoffs 'involved the Mafia and millions of dollars' and that the main focus
of the interest by 'someone high up' in the White House was on whether 'the
top Mafia guy' who ran 'all these things in Southeast Asia' had made payoffs
to Nixon. The crime figure, he says, was 'the one who was apparently known as
the so-called mastermind or architect of the Southeast Asian drug trade...
who was very powerful and very well known as a mob leader.... According to
government narcotics experts, the central figure in the Indochina-Golden
Triangle narcotics traffic was Santos Trafficante."
In my opinion the central manipulator in the whole narcotics scheme was the
CIA, or rather a faction within it. It is erroneous to treat the agency as a
monolith. Various lobby groups have their own agents in the company,
generating internal power struggles that reflect political polarizations
external to the CIA. There are, doubtless, CIA factions wholeheartedly in
favor of ending America's policeman and oppressor roles, and in favor of
social democratic rather than right wing regimes. Equally certain is the fact
that one should take the agency's new, outwardly benign face with a grain of
salt. Within the agency there remain powerful groups promoting continued
support of "old friends" in Latin America and Southeast Asia. The China/Cuba
lobby has traditionally been one of the most influential within the CIA, and
there is little reason to believe that the situation has seriously changed.
Finally, the agency has laid low of late, as the Carter administration has
lobbied for a relaxation of constraints placed upon it by Congress in the
wake of the seventies' exposes of CIA horror stories.
In addition to, or rather behind, the CIA's new official policy there is also
an unofficial one. It manifests itself in such matters as the manipulation of
the DEA to perform what previously had been CIA dirty work, and in the
toleration, if not encouragement of a large, apparently independent army of
Cuban exile terrorists, available for action in Latin America at the request
of the presiding dictators.
The evidence suggests that the forces behind the unofficial policy were able
to place many of their loyal CIA agents in the DEA, and in such private
intelligence agency covers as Intertel and Wackenhut, where they continue
their tasks while letting the agency wash its hands.[1] Intelligence is still
gathered by the CIA, but some of the dirtiest operations are now performed by
"former" agents.
We cannot, of course, discount the possibility that the unofficial policy is
in fact executed by former agents who had either been purged from the agency,
or left in protest against its more moderate line. However that implies that
a renegade CIA faction now runs an independent secret service, aided by lobby
interests -i.e., not Intertel, but an even more powerful "third force.[2] If
that is so, I can come up with only one lobby group with the relevant motives
as well as the power to back them-the World Anti-Communist League (WACL).
WACL can mobilize CIA agents closely associated with the China/ Cuba/Chile
lobby, especially the large contingent of former agents of the Gehlen/
Vlassov organization (the intelligence agency run by Hitler's masterspy
Reinhard Gehlen, which became the BND, the West German equivalent of the
CIA).[3]
E. Howard Hunt was clearly the China/Cuba/ Latin America lobby's man. That he
is also tied to WACL is suggested by the fact that William F. Buckley, Hunt's
close friend for twenty years and the godfather of his children,[4] was one
of WACL's top U.S. supporters.[5] Also connected to the same lobby groups are
Lucien Conein and the State Department's former intelligence chief, Ray S.
Cline, who continues to be a frequent guest at the Taiwan WACL stronghold.[6]
Hunt and Conein were the vital forces behind the White House's great heroin
coup. Hunt secured the Cuban exiles their necessary footing; and he got his
friends Bernard Barker and Manuel Artime to set up "hit teams" to kidnap and
murder Latin American narcotics traffickers. According to Frank Sturgis,
those traffickers included members of Auguste Ricord and Christian David's
Grupo Frances. Hunt persuaded Egil Krogh to bring CIA agents into the White
House narcotics apparatus. He told Krogh that he knew "key CIA officers who
could be temporarily detached from the agency and employed by the new liaison
group."[7] It was Hunt who recommended Lucien Conein to head the group.
Finally, it was intelligence reports from the CIA and Conein's group which
made White House narcotics actions focus almost exclusively on the Corsicans.
Conein's close friend Mitch WerBell III told journalist Jim Hougan he "found
it difficult to believe that a lifelong spy of Conein's stature could ever
really leave the CIA. Accustomed to the use of other government agencies as
CIA covers, WerBell quite naturally held open the possibility that Conein's
DEA job was no more than an exercise in 'sheep-dipping' the backgrounds and
identities of the Dirty Dozen, all of whom were CIA veterans."[8]
The desire to help its old friends in Southeast Asia and Latin America was
not the CIA's only motive for promoting the heroin coup. The Gaullists in
France, including their loyal adherents in intelligence agency SDECE, and
their dirty tricksters in SAC were, in the de Gaulle era, the CIA's arch
enemies as well as rivals for control of the world heroin trade. One can well
imagine the CIA joining forces with Georges Pompidou and other pro-U.S.
forces in France, in crushing the old Gaullist intelligence network.
In 1973, with the Corsicans finally pushed out of the picture, the White
House reorganized the narcotics effort to form the DEA. Almost immediately,
heroin began flowing to the U.S. from new sources of supply. Journalist Ron
Rosenbaum cites the following statement by a U.S. customs official: "BNDD and
Customs are finally getting somewhere, they break up the French Connection,
they're getting big conspiracy cases. Suddenly they [the White House] step in
and there's this big shake-up, and by the time people get back to work the
Mexican Connection is set up, protected and doing big business. What's that
say to you?"[9]
He might have added that the Southeast Asian connection was also protected
and doing big business.
The emergence of the DEA was the next to last phase of the heroin coup. Hunt
and Conein's CIA agents moved into DEA intelligence and operations, Conein
locating twelve Latino CIA agents in his Special Operations Group alone. The
Dirty Dozen was officially created to combat Cuban and Latin American
narcotics smugglers, allegedly following the assassination approach conceived
in the darkest corners of the White House.
It must have been a gag. Conein's forces were apparently directed, for the
most part, against small-time independents who had competed with the big-time
traffickers in on the heroin coup. The biggest Cuban network, Santo
Trafficante's, went untouched. Miami's 1974-75 murder wave in Little Havana
might even have been connected to the activities of Conein's Cubans. The
victims had opposed Orlando Bosch's drive for solidarity in terrorism, a
drive which�as suggested by writer Hougan[10]�might well have enjoyed the
support of Trafficante and Robert Vesco. Of the latter two, certainly the
first and quite possibly the second as well were central figures in the
heroin coup.
That brings us to the last, the political phase of the heroin coup, which
began with the DEA's 1974 takeover of the CIA's Latin American torture and
repression apparatus, and ended with the 1976 creation of CORU, Bosch's
terrorist mercenary army. "Ended" is, however, the incorrect word, since the
brutalities financed by the heroin coup continue. The DEA�or that part of it
penetrated by the CIA�protects the major narcotics dealers. The latter, in
turn, support�financially and through gun-running�anti-Communist paramilitary
groups which work hand in hand with Latin American police and military
forces, whose death squads and torturers are supervised by agents of the DEA.
The infiltration of the DEA, and the variety of political assignments for its
agents, have caused such violent splits within the bureau that one can speak
of two wings which fight one another. One wing carries out
guns-for-drugs-and-protection programs; the other tries desperately to combat
the drug traffic carried out or protected by the first! Among the expressions
of this bitter internal strife, apparently, are the Sicilia-Falcon and
WerBell cases, and the dismissal of DEA director Bartels for suspected
corruption.
Recently, the use of drug profits to finance right wing terrorism has been
placed in a new perspective by revelations of Cuban exile teamwork with
European and Latin American Fascists, and the economic support of WACL for
the same anti-Communist groups." And that brings us to the final link in the
chain of drugs, intelligence, and fascism.
pps.189-196
Notes
1. Wackenhut was founded in Miami in 1954, at the height of the Cold War,
McCarthyism, and domestic witch hunts, by George Wackenhut, a former FBI gym
instructor. The firm reportedly has archives containing files on everyone
investigated by the old House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), and
publishes a monthly bulletin, The Wackenhut Corporation Security Review:
Communism and You. In 1974 it was awarded a $15 million contract to guard the
trans-Alaska pipeline.
International Intelligence, Inc. (Intertel) was created in 1970 by former
Naval Intelligence, National Security Agency and Justice Department
investigator Robert Peloquin. It grew out of the latter's association with
James Crosby (a partner in the Mary Carter Paint Company which became Resorts
International, and a close friend and business associate of Nixon crony Bebe
Rebozo) whose entry into the Bahamas gambling casino scene was facilitated by
a U.S. Justice Department probe, led by Peloquin, of Bahama gamblers' links
to the Mob. Once Crosby had built his own casino on Paradise Island, Peloquin
ran the security firm that policed it. Resorts International later helped
Peloquin found Intertel, whose more prominent clients have included Howard
Hughes and ITT. Thus was Intertel involved in the Thanksgiving 1970 whisking
away of Hughes to the Bahamas, and the 1972 affair involving the Dita Beard
memo on ITT's buy-off of a Justice Department antitrust action. Besides
industrial security, Intertel's specialties include economic intelligence,
data processing, systems engineering, and the behavioral sciences. See G.
O'Toole: The Private Sector (Norton, 1978).
2. Intertel. might indeed be very important in this connection, as the
Justice Department's DeFeo report reveals the close relationship between
Intertel and the DEA on such matters as Operation Silver Dollar and Operation
Croupier. Consider DEA agent Santo Allesandro Bario, who seems to have been
in on many of the operations discussed in this book. Intertel employed him on
a 1971 security project in Las Vegas. He later infiltrated New Orleans Mafia
circles as a BNDD undercover agent. In 1972-73 the BNDD/DEA sent him to
France, where he infiltrated the key Corsican Guerini family. In May 1974
Lucien Conein recommended Bario as an undercover agent to help Intertel on
Operation Croupier. Croupiers at the Paradise Island Casino were allegedly
involved in narcotics smuggling. In July 1974 Bario, Conein and acting DEA
chief inspector Phillip Smith met with Intertel director Robert Peloquin. In
August Bario was off on his mission to Nassau. Smith and Bario alike have
been under investigation for cases of fraud and misconduct involving
Intertel. Bario worked for the DEA in Mexico from 1975 until he was caught in
1978 in a mysterious fraud setup in San Antonio. He went to jail, where he
was allegedly poisoned, and was unconscious in a hospital until he died a few
months later.
3. Spearheading WACL's Latin America drive is the Confederacion Anticomunista
Latinoamericana (CAL), which is connected to the Federacion Mexicana
Anticomunista (FEMACO). Financial support for these organizations is
allegedly supplied through Shuen Shigh Kao, a Mexico-based agent of Taiwan
intelligence -see P. Chairoff: Dossier Neo-Nazisme (Editions Ramsay, 1978).
WACL's tolerant attitude towards heroin smuggling was never more evident than
in the case of Chao Sopsaisana, who in 1977 was arrested in Paris with sixty
kilos of pure heroin in his valise. Diplomatic immunity got him back to Laos,
where he continued in his role as vice president of the National Assembly as
if nothing had happened. He remains today the president of the Laotian
chapter of WACL -see Asian Outlook, January 1979.
4. E.H. Hunt: Undercover (Berkeley-Putnam, 1974); T. SzuIc: Compulsive Spy
(Viking, 1974).
5. According to Frederic Laurent in L'Orchestre Noir (Stock, 1978), documents
of the neo-Fascist terrorist group Aginter Press, recovered by the Portuguese
army in 1974, included correspondence between Buckley and Aginter agent Jay
Salby; see chapter twenty-three on the terrorists.
6. Asian Outlook, June and October 1978.
7. E.J. Epstein: Agency of Fear (Putnam, 1977). 8. J. Hougan: Spooks (William
Morrow, 1978).
9. R.Rosenbaum: "The Decline and Fall of Nixon's Drug Czar, "New Times, 5
September 1975.
10. Hougan, op. cit.
11. ABC, 27 January 1977; Latin America, 27 August 1976; Cuadernos para el
Dialogo, 19 February 1977; Triunfo, 12 February 1977; Chairoff, op. cit.; Carl
os Barbeiro Filho, the Brazilian head of the South American branch of the
WACL, runs an Asuncion, Paraguay finance company, Financiera Urundey, which
launders dirty money from Saudi Arabia and South Korea through Paraguay' wide
open foreign exchange market. Barbeiro, who has been linked to the Argentine
and Brazilian Anticommunist Alliances, the terrorist AAA and AAB, reportedly
arranges training courses in Taiwan for the Paraguayan police (see The
Leveller, October 1979).
--fini--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
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