-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 --[22]-- POSTSCRIPT The more things change, say the French, the more they remain the same. And who knows better than the French, for whom scandal at government's highest levels is as common as the new moon. The current talk of Paris is the cover-up in the investigation of the Christmas 1976 murder of Prince Jean de Broglie, former French cabinet member and co-founder of his brother-in-law President Giscard d'Estaing's Republican party. When he left the government in 1967 de Broglie plunged into the shadowy side of "export-import", choosing as his associates traffickers in arms, counterfeit dollars and drugs. Following a five-day investigation, then Interior Minister Michel Poniatowski fingered two members of the neo-Fascist OAS underground, who were later released for lack of evidence. Poniatowski's lame attempt to minimize the president's embarrassment is now being compared to the Ben Barka affair cover-up of a decade earlier.[1] Which is not to imply that the sensation of deja vu is a monopoly of the French. One needn't be an apologist for Russia's involvement in Afghanistan to see history repeat itself in CIA support for the side financing its operations with opium. By the time the agency admitted supplying arms to Afghanistani insurgent groups,[2] it had long been known that the same groups supported themselves via the drug traffic. As reported a year earlier Feudal landlords whose buildings are threatened with confiscation by the Taraki government are bringing the produce from their poppy crops into Pakistan, and use the proceeds to buy rifles, explosives, and other weapons. Pakistani arms merchants report that their new customers come in daily and business is booming.[3] Guns for drugs, the same scenario as in Laos, Burma and Latin America. In a New York Times portrait, Afghanistani rebel leader Sayed Ahmed Gailani was described as an aristocrat tied to former King Zaher Shah and the owner of a Peugeot dealership in Kabul. His ancestral holdings confiscated, he was now underwritten by Saudis.[4] Gailani's followers, reports Counterspy magazin e, are for the most part Pathan tribesmen, traditional harvesters of opium.[5] Not long after the major dislocations began, tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan were replacing Southeast Asia's "Golden Triangle" as the major source of heroin in Western Europe, and beginning to ship heroin to the United States.[6] This was reported prior to the Russian invasion, by DEA director Peter Bensinger. He added that the Afghanistani police were vigorously combatting the narcotics traffic (Afghanistan's 1979 opium harvest was twenty times Mexico's[7]), thanks to their Russian advisers and the decrease in corruption. Most of Europe's heroin was arriving in West Germany by way of Turkish migrant workers. The Turkish Fascist party and its storm troopers, the "Grey Wolves," were said to be organizing the traffic and using their profits to purchase arms.[8] As in Afghanistan, Iran's problems, too, have been a shot in the arm for the drug trade. That this is not taken lightly by the Ayatollahs was shown by the recent firing squad execution in Teheran of 20 drug traffickers.[9] Americans, meanwhile, have been learning about a quarter century of CIA teamwork with its Gestapo-like creation, the Shah's secret police SAVAK (which had long been operating against progressive forces in Afghanistan). Amo ng the more notable developments was one evoked by the April 1980 trial in Wilmington, Delaware of SAVAK agent Sharokh Bakhtiar, cousin of Iran's last prime minister under the Shah and son of SAVAK's founder, on charges of selling heroin to Federal agents. One week before the trial was to open, former CIA agent Donald Deneselya, who met Bakhtiar while working for SAVAK, threatened to reveal the names of 7500 CIA agents-hostages in Iran included-unless the charges against Bakhtiar were dropped. Although Deneselya's initial threat proved idle, when Bakhtiar was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, Deneselya gave a list of names to the Wilmington News-Journal, which chose not to print them. The same newspaper reported, however, that Bakhtiar and his two co-defendants were among a group of Iranian intelligence operatives who resorted to the smuggling of heroin to finance a counterrevolution in Iran. Moreover, according to Deneselya, SAVAK's heroin traffic into the U.S. had long been tolerated by U.S. authorities, who also ignored the fact that as the Shah's downfall approached, Iranians brought in large amounts of heroin via the diplomatic pouch. A member of the State Department Iranian Task Force confirmed that the Iranian aristocracy cashed the local currency into heroin as they escaped the revolution. Furthermore, DEA sources acknowledged that until shortly before the Shah's departure, all SAVAK drug arrests were automatically dropped.[10] In August 1979 two Cuban exiles and the Turkish-American owner of a Manhattan restaurant were arrested selling four pounds of Middle Eastern heroin to an undercover agent, prompting the Times' Nicholas Gage to speculate that Latino drug dealers were in business with Turkish suppliers.[11] Five months later DEA regional director John Fallon reported that 48 percent of all heroin confiscated in New York could be traced to the Middle East and Asia.[12] In late February Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti targeted Baltimore, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington for stepped-up enforcement to halt the flood of high-grade heroin from Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan[13]—where the DEA reported a combined 1979 harvest of 1600 tons, ten times the figure for the Golden Triangle and one hundred times the tally for Mexico.[14] As noted earlier, drug trade realignments of this magnitude are generally paralleled by realignments in the underworld. The 12 July 1979 gangland slaying in Brooklyn of Carmine Galante might have been connected to the fight for control of the East Coast heroin trade. Galante was the reported boss of the New York Bonnano crime family which, according to a 1978 N.Y. Police Dept. report, "controls the large majority of the heroin shipped through Canada into the United States."[15] On 21 March 1980, a day after appearing before the New Jersey State Commission on Investigation, Angelo Bruno, reputed capo of the Philadelphia-southern New Jersey crime organization, was shot to death in front of his home. Speculations as to why included Mafia squabbling over half-a-billion dollars' worth of service industry growth since legal gambling came to Atlantic City, and control over the New Jersey numbers racket -which Bruno reportedly refused to share with such interested parties as the late Galante and the New York crime family of the late Carlo Gambino. Philadelphia police, however, felt Bruno's killing might have been related to his reported aversion to dealing in narcotics.[16] Coincidentally, three days before the Bruno murder, two of Gambino's cousins had been arrested in their Cherry Hill, New Jersey restaurant on charges of conspiring to smuggle $10 million worth of heroin into New York. Rosario and Giuseppe Gambino, who Federal law enforcement officials say ran 200 southern New Jersey pizza joints employing illegal aliens, had allegedly masterminded the smuggling of 90 pounds of heroin from Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan by way of Milan, Italy. What makes their case all the more intriguing is the Gambinos' connection to the powerful Milan-based financier Michele Sindona.[17] Sindona was convicted in New York in late March on counts ranging from bank fraud to perjury after looting $45 million from the Franklin National Bank-America's twentieth largest-which he controlled and brought to ruin. In June a New York judge sentenced him to twenty-five years imprisonment, a record for white collar crime. He is similarly accused of looting $225 million from his banks in Milan. On 2 August 1979, three weeks after the assassination in Milan of the lawyer chosen to liquidate Sindona's bankrupt Banca Privata Italiana, and one month before the scheduled opening of his New York trial, Sindona disappeared — supposedly kidnapped by left wing Italian extremists, as he later reported — only to reappear two and a half months later on 42nd Street and Tenth Avenue with a bullet wound in his thigh and with documents, miraculously gathered during his "abduction" in Europe, which he claimed would exonerate him. That was not all. On 24 January 1980 it was announced that three high-standing clerics from the Vatican-whose immense financial holdings had once been in Sindona's hands-were going to be his character witnesses (an offer the Vatican would later retract). Sindona's fortunes suffered another setback, however, when Italian and U.S. agents established that he had arranged his own disappearing act-booking, for example, his own European flights-and that his accomplices had included the Gambino brothers. The Gambinos, it seems, had a long record in the import-export and protection of criminals and other illegal aliens, among them the family of Sicilian Mafia chieftain Tomasso Buseetta[18]—who, recall, was dispatched to South America to take over the Ricord network, but wound up joining Christian David's heroin connection. As to Sindona, his co-defendant in the U.S., Carlo Bordoni, reportedly told the Italian magazine Panorama that "Michele Sindona was (and still is) one of the mafia's bankers, the route through which organized crime money passes across the Atlantic."[19] Back in 1967 Interpol had asked the Italian police if they could verify that he and others were "involved in the illicit movement of depressant, stimulant and hallucinogenic drugs between Italy, the United States and possibly other European countries." The response was negative.[20] Sindona's connections to the presidential administration of Richard Nixon are more firmly established. Sindona's Italian banks were investment partners with the Continental Illinois Bank headed by David Kennedy, Nixon's first treasury secretary and a director of Fasco International, Sindona's Luxembourg-based holding company. Sindona's interests were represented in the United States by Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander, the law firm of Nixon's attorney general John Mitchell. In Italy, Sindona orchestrated the efforts of the neo-Fascist deputy Luigi Turchi to garner Italian support for Nixon's election campaign.[21] Sindona even offered $1 million, on condition of anonymity, to CREEP treasurer Maurice Stans. The offer was refused. While Sindona was out-Vescoing Robert Vesco himself, the CIA was exploiting Sindona's far Right political sympathies and connections in Italy. According to the House of Representatives' Pike Report on CIA activities, Sindona was a key channel for the millions distributed by the agency to centrist and right wing Italian political parties, affiliated organizations and candidates. Part of the payoff helped finance an abortive Fascist coup in December 1970. Another portion was allocated to the Fascist "Strategy of Tension," in which Italian intelligence officers and neo-fascists conspired to shift Italian voters rightward through bombings—that were attributed to "leftists"—including the 1969 explosion at Milan's Piazza Fontana which claimed seventeen lives.[22] (A key figure in the 1969 bombing and the 1970 coup attempt was the Italian Stefano delle Chiaie. As we go to press, we find confirmation of his role in the 1975 attempted assassination of Bernardo Leighton in Rome, in John Dinges and Saul Landau's penetrating book Assassination on Embassy Row (Pantheon 1980). Delle Chiaie had been contacted for the hit by Michael Townley of the Chilean DINA and Virgilio Paz of the Miami and Union City, N.J.based Cuban Nationalist Movement.) While it's not certain just who is controlling the U.S. end of the heroin bonanza from Southwest Asia (Santo Trafficante's the sentimental favorite), there is no disputing the fact that the United States—its heroin capital New York City in particular—is again experiencing a major heroin wave. The New York State Division of Substance Abuse Services reports that, compared with 1978, drug-related deaths increased in 1979 by 77 percent and hospital emergency room admissions for heroin by 46 percent.[23] The 1980 outlook is even gloomier. In the first quarter of 1979 the DEA rarely found heroin purities in excess of 20 percent. One year later the laboratories were reporting purities between 20 and 90 percent. An addict from Manhattan's Lower East Side reports: "It's all over the neighborhood. You can get it on the street corners, even in the candy stores. And it's superior to the earlier stuff." The head of New York's Phoenix House, a drug treatment center, says: "There is no question that we are going to have another heroin crisis."[24] In Boston the story is the same. "It's getting worse all the time," says a detective in the Police Department's Drug Control Unit (DCU), which handled twice as many cases from December 1979 to mid-April 1980 as it had in the same period one year before. When asked how many heroin addicts there were in Boston, a city of under one million inhabitants, DCU head Lt. David Walsh replied: "If your figure was 3500 it would be a conservative estimate."[25] What has been the federal government's response? While enforcement officials like Attorney General Civiletti promise intensified efforts to control the heroin deluge, the reelection-minded Carter administration has added $15 billion to the military budget while proposing cuts of $40 million in the $160 million national drug abuse treatment program. The White House Strategy Council on Drug Abuse, appointed by President Carter in November 1977, has not convened, despite the urgings of its members, in seven and a half months. In the words of two of those members: Our requests for information that by law we are entitled to receive have been met in some instances by delays of years, at other times with only superficial responses. The council has working groups and subcommittees about which we are given only the sketchiest information. Since November 1977, we have never received classified information, although we cannot understand how we can serve any supervisory function without it. For example, we worry about the growing of opium poppies in Afghanistan and Pakistan by rebel tribesmen who apparently are the chief adversaries of the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Are we erring in befriending these tribes as we did in Laos when Air America (chartered by the Central Intelligence Agency) helped transport crude opium from certain tribal areas?[26] pps. 221-228 --[NOTES]-- 1. L'Express, 26 April 1980. Speaking of Ben Barka, his old arch enemy, King Hassan II of Morocco, is currently waging war against nationalists in Western Sahara with the aid of US aircraft, a $200 million Westinghouse Tactical Air Defense system and a PR campaign run by a firm chaired by former N.Y. senator Charles Goodell, which is primarily directed (according to Justice Dept. records) at improving "public and political understanding in the United States of Moroccan interests, including obtaining US approval of the right of Morocco to purchase armaments in the US." In 1975 Hassan's air force bombed and napalmed camps set up for refugees from the guerilla war waged by the Polisario independence movement. (See S. Talbot: "Arms for Peace", Inquiry, 26 May 1980) According to a medical team sent to Morocco by the Belgian Association of Democratic Jurists, political prisoners there are regularly left in total isolation, chained to the ground, suspended head down or beaten on the soles of their feet until they lose consciousness (New York Times, 22 May 1980). 2. New York Times, 16 February 1980. 3. McLean's, 30 April 1979. 4. A. Khan: "With the Afghan Rebels", New York Times Magazine, 13 January 1980, cited in Counterspy Vol. 4, No. 2 (1980). 5. Counterspy, op. cit. An added irony of the situation in Afghanistan is to be found in President Carter's promotion, in response, of a military draft that would include women. In the wake of the April 1978 Taraki takeover, school- teachers rushed to the Afghanistani countryside to spread education to women. Many of the schoolteachers were assassinated by villagers with more traditional views on the status of women. (See D. Johnstone in In These Times, 27 February 1980) 6. Washington Post, 10 October 1979. 7. Counterspy, op. cit. 8. Stern, 13 October 1979; Arbeiterkampf, 29 October 1979. Turkey, by the way, is in the throes of long-standing, violent political convulsions, in which the frequency of murder makes Latin America's bloodbath seem like child's play. 9. New York Times, 22 May 1980. 10. J. Trento and R. Sandza in the Wilmington News-Journal, 30 March and 3 May 1980. 11. New York Times, 11 January 1980. 12. New York Times, 18 January 1980. 13. Boston Globe, 20 February 1980. 14. New York Times, 15 May 1980. 15. New York Times, 4 March 1980. 16. C. Winans in the Boston Globe, 23 March 1980. One year before the Bruno hit, Anthony "Little Pussy" Russo, the reputed mob boss in northern New Jersey, had been knocked off -by the same hit team, according to a "topranking underworld federal informant." 17. N. Pileggi: "Sindona: A Little Help from his Friends", New York, 7 April 1980. 18. Ibid. 19. C. Mann and D. McAdoo: "Sindona: An Investigative Report", Attenzione, Dec ember 1979. A different opinion was apparently held by U.S. Ambassador John Volpe in January 1974 when, at a luncheon at the American Club in Rome, he presented Sindona with the "Man of the Year" award. 20. B. Rostron: "A Chapter from 'The Godfather'?", Village Voice, 21 January 1980. 21. Mann and McAdoo, op. cit. 22. Ibid. 23. New York Times, 15 May 1980. 24. Ibid. 25. Boston Globe, 11 May 1980. 26. J.H. Lowinson and D.F. Musto, New York Times, 22 May 1980. --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
