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The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage
Intrigues that Shaped the DEA
3:42 pm on October 13, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply | Edit
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http:www.trineday.com
The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage
Intrigues that Shaped the DEA
Through interviews with former narcotics agents, politicians, and
bureaucrats, this exposé documents previously unknown aspects of the history
of federal drug law enforcement, from the formation of the Bureau of
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the creation of the Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) up until the present day. Written in an easily
accessible style, the narrative examines how successive administrations
expanded federal enforcement operations at home and abroad; investigates how
the CIA compromised the war on drugs; analyzes the Nixon, Reagan, Bush,
Clinton and second Bush administrations¹ failed attempts to alter the DEA¹s
course; and traces the agency¹s evolution into its current stage of
³narco-terrorism.²
Doug Valentine belongs to that precious remnant of journalists and
historians with the wisdom to see our time, the integrity and courage to
write about it, and the literary grace to bring it all chillingly alive.
This indispensable book may quite well be the best yet in the author¹s
already singular body of work. He takes us again into that dark inner
reality of policy and politics that Americans so tragically deny and evade,
and gives us back a reflection there is no denying, no escaping. If there
is hope for America at this moment of so many reckonings, it is out of pages
like these.
Roger Morris, a member of the National Security Council under Presidents
Johnson and Nixon, who resigned in protest over the invasion of Cambodia, is
the author of bestselling biographies of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and
the Clintons
The Strength of the Pack is an indispensible resource for those who wish to
understand the politics of drug enforcement in America; and for those with
any sense of the subject¹s real importance it is a gripping read as well.
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the
University of California, Berkeley, and the author of The War Conspiracy;
Cocaine Politics (co-author); Deep Politics and the Death of JFK; Drugs Oil
and War
(Bookflap)
Many books have focused on the public policy aspects of federal drug law
enforcement. But no book to date has plumbed as deeply into the secret
policies, or taken as comprehensive a view of them, as this one.
With complete objectivity, author Douglas Valentine maps out in documented
detail the secret history of federal drug enforcement from 1968 until the
present. More than that, he shows how that secret history dovetails into a
myriad of seemingly unrelated national security matters around the world.
With the declaration of a War on Drugs in 1971, the Nixon administration set
the stage for the massive projection of American drug enforcement overseas.
But the drug agencies involved were, from the start, deflected from their
law enforcement mission by over-arching political and espionage intrigues.
Valentine explains how a small handful of American drug enforcement agents
and their operatives, under the direction of top CIA officials and
politicians, have helped further the secret agenda of the national security
state: from the Bay of Pigs, to Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and
Afghanistan.
In many important legal and extra-legal respects, the techniques of the
current War on Terror are seen to have their origins in the War on Drugs.
Indeed, the modern technique of ³rendition² was ripped right out of the drug
war¹s playbook.
Time after time, as honest DEA agents were about to pounce on a large-scale
dealer, higher authorities told them to walk away, explaining that the
culprit was an ³asset² in their clandestine operations.
In other cases, in the name of ³controlled delivery², DEA agents were made
to ³look the other way² as shipments flowed into the US, supposedly to
follow them up the food chain and hook the Big Fish.
And so the streets of the world are still flooded with a sea of misery.
In the words of a former agent, ³I used to think we were fighting the drug
business, but after they formed the BNDD [the DEA¹s predecessor], I realized
we were feeding it.²
Valentine traces the CIA¹s hi-jacking of federal drug law enforcement back
to the early ¹50s, when a handful of Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents, at
the behest of the CIA, through its MKULTRA Program, set up safe houses for
illegal drug-testing experiments on unwitting US civilians in San Francisco
and New York City. Equipped with two-way mirrors, the drug agents were used
to observe unsuspecting dupes, including US congressmen, under the influence
of LSD. Over the next decade, federal drug agents helped sprinkle so much
acid in the Bay Area ³that it spawned the psychedelic generation.²
The cast of The Strength Of The Pack includes many colorful characters, such
as George Belk, a hard-drinking, bible thumping New York City district
supervisor in the mid-¹60s. A participant in the MKULTRA Program, Belk later
became the DEA¹s first chief of intelligence. Known for his dry sense of
humor, Belk once asked the New York agent at a group meeting: ³Don¹t you
ever think of giving these people a chance to surrender?²
After 40 years, the War On Drugs is about to become the longest continuous
war in history. Between the outright mayhem and the wasted lives, it may
also be one of the most deadly.
If you subscribe to the notion that peace is preferable, all wars must have
a resolution.
However, in The Strength of the Pack, Douglas Valentine explains why
dismantling the $44 billion a year DEA behemoth is unlikely to happen, as
long as America strives to maintain a world empire.
The Strength of the Pack
Kris 6:40 pm on August 25, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply | Edit
Publisher¹s Foreword
The small size of the room had me sitting on my little brother¹s bed, while
my dad and his friend sat on dining room chairs. It was September 1969, I
had a 5-month-old daughter, was a partner in a thriving record store in
Portland, had just helped pull off a successful rock festival headlining the
Grateful Dead and it was the day before my twentieth birthday. So, I had a
few other things on my mind when my dad said, ³It¹s time to have that talk.²
He was referring to a question he had asked me months earlier about the
Vietnam War. I was young, and had given him a flip answer. He said we would
have to have a ³talk.²
My dad had been waiting for a visit from Dr. D.F. Flemming, a Vanderbilt
University professor and author of The Cold War and its Origins. We had met
before when my family lived in Nashville in the late ¹50s, but I had little
recollection because at that time I was more concerned with baseball cards
and bicycles.
I felt strange as we three sat there, then my dad spoke right up saying,
³The Vietnam War is about drugs.² He said other things: about secret
societies, playing out a lose-scenario, sway pieces in the news, and more.
My head was swimming. I didn¹t understand what my dad was talking about.
Early on in the discussion I thought my dad was having a parental ³drug
talk² with me, and I kept waiting for him to tell me not to smoke pot, etc.
But dad kept on talking about his work in the intelligence field.
He told me he had first been approached in 1936, when he was an exchange
student to China. He had served in the Office of Strategic Services and was
³placed² into the army in 1943, to report back on the doings around General
MacArthur, among other duties. Later on in the Philippines, towards the end
of WWII, my father worked with Colonel Edward Lansdale. This relationship
continued while both were employed by the Central Intelligence Agency, where
my dad¹s last overt job was serving as Branch Chief, Head of East Asia
Analysis Office. Lansdale would occasionally stop by the family home in
rural Virginia, and a 1956 meeting with Lansdale in Tay Ninh Vietnam would
play a big part in my father¹s decision to leave the agency in 1959.
Now my dad had never uttered a word to me alone, or in a family setting,
about his ³secret² work. So I was fascinated, but was also on the automatic
pilot of a child being ³talked to² by a parent. Dr. Flemming didn¹t speak
much, simply reinforcing some of my dad¹s points. It quickly became apparent
that I had no frame of reference for what was being said, and the talk soon
ended.
Further conservations, some rather heated, with my father continued my
education into something I call CIA-drugs, a subject that officially doesn¹t
exist. There was a bit of reportage in the alternative press and some of the
men¹s magazines about possible involvement of our intelligence agencies with
the drug trade. Then in late 1972 came Alfred McCoy¹s ground-breaking
exposé, Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, which seemed to validate my
Dad¹s words.
During the ensuing years some light would shine now and then into this deep
nether realm of quasi-official drug trafficking, generally to be blotted out
by ceremonious denials and, when needed, the full force of a pliant media.
That The Strength of the Pack a superb investigative work of history by a
noted and respected author is being published by us, a small and relatively
insignificant press, illustrates the power of officialdom and money.
This flimflammery is nothing new; the smuggling of narcotics has been an
integral part of foreign policy decisions and the world¹s ³legitimate²
economy for centuries. Indeed, as Professor Carl Trocki says in Opium,
Empire and the Global Political Economy, ³The trade in such drugs usually
results in some form of monopoly which not only centralizes the drug
traffic, but also restructures much of the affiliated social and economic
terrain in the process. In particular two major effects are the creation of
mass markets and the generation of enormous, in fact unprecedented, cash
flows. The existence of monopoly results in the accumulations of vast pools
of wealth. The accumulations of wealth created by a succession of historic
drug trades have been among the primary foundations of global capitalism.²
He also realizes that, ³drug economies have the power to destroy or
seriously undermine an existing political order.² How true.
My studies have concluded that our long-running Drug War has nothing to do
with temperance, the health of our community, our children or ourselves, but
simply serves to keep in place drug prohibitions that create a gigantic
black market. A black market that allows ³weeds² to be sold for, sometimes,
even more than gold. An underground economy that may allow faceless forces
to exert political and financial pressure from the shadows, creating
situations where who knows whose eldritch hand one may be grasping.
History shows that a state-regulated open market operates with less harm to
civil institutions, and engenders less personal tragedy and social misery.
The Strength of the Pack shows that America¹s valiant federal drug law
enforcement agents have been used as pawns in a rigged game, played in the
dark with their hands tied behind their backs.
Onwards to the utmost of futures!
Peace,
Kris Millegan
Publisher
TrineDay
August 18, 2009
