-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
Orginally published in Danish
Smukke Serge og Heroien
Bogan 1976
240pps - one edition - out-of-print
--[1a]--
To heroin's victims in the United States and Europe,
And to all veterans of the War in Vietnam,
Especially those who returned strung out,
And those who did not return at all...
To victims of torture and repression in Latin America and elsewhere,
And to those who owe the monkey on their back,
And the scars on mind and body
To agents of the CIA and DEA.
=====
FOREWORD
The story of Christian David, an international narcotics trafficker used by
the intelligence services of at least three nations, is fascinating in
itself. It is even more important for what it tells us of a larger, less
documented history -the secret collaboration of government intelligence
services and parallel police throughout the world, and their use of
criminals, particularly from drug networks, for political countersubversion.
Above all it is an important book for Americans to read, since the shadow of
the CIA can be seen behind Christian David's political intrigues in countries
like France and Uruguay. America's role in Christian David's strange career
has never before, to my knowledge, been revealed in this country. And Henrik
Kruger is able to expand the story into larger perspectives on the CIA,
Watergate, and current U.S. counterinsurgency tactics.
The heavy censorship of David's story in the United States, or what may be
called the media resistance to it, is perhaps the clearest symptom of
America's involvement. For example, it was surely newsworthy that in June
1973 Le Monde, France's most respected newspaper, charged that the break-up
of the Ricord French drug network in Latin America (which had included
David's arrest and extradition to the United States), was the result of a
"close Mafia-police-Narcotics Bureau collaboration" in the U.S. The result of
this collaboration, according to Le Monde, was to shatter Corsican influence
in the worldwide narcotics traffic, and create a virtual monopoly for the
U.S.-Italian Mafia connection (whose key figures were Santo Trafficante in
America and Luciano Liggio in Europe).[1]
Le Monde's charges, many details of which have since been corroborated, were
passed over in silence by the U.S. press. This studied disinterest in the
politics of narcotics (other than the propaganda, including flagrant lies,
from official press releases) is a recurring, predictable phenomenon of our
press; and it has visibly had a deleterious impact on U.S. politics. If the
Washington Post and the New York Times, then supposed exposers of Watergate,
had picked up on stories like the one in Le Monde, then the history of
Watergate might have been altered. For the history of Nixon's involvement in
Watergate is intertwined with that of his personal involvement in drug
enforcement. Nixon's public declaration in June 1971 of his war on heroin
promptly led to his assemblage of White House Plumbers, Cubans, and even "hit
squads" with the avowed purpose of combatting the international narcotics
traffic. (Among those with a White House narcotics mission, or cover, were
Krogh, Liddy, Hunt, Caulfield, Sturgis, and Bernard Barker.)[2]
Many writers have since suggested that Nixon's war on heroin was part of his
"grand design" to develop a new drug superagency, under direct White House
control, into "the strong investigative arm for domestic surveillance that
President Nixon had long quested after."[3] Yet the establishment press
failed to look critically at Nixon's war on heroin. Instead it blandly
reported Nixon's decision in June 1971 to provide $100 million in aid to end
opium production in Turkey, a country which (according to CIA estimates)
produced only 3 to 8 percent of the illicit opium available throughout the
world.[4]
At the time perhaps 80 percent of the world's illicit opium was grown, much
of it by CIA-supported tribesmen, in the "golden triangle" of Laos, Burma,
and Thailand, while the Shah of Iran, who became one of Nixon's closest
foreign allies, had just announced resumption of Iranian opium production of
over 20,000 hectares (an area 50 percent greater than the total cultivation
in Turkey). As the New Republic noted only one month later, Nixon's decision
to shut down the supply of Turkish opium was "likely to do no more than drive
the industry further east."[5]
Another, and even more cynical view of Nixon's action is to see it as a
direct attack on the French Corsican networks which relied almost exclusively
on Turkey as their source of supply, and which, according to Le Monde, were
being deliberately forced out of the international drug trade as the result
of a "close Mafia-police-Narcotics Bureau collaboration." Le Monde stated
explicitly that it was the U.S.-Sicilian Mafia which closed down the
sluice-gates of Turkish opium production. Was Nixon personally playing a
role, as Henrik Kruger suggests, in this seamy international drug war between
rival networks? Such a possibility seems less remote when we recall the
rivalry which had grown up in the 1960s between deGaulle's intelligence
services and the CIA, and the respective reliance of these services upon the
rival Corsican and U.S.-Italian crime syndicates.
Le Monde had no difficulty in spelling out the American side of the
intelligence-Mafia connection, even though the CIA activities of Santo
Trafficante, the alleged heir to the Luciano network, were not known to it at
the time:
Instructed by his own experience of collaboration with the American
intelligence services, Lucky Luciano used to recommend to his honorable
correspondents scattered from Beirut to Tangiers, via Ankara and Marseilles,
to operate as he had done. It was in this way that drug dealers and couriers
served as informants to [the British] MI5, to [the American] CIA, to [the
French] SDECE, to the [West German] Gehlen organization, even to the Italian
SIFFAR.[6]
On the French side, LeMonde was predictably more reticent; but from other
sources we learn that at least two members of the competing Ricord network,
Christian David and Michel Nicoli, were former members of the Gaullist
Service d'Action Civique (SAC), the parallel police or barbouzes who had been
used to assassinate members of the right wing Organisation de I'Armee Secrete
(OAS), in revolt against de Gaulle's accommodation with Algeria. Through SAC,
David and Nicoli had come into contact with SDECE operations as well.[7]
One of the major theses of Henrik Kruger's fascinating book is that "the
great heroin coup" -the "remarkable shift" from Marseilles (Corsican) to
Southeast Asian and Mexican (Mafia) heroin in the United States, was a
deliberate move to reconstruct and redirect the heroin trade, rather than to
eliminate it, and that Cuban exiles, Santo Trafficante, the CIA, and the
Nixon White House were all involved:
It was, needless to say, not a willful conspiracy of all the above. But we
can assert with reasonable certainty that the CIA, Trafficante and other
mafiosi, certain Southeast Asians, and some people in the White House must
have been in the know. (Kruger, p. 122)
As Kruger tells the story, the motivations for the alleged heroin coup were
primarily political: to break the power of the old Gaullist SAC connection,
which by 1970 was as distasteful to de Gaulle's proAmerican successor
Pompidou as it was to Nixon, and (on the American side) to replace it by an
alternative power base. In Kruger's analysis it was not so much a struggle
between the French and American intelligence services, SDECE and CIA, as it
was a struggle between old and new leaderships. The coming to power of
Pompidou in France, and of Nixon in America, had created unprecedented
tensions and suspicions between these two presidents and their oldline
intelligence services: hence Nixon's desire to use the war on heroin as a
pretext for a new superagency under White House control. Hence also the
successive agreements between Nixon, Pompidou, and their cabinet officers to
crack down on the old Corsican connection.
Once again, the U.S. press resistance to the subject matter of Kruger's book
suggests that there is something to his thesis. At least two books published
in America, both obviously based on U.S. government sources, discussed the
arrest of David at length, without mentioning either that he had worked for
SAC/SDECE or that he had confessed to involvement in the 1965 assassination
of the Moroccan leftist Mehdi Ben Barka-one of the major unsolved French
intelligence assassination scandals of the 1960s. The first U.S. book to
mention David's confession was Newsday's newspaper series The Heroin Trail;
the Newsday team also told how they
received a call from the U.S. Embassy in Paris, stating that earlier promises
of French and American cooperation with our investigation would only be kept
if we agreed to submit our manuscript to both governments in advance of
publication for the correction of "erroneous information." We refused.[8]
Yet even The Heroin Trail, which deserved its Pulitzer prize, states only
that David "confessed to participating in the plot to murder Mehdi Ben Barka,
a Moroccan leftist lured to France under false pretenses by SDECE."[9]
Before Kruger's book one had had to go to books published in England or
France to learn that it was not de Gaulle who wanted Ben Barka killed-quite
the contrary-but some other government or governments and their intelligence
services, and that a leading suspect in the case was the American CIA.
As the Oxford historian Phillip M. Williams wrote in 1969,
Here one point is absolutely clear. The Gaullist government not only had no
interest in Ben Barka's death, but had every interest in his survival. Ben
Barka was a left-wing, anti-American, third-world nationalist leader with a
lively admiration for General de Gaulle, and had been received at the Elysee
some time before: a natural ally for Gaullist policy. Thus any official
French connivance could have come only from some section of the State machine
which was acting clean contrary to the wishes of the President.[10]
Williams himself then suggests two possible hypotheses which are both
compatible with each other and close to Kruger's own explanation:
One, much favoured especially among Left Gaullists, was collaboration with
the CIA to eliminate the organizer of the Havana Tricontinental Congress
[i.e. Ben Barka]. Another was that SDECE were obliging either Moroccan
Intelligence as such, or Oufkir [the Moroccan Intelligence Chief, whom
Williams describes elsewhere as "too pro-American for the Gaullists"] in a
personal vendetta against Ben Barka, in return for services rendered in the
past.... That there were some SDECE officers who were violently opposed to
Gaullist policy towards the United States, especially in Intelligence
matters, is clear from the now celebrated "revelations" of the former SDECE
agent Pierre Thyraud de Vosjoli [who was ousted from SDECE because of his
services for the CIA].[11]
In other words, an Oxford don a decade ago had already explored Kruger's
hypothesis that disloyal elements in de Gaulle's cabinet and intelligence
service, acting at the behest of the CIA, had Ben Barka killed. Yet Kruger's
book goes much further and is, to my knowledge, the first serious study of
the Ben Barka mystery to be published in this country. This alone would make
it an important challenge to the current stereotype of the CIA as a bunch of
exotic assassination bumblers, given to armchair fantasies about thallium
foot powders, exploding conch shells, or contaminated cigars.
Kruger's book is also the first in America, to my knowledge, to explore
further what Newsday called "reports" that David, "an adventurer recruited
into the French secret service for terrorist activities. . . assassinated a
number of African officials, and, in Latin America, infiltrated Uruguay's
Tupamaro guerrillas and identified several for the police."[12] Once again, a
well-documented French study, Dossier D comme Drogue, has confirmed David's
work for the French and Uruguayan secret service in penetrating and turning
over the Tupamaros, for which he was equipped with a diplomatic passport.[13]
But it is Kruger who supplies the details of the arms transactions by which
David was able to penetrate to the very heart of the Tupamaro organization.
And, once again, it is Kruger who points out that David's services against
the Tupamaros were part of an effort coordinated by the notorious U.S. CIA
police "advisor," Dan Mitrione — the same Mitrione who according to New York
Times reporter A.J. Langguth arranged for the Uruguay-an police to obtain
superior electric torture needles through the U.S. diplomatic pouch.[14]
David's successful penetration of the Tupamaros—and, before that, of the
Argentine FAL (Fuerzas Argentinas de Liberacion) —helps explain why so many
U.S. and French intelligence agents have been helped, by official provision
of an invaluable diplomatic passport, to become important in the lucrative
international arms and drug traffic. (The two traffics are frequently
interrelated, as LeMonde pointed out, and can help pay for each other).[15]
It was as a well-connected criminal smuggler that David was able to persuade
the FAL and Tupamaro leadership that he could procure arms for them; and it
was after providing small arms to the Tupamaros that David became their
trainer and adviser in weapons matters and turned them in. As we shall see,
this modus operandi will be encountered frequently in Kruger's book.
When one considers that the bulk of the world's small arms traffic is
dominated by the world intelligence milieu, and that the largest single
wholesaler is, or was until recently, the CIA-linked multinational Interarmco
(founded by former CIA agent Samuel Cummings),[16] one can see that it is
difficult to rely on weapons as a major revolutionary asset without becoming
dependent, at one's peril, upon one or another of the existing world powers.
Meanwhile, on the side of the police repressive apparatus, it is difficult to
remain in sustained contact with the enormously lucrative narcotics traffic
(particularly in countries where bribery is an accepted part of the political
culture) without becoming partly or wholly corrupted by it. Thus the New York
Times hats reported how in 1974 one major narcotics trafficker obtained a
diplomatic passport from the secretary to the Bolivian president for a simple
cocaine shipment; while charges against another in Ecuador were dismissed at
the order of Ecuador's minister of the interior.[17] As we shall see, this
latter phenomenon of an "intelligence immunity" has become a recurring
feature of justice inside the United States, even in major cases ranging from
narcotics to political murder.
Again, it is part of Kruger's thesis that the CIA, even after it had decided
to eliminate the Ricord network of which David formed part, was unwilling to
destroy the international drug connection which allowed its agents to gather
intelligence about insurrectionary movements through the tactic of selling
arms to them; and which at the same time financed the organization of
counter-revolutionary death squads and "parallel police" such as the
Argentine AAA (Alianza Anticomunista Argentina). Undoubtedly, in Latin
America, the stories of drugs and of death squads, such as that which
arranged for the assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington, have been
closely interwoven.
As support for his argument that the traffic once dominated by Ricord was
simply redirected to Cuban exiles in touch with the CIA and with Santo
Trafficante, Kruger points to the extraordinary story of Alberto Sicilia
Falcon. Somehow Sicilia, a twenty-nine-year-old Cuban exile from Miami, was
able to emerge as the ringleader of the so-called "Mexican connection" which
promptly filled the vacuum created by the destruction of the Ricord network
in 1972. Lucien Sarti, a top Ricord lieutenant, was shot and killed by
authorities in Mexico on 27 April 1972, after being located there by U.S.
agents.[18] The new Sicilia network, according to DEA Chief Peter Bensinger,
was operating by May 1972, and had "revenues reliably established in the
hundreds of millions of dollars" by the time of Sicilia's own arrest in July
1975.[19]
Once again, it is virtually impossible to find any extensive treatment in the
U.S. press of the mysterious Alberto Sicilia Falcon, even though his arrest
led to no less than 104 indictments, 73 of them in the United States.[20]
>From the noted German magazine Der Spiegel, however, one learns that Sicilia
told the Mexican authorities who arrested him that he was a CIA agent, and
had been trained at Fort Jackson (as had at least one of Nixon's Watergate
Cubans) for possible guerilla activity against Cuba. Allegedly he had also
worked in Chile against the socialist government of Salvador Allende until he
returned to the U.S. in early 1973. He also, according to Mexican police,
spoke of a special deal with the CIA; the U.S. government had turned a blind
eye to his heroin shipments, while his organization supplied CIA weapons to
terrorist groups in Central America, thereby forcing the host governments to
accept U.S. conditions for security assistance.[21]
DEA Chief Bensinger was quite circumspect in his testimony about Alberto
Sicilia Falcon, merely calling him "a Cuban national" and alluding to his
possible "revolutionary activity in Central and South America." From this it
was easier to deduce that Sicilia was a Castro agent than the reverse.[22] In
fact, Sicilia was a Cuban exile who had come to Mexico from Miami, where he
had links to the Cuban exile community, and had personally negotiated for
manufacturing rights to the celebrated 9mm Parabellum machine pistol, better
known as the Ingram M-10.[23]
Parabellum was a Miami-based arms sales firm set up by soldier-of-fortune
Gerry Patrick Hemming, and headed by Cuban exile Anselmo Alliegro IV, whose
father had been close to Batista.[24] Parabellum in turn was sales
representative for Hemming's friend Mitch WerBell III, a mysterious White
Russian, OSS-China veteran, small arms manufacturer, and occasional U.S.
intelligence operative, with unexplained relations to the CIA, DEA, and the
major drugs-for-arms deal for which he was indicted but acquitted.[25] (The
government's case failed after the chief government witness, arms and dope
smuggler Kenneth Burnstine, was killed in the crash of his private
plane.)[26] As we shall see, another client interested in producing the
Ingram M-10 machine pistol in Latin America, under license from WerBell, was
the international fugitive and Nixon campaign contributor, Robert Vesco.
Like other European journalists, Kruger notes that the same 9mm automatic
pistol, better known (after its inventor) as the Ingram M-10, was found in
February 1977 among the effects of the Italian neo-Fascist, Luigi Concutelli,
of Ordine Nuovo, who had used it in the July 1976 political murder of the
Italian centrist judge Vittoria Occorso.[27] Its presence among Concutelli's
effects was considered especially significant because the M-10, manufactured
by WerBell's former firm the Military Armaments Corporation, was supposed to
be delivered only to intelligence services (such as Spain's D.G.S.), and
every sale of the M-10 required a special permit from the Munitions Control
Branch of the U.S. State Department.
According to the Spanish Minister of the Interior, Concutelli's Ingram M-10
had been modified in a clandestine arms factory in Madrid, discovered in a
raid by Madrid police on 22 February 1977.[28] Arrested in connection with
that raid were six Italian leaders of Ordine Nuovo and Mario Sanchez Covisa,
the leader of a Spanish terrorist group (the Guerrillas of Christ the King,
or GCR) which had just assassinated a number of left wing Spanish activists
on the eve of Spain's first general election after the death of Franco.
According to a detailed study by the French journalist Frederic Laurent, the
two chief advisers to Sanchez Covisa, the Italian Stefano Delle Chiaie and
the Frenchman Yves Guerin-Serac, escaped arrest with the others. In turn, all
but one of the rest were released three months later. The reason for this
leniency., according to Laurent, was that the GCR had served as a parallel
police for the Spanish intelligence service (DGS) in its murderous repression
of the Basque (ETA) separatist terrorist network.[29]
Clearly the Sanchez Covisa episode had international overtones, and a number
of newspapers, even including the New York Times, mentioned speculations that
the GCR might be functioning in coordination with a newly created "Fascist
International." Such notions gained credence when Spanish police discovered
among the GCR's assets three gold ingots which had been stolen the preceding
summer by a group of French rightists and OAS veterans in a spectacular $10
million robbery of the Societe Generale de Nice.[30] The leader of this
well-organized group was Albert Spaggiari, veteran of an OAS assassination
attempt against de Gaulle. When Spaggiari was captured by the French police
in October 1976, the British press service Reuter noted reports from police
sources that Spaggiari "had links with an international organization with
members in right-wing circles in Italy, Lebanon, Britain and elsewhere."[31]
Spaggiari's international milieu acquired an even more intriguing dimension
when it was revealed that in September 1976, after the robbery, Spaggiari had
flown to Miami and offered his services as a mercenary to the CIA, citing his
role in the Nice robbery as among his qualifications. Contrary to what he had
expected, the CIA chose to transmit this information to the FBI, who in turn
notified the French police through Interpol. It was this contact with the CIA
which thus led to Spaggiari's arrest one month later.
After thirty-seven hours of noncooperation, Spaggiari suddenly admitted his
role in the Nice robbery. According to LeMonde, this was part of a negotiated
deal with the French police: Spaggiari would plead guilty to the $10 million
dollar robbery, and thereby escape indictment on a still more serious charge
of international arms trafficking. Spaggiari gained acceptance of this
proposal after citing "the name of an important personage in the Ministry of
the Interior, sometime participant in the cabinet of [French Interior
Minister] Michel Poniatowski, who, for various reasons, was aware of the
traffics in which he [i.e. Spaggiari] was involved."[32]
Five months later, in March 1977, Spaggiari escaped by jumping through the
second-story window of the Nice Palais de Justice, landing on the roof of a
waiting truck. Meanwhile the French weekly, L'Express, revealed that
Spaggiari had been in contact in 1976 with a gang in Rome, "the Marseilles
clan," who in turn had been close to Concutelli, and had been indicted by the
latter's victim, Judge Occorsio.[33]
As Henrik Kruger points out, CIA-trained Cubans and their new patrons from
the intelligence service and parallel police of the military police-states of
Chile and Argentina, were also directly in touch with the so-called "Fascist
International" milieu of Concutelli's Ordine Nuovo, Sanchez Covisa's GCR and
Spaggiari's connection. As he points out (Kruger p. 204), an Argentine, Jorge
Cesarsky, and a Cuban, Carlos Perez, were arrested in January 1977, in
connection with one of the murders organized by Sanchez Covisa's GCR.[34]
Carlos Perez is of particular interest to U.S. readers, because he was the
Madrid representative of the Movimiento Nacionalista Cubana (MNC), an
ideologically Fascist Cuban exile group, two of whose leaders (Ignacio and
Guillermo Novo Sampol) have recently been convicted in connection with the
assassination in Washington, in September 1976, of former Chilean foreign
minister Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt.
As has now been confirmed in part by a U.S. court, the assassination of
Letelier by MNC members and Chilean intelligence agent Michael Townley was
one of a series of "crimes in which Cuban exile terrorists and Chilean
officials have collaborated since 1973."[35] Senior members of the Chilean
junta intelligence service (DINA) initiated the Letelier murder, while junta
leader Augusto Pinochet himself, according to a U.S. government official, was
personally responsible.[36] One of these shootings, that of former Chilean
Christian Democratic leader Bernardo Leighton and his wife (who was left
paralyzed for life) took place in Rome in October 1975. Zero, a Cuban exile
terrorist group allied to the MNC, took credit for the shooting in a
well-informed communique. American sources have claimed that the attack was
arranged through either Michael Townley or his wife Mariana Callejas, working
for two Chileans who had collaborated earlier on the murder of Chilean
General Rene Schneider.[37] European journalists have added that the
terrorists in Rome were connected to a former mercenary group, once based in
Lisbon, known by its cover name of Aginter-Press, and more particularly to
Aginter's Italian "correspondent" Stefano Delle Chiaie.[38] Both
Aginter-Press and the Townleys had collaborated in the 1973 Chilean coup
group Patria y Libertad (a group indirectly subsidized by the CIA), while
Delle Chiaie and his friend, the Italian Fascist Prince Valerio Borghese, had
visited the Chilean junta in 1974.[39]
Delle Chiaie has already come to our attention as the Italian attached as
senior adviser to the GCR in Spain, along with Yves Guerin-Serac, the former
leader of Aginter-Press and, like most Aginter members, a veteran of the OAS.
We should like to recall that Delle Chiaie and Guerin-Serac escaped because
of their relationship to the Spanish, DGS arrest for the same murder in
Madrid which led to the temporary arrest of Cuban MNC representative Carlos
Perez. In other words the Letelier killing, horrible in itself, was only one
incident in a larger web of international conspiracy.
The Latin American aspect of this larger story has already been told in the
United States: the creation of an international Cuban exile terrorist network
at the service of dictatorships such as Cuba, Brazil, and Nicaragua (under
the Somozas), in exchange for payments in arms and future support in actions
against Fidel Castro. Thus the Letelier killing has been traced back to the
creation of a Cuban exile umbrella organization, CORU (Coordinacion de
Organisaciones Revolucionarias Unidas), in the Bonao mountains of the
Dominican Republic, in June 1976, under the leadership of Cuban exile
terrorist Orlando Bosch, who had visited Chile in December 1974 with
Guillermo Novo, and had spent a year there at junta expense.[40]
Bosch himself spoke to New Times reporter Blake Fleetwood about these
activities. While declining to talk about the Letelier killing which was then
under investigation, he cheerfully admitted setting up the murder of two
Cuban diplomats in Argentina, in conjunction with the Argentine right wing
terrorist AAA (to which Jorge Cesarsky, arrested in Spain, belonged).[41]
Government sources told Saul Landau of the Transnational Institute in
Washington that the Bonao meeting, attended by a U.S. Government informant,
broke down into workshops for the planning of specific crimes, including the
murder of Letelier and the October 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner, in which
seventy-three people were killed.[42] Bosch returned from the Bonao meeting
to Venezuela, at the invitation, he maintains, of the Venezuelan intelligence
service DISIP, who gave him a DISIP identification card.[43]
Given the nature, and the scope, of this network of governmentassisted
terror, of which the U.S. government was well-informed, it is interesting to
recall the initial charade which the U.S. intelligence agencies put on for
the benefit of the U.S. press:
On October 11, 1976, Newsweek magazine reported that "the CIA has concluded
that the Chilean secret police were not involved in the death of Orlando
Letelier." The CIA also reassured the U.S. Department of Justice of this
"fact." A Washington Star reporter (8 October 1976) was told by FBI sources
that "Letelier might just as well have been killed by leftist extremists to
create a martyr." David Binder of the New York Times reported (12 October
1976) that "intelligence officials" were "pursuing the possibility that Mr.
Letelier had been assassinated by Chilean left wing extremists as a means of
disrupting U.S. relations with the military junta"[44] .... But the biggest
flood of distortion and rumors came from former and retired FBI and CIA
officials.... Members of such groups as the Association of Former
Intelligence Officers headed at that time by David Phillips (Phillips,
incidentally, headed the CIA's Latin American covert action department at the
time of the Sept. 11, 1973 coup in Chile) delivered documents from Letelier's
briefcase [to suggest, falsely] that Letelier was... not only a Cuban agent,
but... a Soviet agent as well.[45]
After persistent pressure from Letelier's U.S. associates and friendly
journalists, Letelier's principal assassin (Michael Townley) has received a
10 year sentence (he will be eligible for parole in 1981). For some reason
the CIA was withholding relevant information from the Justice Department at
the same time it publicly advocated its theory of DINA's innocence. Those who
ordered Townley's crime have not even been indicted. On the contrary, a
related case against another Cuban exile for receiving heavy-caliber arms,
reportedly in "part payment for the Letelier-Moffitt murders," was
unsuccessful; largely, it has been charged, because the CIA helped throw the
case.[46] As I write these words, a Congressional Committee has just released
a bill which responds in part to mounting pressures to "unleash" the CIA.
Thus Kruger's book is urgent and timely: it lifts the veil on the global
networks of these parafascist terrorists who can so frequently plot and
murder with impunity, thanks to their relationships and services to the
intelligence agencies of the so-called "free world." In short, it tells a
story which our own media have systematically failed to tell.
I cannot promise that his account is flawless. He writes about intrigues
where disinformation is rife and the truth about an event is frequently
misunderstood even by its participants. But he has brought together a
prodigious amount of information, supported by shrewd analysis, particularly
with respect to the European scene which he knows best. As for the American
scene, it may be difficult on first reading to accept his hypothesis of a
huge "Miami conspiracy", now "reaching out with a vengeance to Latin America"
(Kruger p. 204). Other observers of the so-called "Fascist international"
phenomenon (to use the term first given respectability by Le Monde), have
seen it as more polycentric, continuously divided by sectarianism, paranoia,
and the ultimate inadequacy of national socialism as an international
ideology.[47] But, even if nationalist ideologues continue to clash, there is
unquestionably increasing international unity among the professional
terrorists. I prefer to call the latter parafascists rather than Fascists
because their primary concern is neither ideology nor a mass movement, but
rather to function covertly in the service of, or parallel to, intelligence
bureaucracies. Among parafascists there is a tendency toward international
cohesion, even if this is fluid, and requires no one single capital or base.
Where Kruger focuses on Miami, others have focused on Madrid, Costa Rica or
Washington.
Kruger's invaluable contribution is to have spelled out the pervasive role of
narcotics in supplying finances, organization, and sanctions to this
parafascist network, from the Argentine AAA to the World Anti-Communist
League (WACL) founded by KMT intelligence personnel on Taiwan. Before World
War II the KMT regime in China was perhaps the best example of political
manipulation of the narcotics traffic, under the guise of an "opium
suppression campaign," to finance both a political and an intelligence
apparatus (under General Tai Li).[48] This practice spread after World War II
to a number of other WACL member countries and groups. Today there is cause
to fear that Nixon's superagency, the Drug Enforcement Administration, has,
like other narcotics enforcement agencies before it, come to use corrupt
personnel who are actually part of the traffic, as part of a covert war
against revolution.
This is easiest to argue in the case of corrupt police forces overseas, such
as the DEA-supported Thai Border Patrol police who, by a massacre of unarmed
Thai students, contributed to the overthrow of Thai democracy in October
1976.[49] But, in addition, Harper's Washington editor Jim Hougan has raised
the possibility that a supersecret internal DEA intelligence group called
"Deacon 1," consisting of thirty former CIA officers, all of them Cuban
exiles, was "taken over by Cuban exile extremists" who "may have felt a
greater loyalty to the politics of Orlando Bosch than to the goals of the
DEA."[50] Hougan and Kruger cite the example of Deacon 1 operative Carlos
Hernandez Rumbaut, a convicted narcotics trafficker who became
second-in-command of the Costa Rican Narcotics Division and allegedly also
joined a local death squad. Hougan asks whether the plans for Bosch's CORU
and the DEA Deacon 1 operation in Costa Rica may not together explain the
convergence in Costa Rica in 1974-76 of Robert Vesco, Mitch WerBell, Santo
Trafficante and Orlando Bosch — all of whose activities "impinge on the same
areas... exile politics, smuggling, and the CIA. "[51] In support of this
disturbing question, one can note that Bosch was given no less than three
passports by Costa Rica in August 1976, right after the Bonao CORU meeting;
and also that ten months later Bosch's daughter and son-in-law were both
arrested on charges of smuggling cocaine.[52]
The U.S. government's narcotics Mafia connection goes back, as is well known,
to World War II. Two controversial joint operations between OSS (Office of
Strategic Services) and ONI (U.S. naval intelligence) established contacts
(via Lucky Luciano) with the Sicilian Mafia;[53] and (via Tai Li) with the
dope-dealing Green Gang of Tu Yueh-Sheng in Shanghai.[54] Both connections
were extended into the post-war period as the Luciano and KMT networks slowly
resumed their pre-war contacts. In Washington, in 1947, State Department
official Walter Dowling noted with concern the efforts of an ex-OSS officer
to reactivate the wartime OSS-mafia connection. Future CIA officer James
Angleton (then in an interim agency, SSU) appears to have shared Dowling's
repugnance; but one of the principal ex-OSS agents concerned, Max Corvo, now
enjoyed influential private backing as a consultant to Italian-American
industries in SiCily.[55]
The deportation of Lucky Luciano to Sicily in 1946 was followed by that of
more than sixty other American mafiosi, some of whom, like Frank Coppola,
became not only key figures in the postwar Luciano-Trafficante narcotics
connection, but also political bosses whose Mafia muscle ensured the election
of Christian Democrat M.P.s.[56] Coppola's name has been linked, together
with that of Interior Minister Mario Scelba, to a May Day 1947 massacre at
Portella delle Ginestre, in which eight people were killed by machinegun
fire, and thirty-three were wounded. In all 498 Sicilians, mostly left
wingers, were murdered in 1948 alone, a revealing footnote to former CIA
operative Miles Copeland's benign assurance that "had it not been for the
Mafia the Communists would by now be in control of Italy."[57]
Meanwhile, in the United States, KMT agents helped establish a powerful China
Lobby, and collaborated with friends in U.S. agencies to target, and in some
cases drive from government, old foes of the former U.S.-KMT-Tai Li alliance
including those inside the OSS. A scholarly book in 1960 noted that "the
narcotics business has been a factor in some activities and permutations of
the China Lobby," thus challenging the official Narcotics Bureau myth that
KMT dope in this country was "Communist Chinese".[58]
The Luciano and KMT networks had been in contact for U.S. dope distribution
in the 1930s. Although there is no evidence of substantial collaboration
between them in the 1950s, there are symptoms of increasing convergence,
partly through agents who dealt with both. There is the example of George
White, an FBN official and former OSS agent who testified to the Kefauver
Committee that he had been approached on behalf of Luciano in 1943 by an old
China trafficker, August del Grazio.[59] White worked closely with the CIA in
the postwar years and (under FBN cover) ran one of their LSD experiments in
Project MK/ULTRA.[60] In 1948 White was back in Europe, intending to check up
personally on Luciano and his narcotics associate Nick Gentile, another
former U.S. gangster who (like Vito Genovese) had worked for the Allied
Military Government in Sicily.[61] Soon afterwards Mafia traffickers in the
United States began to be arrested, but not men like Luciano, Gentile, or
Coppola.
By the time of White's visit to Marseilles, the CIA and AFL organizer Irving
Brown were already subsidizing the use of Corsican and Italian gangsters to
oust Communist unions from the Marseilles port. Brown's CIA case officer,
Paul Sakwa, has confirmed that by the time CIA subsidies were terminated in
1953, Brown's chief contact with the Marseilles underworld, Pierre
Ferri-Pisani, no longer needed U.S. support, because of the profits his
newly-gained control of the port supplied from the heroin traffic.[62] Under
the oversight of Ferri-Pisani and the Guerini gang, Corsican traffickers
worked with the Luciano network and in the 1950s were its chief source of
refined heroin. This alone might help explain the apparent immunity of
Luciano's network, to which Le Monde alluded, along with that of its Corsican
suppliers, about which Le Monde was silent.
Although White worked on the Luciano and Corsican cases, his FBN reputation
had been made in 1937 by smashing a major distribution network headed by the
pro-KMT Chinese tong (gang) in San Francisco, the Hip Sings.[63] But by 1951
the CIA was closely allied with KMT drug operations in Burma and Yunnan,
through a Miamibased proprietary, Sea Supply, Inc., organized by OSS veteran
Paul Helliwell.[64] In 1959 the FBN and White again arrested a new generation
of Hip Sing officials, but only after the ringleader (Chung Wing Fong, a
former Hip Sing president and official of the San Francisco Chinese
Anti-Communist League, a KMT front) had yielded his passport to the U.S.
consul in Hong Kong and then travelled as ordered to Taiwan.[65] In this way
Fong became no more than an unindicted conspirator and the KMT disappeared
from view; White, meanwhile, turned around and told the U.S. press the heroin
came from Communist China ("most of it from a vast poppy field near
Chungking").[66] In China, if not in Italy, White's concern about dope seems
to have centered on networks within U.S. borders, not on the international
suppliers.
In 1953-54 the CIA drew on old China hands with exposure to KMT traffic
(Chennault, Willauer, William Pawley, Howard Hunt) to set up the overthrow of
the Arbenz government in Guatemala, an operation which at least contemplated
the use of "Puerto Rican and Cuban gangsters."[67] As part of this operation,
we see CIA officer Howard Hunt, a veteran with his friend Lucien Conein and
Conein's friend WerBell of OSS operations in China under Helliwell, helping
in 1954 to set up what would eventually become the Latin American branch of
the KMT-backed World Anti-Communist League. (Four years later the chairman of
this group was the Guatemalan attorney of New Orleans Mafia leader Carlos
Marcello.[68]) Nevertheless, in the late 1950s it seemed unlikely that the
heroin connection, outside of countries directly involved, like Laos, would
either have a major impact on U.S. policy or become a significant alternative
to it. With the decline of cold war paranoia, events seemed to be moving
towards normalization.
All this changed with the 1960s, when the CIA reassembled for the Bay of Pigs
the old Guatemala team (including Hunt, Willauer, and Pawley, who oversaw
Cuban recruitment). With the failure of the Bay of Pigs Cuba became to
America what Algeria had been to France. The explosive political controversy
meant that thousands of Cuban exiles, many of them with backgrounds in the
Havana milieu, were trained by the U.S. as guerrillas and/or terrorists, then
left in political limbo. Many of them soon turned to smuggling to augment
their finances, and in some cases supplant their original political
objectives. At least one CIA project growing out of Operation 40 (the
control, element in the Bay of Pigs invasion force), had to be terminated,
when the drug activities of its members became too embarrassing.[69] In 1973
Newsday reported that "at least eight percent of the 1500-man [Bay of Pigs]
invasion force has subsequently been investigated or arrested for
drug-dealing."[70]
By this time many Bay of Pigs veterans were working for either Vesco or
Trafficante.[71] Both the lucrative drug traffic and its anti-Communist
politics began increasingly to get out of U.S. control. This was particularly
true when, after the death of President Kennedy, the U.S. lent a hand to
military coups in Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Greece, nations which
in turn became bases for further right wing activities in other countries.
America's lack of enthusiasm for the Fascist clients it had helped to
procreate, only had the effect of encouraging them to plot more energetically
with each other, and to lobby lavishly for more right wing policies in
Washington. It was in this period that mercenary terrorism, illicit arms
traffic, and drug traffic, consolidated into one increasingly global milieu.
The longdelayed founding of the World Anti-Communist League in Taiwan in 1967
may be a less significant symptom of this trend than the Greek coup of the
same year, after which the KYP (the Greek CIA) became an active fomenter of
parafascist terror tactics in the rest of Europe.[72]
The official termination of the CIA MONGOOSE project against Cuba in the same
year left a colossal disposal problem: what to do with the estimated 7000
trained Cubans? Here America seems to have followed the example set by de
Gaulle. Some of these Cuban exiles were absorbed into other CIA and Pentagon
operations, some went to work as did David for intelligence services in Latin
America, some were retained by the CIA to report on their former colleagues
and even to eliminate the more troublesome of them. But each of these
solutions ran the risk of giving more power to the very elements whom the CIA
wished to disperse. This was the situation faced by Richard Nixon on his
election.
Several studies of Richard Nixon have focused on his contacts since 1946 with
elements from organized crime, mostly through his early political adviser
Murray Chotiner, and his close friend and business associate Bebe Rebozo.
Kirkpatrick Sale has suggested that "It is possible that Richard Nixon was
one more of the large number of politicians in this country who have been
bought or cajoled into the service of the ends of organized crime."[73]
Yet this dark hypothesis is, I think, as oversimplified as its opposite. Like
every one of his predecessors since at least World War II, Nixon, to become
elected, had made accommodations to all of the prominent political forces in
the coalition he represented, including the inevitable connection to
organized crime. It may well be that in his early career these connections
were more prominent than in the case of Lyndon Johnson, who started as FDR's
protege, or John F. Kennedy, who was born wealthy (and could leave dirty
business connections to his father). But it was also apparent, even before he
was elected in 1968, that Nixon sought to pursue a foreign policy that would
be independent of the early KMT, and other money which had first helped him
to become a national political figure.
Faced with the growing and closely related problems of right wing terrorism
and of the international narcotics traffic, Nixon's approach seems to have
been that of a self-perceived political realist: to gain control of,
redirect, and manipulate the problem forces, rather than to somehow make them
magically disappear. It is unlikely that these objectives were unrelated to
his foreign policy efforts to establish links to mainland China, for this
policy challenged the powerful China lobby which had supported him in the
past. It may be no coincidence that the proclamation of the war on drugs,
Kissinger's secret trip to Peking, and the establishment in the White House
of what the president called "a non-legal team" (the Plumbers), including
Hunt and Conein, all took place within a month of each other in mid-1971.
Thus in Miami Nixon appointed an energetic U.S. attorney, Robert Rust, who in
June 1970 rounded up ex-CIA Cubans like Juan Restoy in Operation Eagle: this
unusual zeal, according to Hank Messick, made Rust an exception to the South
Florida "don't-rock-the-boat" tradition.[74] But Nixon's appointments to the
Federal Court in the Miami area (one of whom was close to Paul Helliwell and
had served as director of a bank accused of laundering money for Meyer
Lansky) were not so gung-ho; and eventually most of Rust's indictments in
Operation Eagle were overturned in court. Meanwhile the "non-legal team" at
the White House, thanks to Howard Hunt, began to recruit men like Frank
Sturgis, whose FBI file linked him to possible "organized crime activities,"
and Felipe de Diego, a colleague of Restoy in the CIA's Operation 40 project
which had to be closed down because of its narcotics involvement.
Nixon, following de Gaulle's example, seems to have taken steps to restore
control by the White House over a milieu which the U.S. government itself had
helped to create. Like the French, he seems to have turned to elements of the
milieu to work against it; but he seems to have had worse luck in those whom
he picked. In his memoirs Nixon tells how, less than two weeks after the
Watergate break-in Haldeman said that the whole thing was so ludicrous that
Dean had not discounted the possibility that we were dealing with a double
agent who purposely blew the operation. Otherwise it was just too
hard to figureout.[75]
Eight years of journalistic books on Watergate, most of which barely mention
the narcotics responsibilities of the so-called Plumbers, have not come up
with any better explanation.
Edward J. Epstein's book on Nixon's drug policies, which ipso facto is a book
about Watergate, analyzes this shortcoming of the journalists:
The White House timetable for consolidating its power over the investigative
agencies of the government was rudely interrupted on June 17, 1972, when
Washington, D.C., police arrested five men in the national headquarters of
the Democratic Party in the Watergate apartment and office complex.... With
Nixon's impending reelection threatening the very independence of the power
base of the investigative agencies, there were strong forces within the
executive branch of the government which would not only refuse to help cover
up the embarrassing connection but would actively work to disclose it....
Richard Helms... had been told that Nixon planned to replace him immediately
after the election, and he feared, as he told me subsequently, that Nixon
also planned "to destroy [his] agency.".. . . The "battle of the leaks," as
Colson called it... began to sink the Nixon Administration. . . ,
Consider, for example, the problem of Woodward and Bernstein, of the
Washington Post. Woodward was receiving information from Robert Foster
Bennett, of Robert R. Mullen and Company, that focused the blame for
Watergate on Charles Colson. If he had assumed that Bennett was providing him
with this information for anything more than a disinterested purpose, he
would have had to ask whom Bennett worked for, what the true business of
Mullen and Company was, and why Bennett wanted him to steer his investigation
away from the CIA and toward Charles Colson. He then would have found that
Mullen and Company was a CIA front organization and was aware that Bennett
was giving information to Woodward; and that the CIA was trying to divert
attention from itself (and succeeding, in the Washington Post) because a
number of the conspirators involved in the Watergate burglary had also been
involved in operations that the CIA had directly supported, such as the
Plumbers. Moreover, the very fact that a CIA front group was providing
information that was undermining the Nixon administration pointed to a
conflict between Nixon and the CIA. Woodward and Bernstein, however, could
not have reported these implications and thus could not have depicted the
power struggle between the president and the CIA without revealing one of
their prime sources. For the same reason, the reporters who received Nixon's
tax returns from officials of the Internal Revenue Service could not have
revealed this as evidence of a struggle between disgruntled members of the
Treasury Department and the president without also revealing that they were
no more than messengers for insurgents struggling against the president. By
not revealing their sources, they received the Pulitzer Prize... [76]
Epstein views Watergate as optimistically as Edmund Burke saw the Whig
Revolution of 1688 —as a restoration of decorum after tyrannous encroachment,
a revolution not so much made as prevented: "The revolt of the bureaucrats
thus succeeded in blocking Nixon's plan to gain control over the
investigative agencies of the government in his second term."[77] This
optimism assumes that Nixon himself was the problem, not the monster DEA
agency which outlasted him or the CIA Cubans it recruited. It is true that
the Watergate exposures put an end to Hunt's little known "recruitment of a
secret army of Cuban exiles [no fewer than 120, according to CBS], answerable
only to the White House, and equipped to assassinate foreign leaders."[78]
But some of the old China hands with network connections began moving to the
new DEA. As we have seen, Hunt secured a post for his old OSS-Kunming friend
Lucien Conein in what eventually became DEA, and Conein in turn recruited his
own band of CIA Cubans in Deacon I, at least one of whom, according to CIA
reports, has already taken part in a death squad operation.[79]
Nor did Watergate have a good effect on narcotics enforcement. On the
contrary, the Watergate disclosures were followed by a marked drop-off in
high-level drug conspiracy arrests. Senate investigator Philip R. Manuel
reported in 1975 that "from 1917 through early 1973 Federal narcotics
enforcement had its period of greatest success," but failed to hold its gains
thereafter.[80] The new DEA soon came under both Senate and Justice
Department scrutiny for a series of irregularities, including what one Senate
staff report called "unprofessional conduct" in failing to pursue a Vesco
narcotics lead.[81]
The terrorism connection which would survive Nixon's departure from office
was not confined to Conein's Cuban squad in DEA. In 1975, when one
Aginter-Press operative was overseeing the attempted murder of Bernardo and
Anna Leighton in Rome, another was consulting in Washington with right wing
Senator Strom Thurmond and with an official of President Ford's National
Security Council. The second Aginter operative was former OAS member
Jean-Denis Raingeard, and he sought (but failed to obtain) U.S. support for a
plan by which the Azores would secede from Portugal; Aginter's Plan Usine for
the secession involved a deal whereby a U.S. firm, with links to a New York
Mafia family, would obtain rights for a casino, a bank, and (as one might
have predicted) two diplomatic passports.[82] Although the Ford
Administration did not ultimately buy the illegal proposal (they were more
worried by the Portuguese reaction) neither did they discourage Raingeard's
lobbying efforts among the Republican right wing. The next year U. S.
agencies helped cover up the murder of Letelier by Aginter's Cuban allies in
CORU, in a plot of which they may have had foreknowledge.
Whatever one may think of the Carter administration, it does not seem to have
been as protective of Aginter, CORU, or their connections in the
international arms and drug traffic. There are, however, two separate reasons
why Henrik Kruger's expose of the international parafascist connection is a
timely one, and particularly important to U.S. readers. The first reason is
that a number of recent revelations, which I have explored elsewhere, link
those in the Aginter-CORU connection to the assassination of President John
F. Kennedy. At least three Cubans prominent in the Letelier case have also
been revealed, by the recent publications of the House Select Committee on
Assassinations, to have been allied in a 1963 Cuban exile junta which, the
Committee reported, warranted a "thorough investigation" in the Kennedy
assassination case. Lee Harvey Oswald's activities in New Orleans brought him
into contact with an anti-Castro group financially backed by this junta, and
to Americans with links to the future Aginter community and possibly the OAS.
And on 23 November 1963, Jean Rene Souetre, an OAS terrorist and future
Aginter operative, was, according to recently declassified CIA reports,
allegedly "expelled from the United States at Fort Worth or Dallas 18 hours
after the assassination."[83]
More currently, there are press reports that Ronald Reagan, if elected
president of the United States, would appoint Richard V. Allen to succeed
Kissinger and Brzezinski as his special assistant for national security
affairs. Richard Allen (who had been Nixon's first choice for the Plumbers'
unit) is known to have represented Robert Vesco in Washington back in 1972,
the year in which Vesco flew from a meeting with Lansky's representative Dino
Cellini to Costa Rica, and initiated the contacts which later led to the
proposed deal to manufacture Ingram M-10s in Costa Rica, between Vesco and
Parabellum, Alliegro, and WerBell. Allen is also said to have been one of the
U.S. contacts of the Aginter Plan Usine lobbyists who were proposing an
economic free zone for the Azores (and the U.S. Mafia) much like that which
Vesco, at Allen's suggestion, was proposing for Costa Rica.[84]
Richard Allen, to be sure, is no Vesco or Raingeard, but a professional cold
warrior who in 1975 helped organize the Committee on the Present Danger -a
coalition against detente, uniting such veterans of the
CIA-military-financial establishment as Paul Nitze, Gordon Gray, Gen. Maxwell
D. Taylor, Arthur H. Dean, and Vesco's attorney Edward Bennett Williams.
Nevertheless, unlike any previous national security adviser, but very much
like some of the younger intellectual members of CPD, Allen comes out of the
circle of ideological right wing think tanks which have advocated rollback
rather than containment, which have collaborated with the Chilean junta, and
which have been in touch with their European opposite numbers who in turn
have had contact with Aginter and/or the OAS.
Whether or not he has a future in the White House, Allen's past involvement
with both the Vesco milieu and the Wall Street establishment should remind
U.S. readers that there is much more to the former than Caribbean exoticism,
and much more to the latter than Council on Foreign Relations meetings and
the sedate journalism of the planners of Letelier's assassination remain
protected and unindicted, we must accept that terrorism in this country still
enjoys the intelligence immunity which it did in the 1960s in Italy and
France. With the advantage of his European experience, Henrik Kruger has seen
the full scope of this international parafascism, more clearly than any U.S.
journalist I know of. If we in this country wish to do something about the
problem he describes, we will do well to begin by studying this book.
Peter Dale Scott Berkeley, June 1980
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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