-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 --[18]-- EIGHTEEN ONE MORE COVER-UP In early 1973 the Department of Health, Education and Welfare estimated the number of U.S. heroin addicts at 600,000. By the end of that year, Dr. Robert Egebjerg, director of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Health Administration, placed the number at 300,000. And in June 1974 DEA international operations chief John T. Cusack, testifying before the House Committee on International Narcotics Control, said that the addict population was down to 200,000.[1] This giant cover-up hid the fact that Nixon's heroin war was no more than window-dressing. On 7 October 1974, six weeks after Nixon's resignation, the head of the White House Special Action Office on Drug Abuse Prevention, Dr. Robert Dupont, was pressured to release a secret report that the number of addicts had in fact risen, reaching even into formerly untouched middle class suburbs.[2] On 27 April 1976 President Gerald Ford said in a message to Congress: "By mid-1973 many were convinced that we had turned the corner on the drug problem. Unfortunately, while we had won an important victory, we had not won the war on drugs. By 1975 it was clear that drug use was increasing, that the gains of prior years were being lost, that in human terms narcotics had became a national tragedy. Today, drug abuse constitutes a clear and present danger to the health and the future of our Nation." In February 1977 the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control reported that the addict population totalled some 800,000. And in 1978 New York City's special narcotics prosecutor, Sterling Johnson, spoke of a heroin epidemic worse than that of the late sixties and early seventies.[3] But the cover-up hadn't stopped in 1974. >From 1975 until the end of 1978 the DEA consistently maintained that between 80 and 90 percent of the heroin consumed in the U.S. was Mexican. However, the claim doesn't stand up against the following facts: 1) 80 percent of the world's heroin -exactly the figure exported from Marseilles until 1972 -was, at least until late 1976, produced from opium harvested in the Golden Triangle and distributed via Bangkok, Singapore, and Hong Kong;[4] 2) the number of arrests of couriers en route from Southeast Asia increased steadily after 1973;[5] 3) reports from New York and other big cities testified to the arrival of large shipments of white heroin from Southeast Asia; 4) the market's supply of heroin did not dwindle despite aerial destruction of an estimated 60 percent of Mexico's poppy fields in early 1976;[6] 5) an effective tidal wave of Golden Triangle heroin began flooding Europe in 1973, while many couriers en route to the U.S. and Canada were nabbed by European police; 6) the DEA was aware of Santo Trafficante's dealings in Southeast Asia, as well as the later Mafia summit in Palermo where large sums of money were set aside for investment in the Golden Triangle; 7) it was easy to verify the narcotics flow from Mexico, since the border was subject to close surveillance, but to conclude that most of the heroin on the U.S. market originated in Mexico was a stretch of logic. Even the DEA had to admit the tenuousness of its claims. On 24 February 1976, the DEA's John Cusack admitted that his agency's estimate that only 8 percent of U.S. heroin came from Southeast Asia was surprising, considering the region's prolific opium production. He added: "We are also concerned about our detection during 1975 of substantial quantities of white no. 4 heroin moving directly from Bangkok to the United States. In December, for example, forty-six kilograms of heroin were seized in Bangkok, concealed in the household effects shipment of a returning U.S. serviceman. Follow-up investigation in the development of an extensive conspiracy prosecution has identified twelve additional shipments entering the United States since 1974." Twelve such shipments meant 552 kilos, or more than the entire 470 kilos confiscated in the U.S. in 1975 -and from only one of many Southeast Asian smuggling networks. Cusack went even further: "It appears almost certain that the bulk of the white heroin found during 1975 in the inner-city areas of our eastern cities has been Asian no. 4 smuggled from Bangkok."[7] Why then did the DEA continue to overstate Mexico's role and minimize Southeast Asia-even after the publication, in 1972, of Alfred McCoy's The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia? Perhaps to justify the great expenditure in support of right wing military and police forces in Latin America. (The later boom in Colombian cocaine would also provide justification.) Southeast Asia was downplayed so as not to jeopardize relations with America's loyal, if corrupt, allies — most of all Thailand, Taiwan, and the latter's overseas agents. They were allowed to profit from opium and heroin in relative peace. Another reason: the DEA could not expose the Southeast Asia connection without compromising the CIA. A secret 1977 House Government Operations subcommittee report accused the CIA of helping an Asian opium ring smuggle drugs into the United States and then lying about it to Congress. Puttaporn Khramkhruan, a Thai national, was arrested in 1973 for smuggling fifty-nine pounds of pure opium into the U.S. via JFK airport. Citing national security interests, the agency had the case squelched, and Khramkhruan was sent back home. However, the House subcommittee eventually established that he was a CIA operative in Thailand.[8] In fact, he was on the payroll of a CIA proprietary using the Agency for International Development (AID) as a cover for training the corrupt Thai border police.[9] Furthermore, Khramkhruan told a DEA investigator that he had been an officer in the KMT army and guarded opium mule caravans. His CIA contact was the U.S. consul in Chiang Mai, Thailand.[10] In its report, the House Committee stated: "It was ironic that the CIA should be given the responsibility of narcotics intelligence, particularly since they are supporting the prime movers."[11] In March 1977 the DEA began to speak of "major maneuvers in the international Asian narcotics market for a share of the U.S. drug scene" and of a "coalition between the U.S. Mafia, the Corsicans and the Chiu Chao Chinese Triad."[12] The coalition had, in reality, existed at least since 1970 and perhaps as early as Trafficante's 1968 journey to the East and it had functioned effectively, shipping large amounts of heroin to the U.S., since 1972-73. The difference was that the Corsican arm of the coalition, their own umbrella o[r]ganization having been smashed, was now essentially reduced to some 100 men working with the U.S. Mafia and the Chinese, most of them as chemists in Thailand's mobile heroin labs.[13] Who has controlled the Golden Triangle opium traffic and heroin production since the establishment of the Mafia-Chinese coalition — besides the CIA, that is? The answer is the Kuomintang (KMT) Chinese and overseas Chiu Chao syndicate -men such as Chang Chifu, Lo Hsing-han, Tsai Chien Cheng and older, more familiar figures like General LiMi.[14] Still head of what's left of the KMT forces, General Li resides in luxury outside Chiang Mai and received official visits there from the United States as recently as late 1976.[15] In 1976-77 a minor war was about to erupt over the control of the region's opium traffic and mobile refineries. Potential combatants were Chu Chi-fu's United Shan Army (of rebels against the Burmese regime) and KMT forces under General Li. However, the opposing leaders were brought together by a senior Thai officer and an agreement was reached on the marketing of drugs and supply of arms to fight Communist forces in Burma's Shan states.[16] Again we see the connection between narcotics and anti-Communist paramilitary operations -albeit Chu Chi-fu later pulled out of the agreement, was arrested in Thailand, and eventually extradited to Burma. The DEA's Golden Triangle unit, SNO, made many whole and half-hearted attempts to eradicate the narcotics plague. All failed. Production has been great, the world's heroin market having multiplied in the seventies. SNO won't say outright that the CIA is undermining them, nor that politics underlies their constant failures. A SNO agent, nevertheless, came close to doing so in this 1976 statement to Alfred McCoy: "If they were selling shares in Golden Triangle Heroin, Inc. in five, ten and twenty-year bonds, I would put my money on a twenty-year bond. The only thing that would end the whole Golden Triangle business would be a communist takeover in Thailand. If that happened, Id sell my stock."[17] Southeast Asia was initially the sole supplier to the rapidly growing European market. Until 1972 heroin abuse was essentially an American problem. But since the heroin shift from Marseilles to Southeast Asia, the European habit has rapidly worsened. In 1972 ten kilos of Golden Triangle "brown sugar" were confiscated in Europe. By 1975 the figure was up to 227 kilos. The country hardest hit has been West Germany, where the large U.S. troop concentration serves as a magnet for heroin, where it is estimated that some 60-80,000 Germans use hard drugs, and where there were over 500 hard drugrelated deaths in 1979. In the summer of 1977, we might note, the administration of Jimmy Carter rejected a proposal by a consortium of rebel army leaders in northern Burma that the U.S. spend $36 million over a sixyear period to purchase and destroy the Southeast Asia opium crop.[18] Among the official explanations was the alleged policy of the United States to deal only with recognized local governments — a policy which in its time had found a number of exceptions, like the overseas Kuomintang Chinese.[19] pps. 171-176 --[Notes]-- 1. 1. Frank and G. Richardson: "Epidemic," Penthouse, September 1977. 2. Ibid. In light of recent years' revelations of CIA mind control experimentation with LSD, it's worth noting the enormous spread of the hallucinogen in 1971-72. Behind it was the cover organization, Brotherhood of Love, whose backers, like Gulf Oil heir William Mellon Hitchcock, exploited and manipulated self-styled LSD prophets like Timothy Leary. The Brotherhood was directly connected to the Robert Vesco-controlled Fiduciary Trust Company of the Bahamas. LSD proceeds were laundered through the usual Syndicate banks in Geneva. See Der Spiegel, No. 39, 1974. 3. B. Herbert: "The Fleetwood Kids," Penthouse, August 1978. 4. A. McCoy: "The New Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia," Oui, December 1976. 5. F. Robertson: Triangle of Death (Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1977). 6. Politiken, 27 March 1976. 7. Drug Enforcement, Spring 1976. 8. J. Anderson and L. Whitten, Boston Globe, 3 October 1977. 9. J. Hougan: Spooks (William Morrow, 1978). 10. J. Burgess: "The Thailand Connection," Counterspy, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1976. 11. Anderson and Whitten, op. cit. 12. San Francisco Examiner, 9 December 1977; Robertson, op. cit. 13. Robertson, op. cit. 14. Lo Hsing-han and his supporters at one time aided the Burmese government in its fight against Communist insurgents in northwest Burma. However, when the government asked him to disband his organization in 1973, Lo Hsing-han refused and signed a pact with the rebels. The Burmese army eventually pushed him and his army into Thailand where he was arrested and extradited back to Burma. In the fall of 1977 he lost his final appeal to Burma's highest court to quash a death penalty for treason. (New York Times, 7 November 1977). 15. McCoy, op. cit. 16. Far Eastern Economic Review, 15 April 1977. 17. McCoy, op. cit. 18. New York Times, 13 July 1977. 19. According to High Times magazine (April 1980), the Shan States rebels have long been subsidized by Taiwan intelligence. Moreover, the article goes on, intelligence sources in Burma have suggested that the DEA, in an aboutface attempt to weld together a local force against right wing opium armies, has approached Burmese Communist guerillas — who, having been abandoned by the current, less revolution-minded Peking regime, had themselves taken steps toward moving in on the opium trade. ===== NINETEEN THE MEXICAN CONNECTION The exaggeration of Mexico's and the downplaying of Southeast Asia's roles as suppliers of heroin to the United States does not mean that Mexico was unimportant. But the DE A and the U.S. press compound the distortion by constantly asserting that the production and smuggling of heroin in Mexico is strictly a Mexican business. No U.S. Mafia is supposedly involved, other than customers on the other side of the border. Heroin shipments are allegedly controlled by seven large Mexican families: the Herreras, the Maciaces, the Romeros, the Favelas, the Sicilia-Falcons, the Valenzuelas, and the Aviles-Quinteros. [1] Let's take a look at one of them. Alberto Sicilia-Falcon, leader of the Sicilia-Falcons, is not a Mexican at all; he was born in Matanzas, Cuba. He and his family left the island immediately after Castro's takeover to become part of Miami's Cuban exile milieu. After the Bay of Pigs invasion he was trained by the CIA at Fort Jackson for Operation 40.[2] From there his trail is faint for several years. However, according to Mexican police, he was in Chile helping the CIA to undermine the government of Salvadore Allende. In mid-1973 he turned up in Mexico, where in record time he established a gigantic heroin and marijuana ring. According to DEA director Peter Bensinger, in 1975 the ring numbered more than 1600, including film stars and international businessmen. Sicilia-Falcon himself resided in villas in Tijuana and San Diego. Heroin was transported to San Diego from a warehouse in Culiacan, marijuana from a processing plant in Mexicali to a U.S. distribution center in Coronado Kays. In late 1973 one of Sicilia-Falcon's truckers was stopped on his way back to Mexico. The truck was loaded with arms bound for Nicaragua. According to a later report of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, one illegal weapons dealer in Brownsville, Texas alone supplied Sicilia-Falcon with 12 million rounds of ammunition in 1974. The guns-for-drugs traffic proceeded unhindered until early 1975, when the government of then President Luis Echeverria discovered that Sicilia-Falcon's weapons shipments went to groups in Mexico. "External forces are attempting to destabilize our country," said Echeverria in a 1975 speech, in obvious reference to his neighbor to the north. Then the Mexicans began an intense surveillance of SiciliaFalcon, who, they learned, often met and conversed by telephone with a mystery man in Guernavaca, some ninety kilometers south of Mexico City. When a lemonade bottle bearing the man's fingerprints was sent to the FBI, the bureau informed Mexican authorities that the man was Sam Giancana, the Chicago Mafia capo, heroin trafficker, and CIA collaborator. The Mexicans agreed to a French extradition request for Giancana, but when his Paris-bound plane stopped over in Houston, Giancana was whisked away by U.S. agents. Soon thereafter he was found murdered in his Chicago mansion. Mexican interior ministry officials claimed the CIA had done all it could to prevent the mobster's extradition. On 2 July 1975 Sicilia-Falcon was arrested. Under rough interrogation he claimed to be an agent of the CIA, and that his drug ring had been set up on orders from and with the support of the agency. Part of his profits were to go towards the purchase of weapons and ammunition for distribution throughout Central America for the destabilization of "undesirable" governments. If true, U.S. heroin addicts were again footing the bill for clandestine paramilitary operations and antiCommunist terror campaigns. And Sicilia-Falcon and his Syndicate associates were not short of funds. In his possession police found two Swiss bank books to the tune of $260 million. Still, the strange testimony of Alberto Sicilia-Falcon did not end with his confession. His family's heroin and arms shipments continued and, on 26 April 1976, he and three of his lieutenants escaped from Lecumberri prison through an electrically lit, 100-yard long tunnel dug from outside. They were recaptured three days later, at which time Sicilia-Falcon, fearing for his life at the hands of the CIA, requested transfer to another prison and additional security.[3] Echeverria and Sicilia-Falcon each were right about the destabilization program. FBI documents released later disclosed that between 1970 and 1976 the FBI served as a secret link between the U.S. embassy in Mexico City and the U.S. Border Patrol in California and Texas, "in order to help destabilize" the government of President Echeverria. J. Edgar Hoover had believed that Echeverria had surrounded himself with "old Communists and Communist Party sympathizers.[4] A memo from Hoover to the U.S. legal attache praises "the detonation of strategic and effective bombs in Mexico City" and "the wave of night machine-gunnings to divide subversive leaders."[5] Besides Echeverria's progressive attitude, another reason for U.S. hostility towards his government was the Mexican president's refusal to approve World Bank and International Monetary Fund plans for the exploitation of Mexico's newly discovered oil reserves. The first order of business of his successor Jose Lopez Portillo in 1976 was approval of the same plans. And the newspaper El Sol de Mexico wrote shortly after the latter's inauguration that year: "The new government is not interested in publicity regarding the Sicilia-Falcon case. It will quietly extradite him to the U.S. as soon as the new extradition agreement between the two countries comes into effect." In the Sicilia-Falcon case the DEA and CIA struggled bitterly against one another. It was symptomatic of a split within the DEA's own ranks, a split rooted in the effective control of its narcotics intelligence division by transplanted agents of the CIA. Since the DEA's emergence many of its agents have resigned in disgust with its modus operandi. Long-standing conflicts between the CIA and BNDD and between the BNDD and Customs did not evaporate when all the narcotics agents were pooled in the DEA. Moreover, the CIA seems still to be guided by political interests incompatible with drug enforcement. A 1975 Narcotics Control Action Plan for Mexico, drafted by the DEA, CIA and State Department, opened the way for new appropriations for fighting narcotics in Mexico through INC. Thirty helicopters as well as other aircraft and computer terminals were brought in, and extensive training programs were initiated. The notorious Operation Condor began in January 1976 with an army of DEA-trained Mexican narcotics agents and their U.S. supervisors, mobilized to fight the drug traffic in the countryside. Reports of the operation reveal that U.S. taxpayers' money has in fact been used for political extermination; that DEA helicopters are used by private landowners to attack peasant revolutionaries with rockets, small-arms fire and napalm;[6] that large groups of farmers and independent narcotics dealers have been murdered or tortured while the major narcotics families have been protected.[7] House subcommittee investigators went to Mexico in 1975 to determine how organized internal corruption and payoff rings within the DEA had made possible the monopoly of Mexican heroin by a few powerful crime families. According to writer Ron Rosenbaum: "Some critics of DE A go even further than the subcommittee investigators and charge the protection of heroin profiteers is not caused by internal corruption but is, in fact, the true function of the agency under the present narcotics laws."[8] DEA-supervised killing and torture had not stopped as of 1978, when the Mexican Bar Association documented eighteen forms of torture applied by Mexican narcotics agents. Prisoners and Mexican agents alike affirmed that DEA agents not only knew of the torture, but at times were also present at the interrogations.[9] pps. 177-180 --[Notes]-- 1. D. Rosen: "The Mexican Connection," Penthouse, February 1977. 2. "Die gefahrlichen Geschafte des Alberto Sicilia," Der Spiegel, No. 20,1977. Much of the following story comes from this account. 3. Ibid. 4. High Times, August 1978. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. C. Pyes: "Legal Murders," Village Voice, 4 June 1979. 8. R.Rosenbaum: "The Decline and Fall of Nixon's Drug Czar," New Times, 5 September 1975. 9. Pyes, op. cit. ===== TWENTY GUNS FOR DRUGS In August 1976 Lucien Conein's chum Mitch WerBell III (whose B.R. Fox Company had shared a Washington office with Conein's DE A Special Operations Group) was brought before a Miami federal court on charges of conspiracy to smuggle 50,000 pounds of marijuana a month from Colombia to the United States. He and several coconspirators had allegedly hatched the plot in the summer of 1975, just when Alberto Sicilia-Falcon was arrested in Mexico. Multi-ton marijuana loads were to have been flown from Colombia to an isolated ranch in the Florida Everglades near the cowtown of Okeechobee.[1] The star prosecution witness was one of WerBell's close associates, the convicted cocaine and marijuana smuggler Kenneth Gordon Burnstine. However, weeks before his scheduled court appearance he died in the mysterious crash of his P-51 Mustang at an air show. Most of the vital tape recordings and films of meetings between Burnstine, WerBell, and other defendants were no longer producible in court. WerBell's defense was that his role in the plot had been as an undercover agent for Conein. Both Conein and Egil Krogh were to have been witnesses on his behalf. But Krogh testified that he didn't know WerBell had worked for the DEA's Special Operations Branch, and Conein wasn't called at all. Another defense witness was the soldier of fortune Gerry Hemming, whose private army of Cuban exiles and Americans, the International Penetration Force, appears, from Hemming's description of its missions, to have played an active role in Operation 40. During the trial, Hemming would stay late into the night in WerBell's hotel room.[2] WerBell was found innocent and released, just like the Thai opium smuggler/ CIA agent Puttaporn Khramkhruan before him in 1973. He went home to Georgia to pursue his weapons business and law enforcement training camp. According to writer Hank Messick, in 1978 he was involved in far Right politics with the likes of Major General John K. Singlaub (who had been relieved of his command in Korea after outspoken criticism of President Carter) and members of the American Security Council[3]— the key U.S. link to the far Right's international umbrella organization, the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). As reported recently in the New York Times, the beneficiaries of his antiterrorist training have included members of the far Right, anti-Semitic U.S. Labor Party.[4] WerBell owns eight companies, most of them dealing in firearms used by law enforcement and intelligence units. One of the firms, Studies in the Operational Negation of Insurgents and Counter-Subversion (SIONICS), specializes in the production- of M10 and M11 silenced machine pistols. The latter two weapons, designed by Gordon Ingram and WerBell, are about the ultimate weapons for terror and extermination. Their sales agent was WerBell's Military Armament Corporation.[5] Together with the anti-Castro Cuban arms dealers Anselmo Alliegro and the mercenary Gerry Hemming, WerBell founded the Parabellum Corporation in 1971 in Miami.[6] Parabellum. was licensed to sell arms in Latin America. It was also the firm from which Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis planned to obtain weapons for Cuban exiles who were going to (but eventually did not) disrupt the 1972 Miami conventions.[7] In 1974 WerBell -according to a motion filed by his own lawyer when WerBell, his son and his company Defense Services, Inc. were charged with illicit weapons sales-was involved in a "conspiracy among the CIA, Robert Vesco, and various corporations to finance clandestine guerilla activities in Latin America."[8] Vesco wanted to purchase WerBell's stock of 2000 silenced M10 machine pistols. When WerBell failed to secure an export license, he devised a plan to smuggle the weapons to Vesco. The two later negotiated the construction of a factory in Costa Rica which would be licensed to fabricate the pistols.[9] Intriguingly, in that same period someone was negotiating with a U.S. firm for rights to fabricate, in Mexico, fully automatic weapons for clandestine guerilla actions in Latin America. That someone was Mexico's Cuban exile heroin czar, Alberto Sicilia-Falcon,[10] and among the weapons he was inspecting was the Ingram M10, 9 mm Parabellum.[11] Although the M10 and M11 could be acquired legally only with the special permi ssion of U.S. officials, large numbers of silenced M10s turned up in the hands of European fascist terrorists in 1976-77. when Pierluigi Concutelli, a leader of the Italian terrorist group Ordine Nuovo, was arrested in Rome in February 1977, police found in his apartment the silenced M10 which he had used to murder the Rome magistrate Vittorio Occorsio. [12] 0ccorsio had been shot down on the streets of Rome in July 1976 after announcing he would expose the close collaboration between Fascist terror groups and the Mafia.[13] However, it was among Spanish terrorists in particular that WerBell's machine pistols appeared in quantity.[14] Most notably, a sizable consignment of M10s, sent to Spain under license from U.S. authorities, had been purchased by Spanish intelligence agency DGS,[15] which has allegedly coordinated the actions of Fascist terrorists.[16] The fugitive IOS billionaire Vesco employed a large contingent of Cuban exiles in his Costa Rica sanctuary.[17] Moreover, his weapons negotiations coincided with the efforts of the fanatic anti--Castro Cuban leader Orlando Bosch to assemble Cuban exile groups into an army of terror, CORU, that would later carry out assassina-tions and other dirty work for several Latin American regimes. During Bosch's 1974-75 drive, a wave of murder struck Miami's Cuban exile haven. Most victims had been opposed to Bosch. With the obstacles to his plan removed, CORU was established in June 1976.[18] While Vesco and WerBell were hatching their weapons deal Bosch's base of operation just happened to be Vesco's kingdom of Costa Rica -and Mafia heroin boss Santo Trafficante, Jr. was also reportedly there between January 1974 and the summer of 1975. Journalist Jim Hougan speculates in his book Spooks that the three might have joined forces in a CIA conspiracy to escalate anti-Communist terror in Latin America.[19] In 1973 some of the details began to surface in a series of scandals linking these individuals. DEA undercover agent Frank Peroff charged Vesco with financing extensive heroin smuggling. For his initiative Peroff was fired summarily and his life was threatened. Before the Senate Investigations Subcommittee could probe deeply the case was squelched through the intervention of the White House. The Oval Office had already helped Vesco- a friend of the Nixon family -in his run-in with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which had sought his prosecution for the trail of swindle he had left in the world of international finance. Midway through the subcommittee investigation of the heroin charges, the DEA announced the disappearance of its Vesco file.[20] One year later, as the subcommittee investigated WerBell's weapons deal with Vesco, it learned that Vesco had once employed government narcotics agents. In 1972 two bugging specialists from the BNDD flew from Los Angeles to New Jersey to sweep Vesco's home and office of surveillance devices. According to the subcommittee, the sweeping tour had been arranged by an admitted friend of Vesco's who was also involved in supplying the fugitive with 2000 machine guns and helping him esta[b]lish a factory for the weapons in Costa Rica.[21] Guess who. That was not the last heard of Robert Vesco in connection with drugs. In the summer of 1977 police uncovered the smuggling of large quantities of heroin and cocaine to Rhode Island. In one of the involved ships they discovered a ledger in which it was written: "to Vesco/6 million/he picked up w. shrimper (Lansky)/'Curier' beat UP. "[22] Several things point to Vesco involvement in the long-standing partnership of the CIA, the Lansky/Trafficante syndicate and the Cuban exiles, in a drugs-for-gans-for-terror deal to step up armed suppression and anti-communism in Latin America. Journalist Hougan ventures that the conspirators might have used such go-betweens and couriers as the beautiful Patricia Richardson Martinson. According to her ex-husband, the former army intelligence agent William Spector, Ms. Martinson had very close relationships with almost everyone of importance in the drug business: Yussef Beidas, the Lebanese founder and managing director of INTRA Bank, known as one of the major financiers of the heroin traffic; Paul Louis Weiller, a French financier similarly alleged to be behind the narcotics trade; Eduardo Baroudi, a big-time heroin and gun smuggler suspected of having arranged Beidas' mysterious death in Switzerland; Christian "Beau Serge" David; Conrad Bouchard, a top heroin trafficker heavily involved in Frank Peroffs Vesco heroin allegations; and Marcel Boucan, the skipper of the Caprice du Temps, which was seized in 1972 with 425 kilos of pure heroin.[23] Yet another likely intermediary among the apparent conspirators is the CIA contract agent/arms dealer/art dealer Fernand Legros. In 1971 the CIA helped get Vesco released from Saint-Antoine prison in Geneva, where he had been arrested in the Bernard Cornfeld/Investors Overseas Service case. Legros was in that same prison and spoke with Vesco. In January 1973 the two were reunited in Nassau.[24] Legros was seen in the company of Beidas in Geneva and Rio de Janeiro. His closest friend was the convicted heroin trafficker Andre Labay, a close associate of Haiti's Duvalier dynasty. In Geneva Legros also met frequently with Evelyne Hirsch, the wife of the im-prisoned bankroller Andre Hirsch, whose South American heroin contact had been Christian David. Just as the U.S. put the screws on the Paraguayan government for the extradition of Auguste Ricord, Legros was in Paraguay to close out a weapons deal with President Stroessner. Later, when Legros was placed in protective confinement in Brazil, newspapers speculated on his involvement in the David Mob's narcotics deals. Recent years' investigations into the CIA/organized crime connection have resulted in an epidemic of sudden deaths. In the CIA/DEA/ Vesco/ Syndicate scheme alone one can mention Kenny Burn-stine; WerBell associate Colonel Robert F. Bayard, who was shot down in an Atlanta parking lot in July 1975;[25] another WerBell associate and codefendant in his marijuana case, John Nardi, who was shot in Cleveland;[26] and Vesco's security chief Bobby Hall, who was shot to death in his Los Angeles home in July 1976. After the Senate Investigations Subcommittee's attempted probe into the Vesco heroin case was sabotaged from the highest quarters, committee chairman Henry Jackson asked: "Did the U.S. govern-ment wish to keep Vesco out of this country for some reason? Did he have some special information which he could supply to explain, inpart, the national nightmare we have just lived through? " One Senate investigator offered an answer: "More than any single person, Vesco has information which, if he talked, would make Watergate look like a picnic."[27] pps.181-187 --[Notes]-- 1. T. Dunkin: "The Great Pot Plot," Soldier of Fortune, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1977. 2. Ibid. According to an interview with Hemming published in the April 1976 issue of Argosy magazine, Hemming settled in Florida after contacting the CIA to tell the agency all he knew about Castro's operations. There he founded Interpen, which specialized in training anti-Castro Cuban exiles in special camps in Florida for long-range guerilla warfare against the Castro regime. Thus began a long and friendly advisory relationship not only with the CIA, but with the Mob, the Hughes empire and other wealthy and influential Americans as well. About the financing of Interpen, Hemming said, "There were dribs and drabs from people connected with organized crime, some from the right wing, and even from some quite liberal sources." Hemming also said: "In 1961, some Mob people wanted my group to do a couple of jobs in Canada" — emphasis added — (against a ship with machinery for Cuba). . . "John Roselli I knew — but I didn't know who he was" . . . and about CIA/ Cuban terror in Latin America: "All this was a kind of Operation Phoenix for Latin America. There's a guy I know in Miami who worked on this more than once. Evidently he's now had a falling out with some Cubans involved in narcotics. He's a close friend of Bebe Rebozo, and Rebozo's interested in protecting him." Interpen reportedly disbanded in 1964. 3. H. Messick: Of Grass and Snow (Prentice-Hall, 1979). 4. New York Times, 7 October 1979. According to the magazine Soldier of Fortune (January 1980), WerBell established Cobray International, Inc., an antiterrorist school primarily for business executives, in Georgia in 1979. Its acting president, Col. Barney Cochran (USAF retired), served as "deputy commander for the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force EUROPE " in 1970-74, and has also been chief of the Unconventional Warfare Branch and special assistant for counterinsurgency and special activities organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the latter post he was responsible for development of "hardware" for Global Special Operations and unconventional warfare. The school's chief marksmanship instructor, Bert Waldron, holds the record for sniper killings in Vietnam — 113. 5. J. Hougan: Spooks (William Morrow, 1978). 6. Ibid.; see also Gerry Hemming's interview in Argosy, April 1976. 7. Argosy, op. cit. 8. Documents of the U.S. District Court, Northern District of Georgia, Atlanta Division, in criminal case no. CR 74-471 A (cited in Hougan, op. cit.) . 9. Hougan, op. cit. 10. "Die gefahrlichen Geschafte des Alberto Sicilia," Der Spiegel, No. 20,1977. 11. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Government Operations, Illicit Traffic in Weapons and Drugs Across the United States-Mexican Border, Hearings,- 95th Cong., 1st Session (1977). 12. Time, 2 February 1977; F. Laurent: L'Orchestre Noir (Stock, 1978). 13. Time, op. cit. 14. Cambio 16, 20 February 1977. 15. Laurent, op. cit. 16. P. Chairoff: Dossier B ... comme Barbouzes (Alain Moreau, 1975); L. Gonzalez-Mata: Cygne (Grasset, 1976). 17. Hougan, op. cit. 18. According to the November 1977 issue of the Dominican Republic Task Force Newsletter (cited in the January-February 1978 NACLA Report), the Bonao, Dominican Republic site of the CORU founding was a club for executives of the Falconbridge Nickel Company, which is controlled by the Keck family of Houston, Texas. There is, however, some confusion about the date, which the same source indicated was June 1975. Counterspy, Vol. 3, No. 2 listed the date as June 1974. The summer 1976 date, however, is that used by Bernard Cassen in Le Monde Diplomatique of February 1977, by an anonymous contributor to the Nation of 19 March 1977, and by Blake Fleetwood in New Times of 13 May 1977. Bosch, incidentally, like Vesco and WerBell, was associated with narcotics, insofar as his daughter and son-in-law were arrested in 1977 for smuggling cocaine. 19. Hougan, op. cit. Vesco had his own contact in the Lansky Syndicate — Dino Cellini, with whom he had met secretly at Rome's Fiumicino Airport in 1972. 20. L.H. Whittemore: Peroff (Ballantine, 1975). 21. Ibid. 22. Messick, op. cit.; Boston Globe, 30 September 1977. 23. Hougan, op. cit. 24. R. Peyrefitte: La Vie Extraordinaire de Fernand Legros (Albin Michel, 1976). 25. Dunkin, op. cit. 26. Messick, op. cit. 27. Whittemore, op. cit. Somewhere among Robert Vesco's memorabilia floats the strange affair of the Brotherhood of Love. Through it thousands of potential activists were stoned for years on LSD, and enormous profits from the sales of tablets were reinvested through the Investors Overseas Servicecontrolled Fiduciary Trust Company (Der Spiegel, No. 39, 1974). In the same connection, it is interesting to note that when, in the fall of 1978, Italian police investigated the American Ronald Stark's close involvement with Italian terrorists, they discovered he had been heavily involved in the Brotherhood of Love until 1971, and had run one of its LSD labs in California. In his terrorist period Stark was closely in touch with the U.S. embassy in London, which had opened a letter to him with "Dear Ron" (Panorama, 31 October 1978). --[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. 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