Please read the information on the following link Mr. Kelly:
It proves one-hundred percent that Lt. Col. Lucien
Emile Conein AKA “Black Luigi”, was a senior staff officer in the Pentagon to
the US Army Assistant Chief of Staff, Intelligence program.
Bear in mind, this is the same Lt. Col. Lucien Emile
Conein who headed up the ZRJEWEL paramilitary training program with Operation
Zapata; officers Grayston Leroy Lynch and William Rip Robertson.
Other commando trainers on ZRJEWEL were David “El
Indio” Sánchez Morales, José Joaquin Sanjenís “Felix” Perdomo “AMOT-2”, Col.
Napoleon Diestro “El Ulupong” Valeriano aka “Col. Vallejo” (“JMTRAX” commander)
and Col. Cecil Himes (U.S. Army School Of The Americas Commandant).
Posted on Following the ACSI Colonels Around the Board - DP
CI-O Phase 2
More on ZRJEWEL
More on ZRJEWEL
home/ resources / projects / cia cryptonyms / cryptonym:
zrjewel
Cryptonym: ZRJEWEL
Definition:
A paramilitary training program in 1961 that
included Rip Robertson, Grayston Lynch, and Lucien Conein.
Status:
Documented
Sources:
Grayston Lynch, Decision for Disaster (Potomac
Books, 2000)
"There were two Americans in Cochinos Bay (the
Bay of Pigs) that night (in April 1961), whose mission was to act as American
representatives to the 2506 Assault Brigade and as insurance against any mishap
that might endanger the effort. Those two agents were William 'Rip' Robertson,
a tall, rugged Texan who was to become a legend in the clandestine services,
and me."
5/12/61 request for approval from CA/PMG (note:
Covert Action/Paramilitary Group) to Security Support Division/Office of
Security: Grayston Leroy Lynch listed as a member of "Project
ZRJEWEL". His specific area of use: "To serve as a paramilitary
specialist in any area that is needed." Full details of use: "To
provide senior paramilitary support for Agency activity under Project
ZRJEWEL." (p. 338): Lynch had been in the Army from 1938-1960, then joined
CIA. (p. 318) He had served in Bay of Pigs as a contract agent, this new
contract would make him a career agent. (pp. 341-342) Memo to Chief, WH/4
(Cuba) from Chief, CA/PMG: Rip Robertson and Grayston Lynch were working
together after June 1961 in Project ZRJEWEL.
"Under the terms of Project
ZRJEWEL, CA/C/PMG is responsible initially for their selection and recruitment,
and subsequently for their training and developmental assignments until they
are transferred to an existing operational project under jurisdiction of an
operating division...it is suggested that WH Division assume...(administrative)
responsibilities for both Robertson and Lynch as of 1 June 1961." Chief,
WH/4 also asked to protect the "deniable status" of Robertson and
Lynch. (Note how p. 341 initially states "PRJEWEL", and p. 308 is
identical letter except for typeface - "ZRJEWEL" - significance is
that this letter was typed twice - why?)
9/21/61 request for approval for CA/PMG to Security
Support Division/Office of Security: Lou Conein. Specific area of use: "In
any area that is needed." Full details of use: "To provide
paramilitary skills in any area that is needed." Handwritten within is
"career agent - CSC". Special limitations: "Priority on PCSA
(preliminary covert security action) and CSA per conversation with
CA/SG/PERS."
1/16/62 follow-up letter from Chief, CA/PMG to
Chief, WH/4 - Robertson and Lynch working together; p. 272: In April 1963, one
of the two men was transferred from the AMTABBY commando group to the AMLILAC
commando group, while the other man remained with AMTABBY. (page 268). 4/30/63
appointed REDACTED as Chief of the AMLILAC team. Based on the file, it may be
Lynch himself. (p. 291) Lynch was TFW in 1962. (p. 288) 9/62, Bill Harvey
approved premium pay. (p. 274) In 1963, he was with SAS. (p. 294) 4/19/62
clarification sought of three employees assigned to JMDUSK. (p. 274) 11/26/63,
Stanley Zamka/David Morales signs fitness report for REDACTED (probably Lynch),
who has headed a commando team from 5/1/63-9/30/63. (p. 339) Lynch has an IQ of
130, team commander and combat experience.
Deposition of Lucien Conein:
http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/jfk/NARA-July2017/JFK-July_2017_Release-Formerly_released_in_part/DOCID-32423482.PDF
(p. 16): "I retired from the military in 1961
and returned to the CIA. I was sent to Vietnam in 1961 and I remained in
Vietnam until 1967. I left the CIA in 1968, July the 15th, retired from CIA and
military. I went into private business for a couple years and in 1971 I worked
as a consultant for the White House for approximately four months, four or five
months. I was then a consultant to the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs
of the Department of Justice and I joined the DEA in 1973 and I am presently
working for the DEA...(In the late 1961-early 1962 period) Mr. Colby had
assigned me to work with the Minister of the Interior of the Government of
Vietnam, and I was responsible to be the liaison between the CIA and the
Ministry of the Interior on a program, on a project, which was called (the)
Strategic Hamlet program."
(page 2 of 17): Nickname: Luigi. (page 5 of 17)
Served in military in France (1944), China (1945), military-polit in Indochina
(1945 and 56-59), intelligence in Germany (1946-53) and Iran (1959-61).
Ted Shackley, Spymaster (Potomac Books, Inc.,
Dulles, VA) 2005, pp. 55-56
"(In early 1962) it was decided to review what
sabotage operations were being considered for implementation. This revealed
that the team of Rip Robertson, Grayston Lynch and Mickey Kappes had been
working for months planning an operation against the Matahambre copper mine
complex in Pinar del Rio province, an important export earner and thus valuable
to Castro...we completed the planning for the operation, got policy approval
from the Special Group (Augmented), and launched it. The team got into the
Matahambre complex as planned...we learned later that Cuban authorities had
found the explosives (and) disarmed them...our Matahambre failure was not well
received by Bobby Kennedy. His caustic tongue worked at full speed to let all
and sundry know we were the new Keystone Kops. On October 20 the team was back
at Matahambre. This time they were detected by Cuban security forces. A short
firefight followed. Of the eight men on the team, six were captured. Castro
broadcast his triumph over Havana radio. Heartburn was suffered in Washington,
and of course the displeasure was conveyed to us in Miami with a series of
biting and unflattering remarks.
Wow, my finding got it's own entry! Cool beans. I love helping out researchers into the 22 November 1963 coup. People need to know the facts. There is no statute of limitations on murder. Of course, since Bernardo De Torres aka "Leopoldo" (Brigade 2506 Chief Of Intelligence), George Herbert Walker “Poppy” Bush (Operación 40 comptroller/ Zapata Off-Shore/ Dresser Industries/ Project WUBRINY-LPDICTUM commander), and Lt. Col. James Walter McCord Jr. (Fair Play For Cuba Committee-CIA/ Special Analysis Division Of The Wartime Information Security Program-Office Of Emergency Preparedness commander) have all died recently, I guess the main plotters are receiving biblical justice...
ReplyDeleteIf any of Mr. Kelly's visitors would like a visual reference in regards to Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, the following link is an interview from 5 July 1981 that "Black Luigi" gave to WBGH Boston Public Radio.
Listen to and take note of Lt. Col. Conein's attitude and demeanor when he talks about the 2 November 1963 assassination of Ngô Đình Diệm and his brother Ngô Đình Nhu is shocking. He just calmly talks about the coup like it's a fun stroll down memory lane.
I would also take note of the grin on his face when the interviewer mentions Gen. Paul Donal Harkins, the first commander of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (effectively Lt. Col. Conein's boss, even though Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the ambassador to South Vietnam was a Major General in the United States Army Reserve) at around the 25:11 mark of the interview.
It is a recorded fact that Gen. Harkins was against the escalation of US intervention and felt that the conflict in Vietnam could not be won. In fact, when he was briefed on the coup plot, he disapproved of it completely. CIA assets such as Lt. Col. John Paul Vann (a Deputy for Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support who oversaw logistics for the blood-thirsty "Phoenix Program") and New York Times reporter David Halberstam (an Operation Mockingbird agent), repeatedly discounted all of the intelligence reports Gen. Harkins gave to General Maxwell Davenport "Max" Taylor and Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara.
Of course, I shed no tears for Gen. Harkins, as he later became an adviser to the pro-fascist American Security Council.
Here is the link to Lt. Col. Conein's interview: http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_17B091E22675449F9D3E61ABF070482F#at_1511.394_s
Continuing on Lt. Col. Lucien Emile Conein AKA “Black Luigi”, I would like very much to present, several literary entries on Lt. Col. Conein, purely for the sake of educating any novices to JFK assassination research and visitors to Mr. William Kelly’s blog who may not be familiar with Lt. Col. Lucien Emile Conein…
ReplyDeleteThe first is from a book authored by Mr. H. P. Albarelli Jr. entitled, “A Terrible Mistake: The Murder Of Frank Olson And The CIA’s Cold War Experiments” The section of the book I am quoting, in its entirety, is called, “Book II- From Brainwashing To LSD, Chapter 8: Assassinations, Lt. Col. Lucien Conein And Assassination” and can be found on pages 335-338:
QUOTE— “… After QJ/WIN and Boris Pash, Lt. Col. Lucien Conein may be ranked as another of the more intriguing people involved in the practice of state-sponsored murder. Conein, according to CIA and FBI files, was “a former member of the Corsican Brotherhood,” a shadowy, secret group of unknown membership that finances its operations thru drug trafficking and contract assassinations, and which reportedly still operates worldwide today. People familiar with the Corsican Brotherhood say that it “makes the Mafia look the Kiwanis Club” and that “the entire concept and practice of ‘omerta’ originated with the Corsicans.” Said Conein of the Corsicans:
When the Sicilians put out a contract, it’s usually limited to the continental United States, or maybe Canada or Mexico. But with the Corsicans, it’s international. They’ll go anywhere. There’s an old Corsican proverb: ‘If you want revenge and you act in twenty years, you’re acting in haste.’
Born in Paris, France, Conein was sent to the United States by his mother when he was only five years old. He was raised in Kansas City by his French aunt, a World War I bride. His aunt assured that he retained his French citizenship, and in 1939, when World War II began, Conein hitchhiked to Chicago and went to the French consulate where he enlisted in the French army. “I didn’t have hardly any money,” he later explained, “but I wanted to see France and Europe and kill Nazis in the process.” Following the German takeover of France, Conein helped deliver weapons to the French Resistance forces and trained civilian fighters in the arts of sabotage and killing. While in France, Conein gained the nickname “Black Luigi.”
After the war, Conein returned to Chicago, where he joined the U.S. Army and was assigned to the OSS because of his fluency in French. (It is possible that around this time, he met fellow OSS recruit, E. Howard Hunt.) Later, the OSS transferred Conein to the Pacific theatre of operations where he led commando raids against Japanese-held bases in North Vietnam.
In 1947, Conein joined the CIA at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, which allowed him to use his military standing to conceal his Agency employment. In his early Agency years, he worked in at least five countries in both Europe and Southeast Asia preforming “sensitive tasks,” according to CIA files on Conein, which largely remain closed to public access. In 1951, the chief of espionage in West Germany recruited Conein to establish a base of operations in Nuremburg. The central purpose of the base was to recruit and dispatch covert agents into Warsaw Pact countries to identify and eliminate troublesome East German and Soviet agents. The operation was mildly successful but lost a large number of personnel, who were murdered, imprisoned, or simply vanished..."
"...About eighteen months into his Nuremburg assignment, Conein was transferred to work for William King Harvey, chief of the CIA’s Berlin station. His duties in Berlin are mostly unknown, but former intelligence officers say that he “served as a link between Harvey and the military, which was operating a number of safe houses throughout West Germany. Said one former official:
ReplyDeleteLucien [Conein] helped with certain human exports out of Germany to the U.S., and served as liaison frequently to delegations from [Camp] Detrick and Edgewood [Arsenal] that arrived to do interviews of assessments on any prospective German scientists that somebody back home thought would be worthwhile to ship back.
Did he come into contact with Frank Olson or others from Special Operations? It’s pretty likely, but that contact would not have been significant in any way. Olson wasn’t high enough up on the ladder; he was a foot soldier, so to speak, and Lucien mostly played with the big boys.
In 1954, Conein was dispatched to work with General Edward Lansdale in Southeast Asia. His work primarily entailed mounting covert operations against the government of Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam. By 1959, Conein was working closely with future DCI William Colby, CIA station chief in Saigon. In 1967, Colby would launch perhaps the largest assassination program ever conducted by the CIA, the Phoenix Program, which systematically murdered, kidnapped, and tortured hundreds, if not thousands, of Vietnamese people. Many, if not all, of the extreme interrogation and torture methods, such as water-boarding, used by the Army and CIA today originated with or were refined by the Phoenix Program.
Conein, under Colby in Vietnam, worked closely with local tribesmen, the Montagnards, and ran commando raids into Laos and North Vietnam. Conein was also closely involved in the violent overthrow and assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam.
Conein’s name first surfaces publicly after he had left Vietnam for the United States – he was said to have played a role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Several credible writers have advanced the argument that Conein was closely linked to former OSS officers, E. Howard Hunt and Mitch Werbell, III, two men also strongly suspected of playing roles in Kennedy’s death.
Around the same time, Conein was joined in the Untied States by a character introduced earlier and about whom readers will soon learn far more, Jean-Pierre Lafitte. Conein had known Lafitte since his wartime days in France, and had later used Lafitte for at least one sensitive mission in Vietnam. The two men shared in common not only their French heritage, but also a mysterious connection to the Corsican Brotherhood. Lafitte has years earlier been awarded a special Corsican Brotherhood medallion bearing the Brotherhood’s coat-of-arms and the Napoleonic Imperial Eagle. Lafitte would later claim that Conein had been awarded the same honor at about the same time. Also like Conein, Lafitte was fluent in French and Vietnamese..."
"...Pierre Lafitte — a pseudonym he used in the United States for at least twenty years prior to 1960 — was expert in many so-called black-operations, including breaking-and-entering, covert surveillance, disguises, and impersonation. According to Gerald Patrick Hemming, a former soldier-of-fortune and CIA contractor who knew Conein well, “Lafitte, who we jokingly called ‘Powerful Pierre’ after some cartoon character, was a master at all, except killing.” Explained Hemming, “he was French, or at least I think he was, and didn’t care much for blood. Fine food, wine, and money were his things. Maybe not in that order, but that’s what he enjoyed most in life.” According to Conein, Lafitte had been in Vietnam at the time of Diem’s death and had “assisted in important ways, but never in anyway related to actual murder.” In 1962, Conein would put CIA officer William King Harvey in touch with Lafitte, who was at that time involved with a number of shady business enterprises and shuttling back and forth between Germany, Luxembourg, South Africa, and the United States.
ReplyDeleteIn November 1973, Conein was asked to work for the Drug Enforcement Administration (reportedly, he was approached by E. Howard Hunt, then a ‘special employee’ in the Nixon White House). Conein naturally thought of his friend, Lafitte, who had worked extremely close with George Hunter White, Charles Siragusa, Vance Newman, and other FBN agents in New York, Boston, Houston, Chicago, California and overseas. Lafitte, who knew virtually every major drug-trafficker in the world, including the entire cast of the infamous French Connection case, now gave his friend Conein a crash course in the machinations of international drug trafficking.
Thanks to Lafitte, Conein quickly progressed from consultant to director of the DEA’s newly formed Special Operations and Field Support Division. His responsibilities were “to create worldwide intelligence networks, both inside and outside the United States, and to identify and ultimately stop the work of the many significant drug traffickers.” According to the Washington Post, some of Conein’s activities were “so sensitive that they required approval of [Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger’s {Foreign Advisory} Committee.” According to handwritten notes by the CIA’s William King Harvey — who was himself deeply enmeshed in operating Agency assassination projects at the time — Conein was assembling “hit-squads” composed of former CIA contractors and veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion to target and assassinate foreign drug traffickers.
According to author and investigative reporter Henrik Kruger, “ DEA official told Washington Post reporter George Crile: ‘When you get right down to it, Conein was organizing an assassination program.’”
In 1976, investigators of the Church Committee, mentioned earlier, told newspaper reporters off-the-record that Conein “had recruited twelve retired CIA men, not previously known to Conein, to preform assassinations and special interrogations on drug traffickers.” A subsequent Washington Post article stated that Conein, who died in 1998, “appears to have stretched so far the boundaries of legality that they were undertaken in total secrecy…” —END QUOTE.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThe second literary entry on US Army Assistant Chief of Staff, Intelligence officer, Lt. Col. Lucien Emile Conein AKA “Black Luigi” is quite devastating in terms of its para-political gravity, or what Professor Peter Dale Scott famously termed “Deep Politics”.
ReplyDeleteThe book I will now be quoting is authored by American journalist Douglas Valentine and is entitled, “The CIA As Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America And The World.” The section of the book I am quoting (just elements of the book this time) is called, “Part II- How The CIA Co-Opted And Manages The War On Drugs, Chapter 12: Creating A Crime: How The CIA Commandeered The Drug Enforcement Administration” and can be found on pages 178-203:
QUOTE— “… Federal drug law enforcement’s relationship with the espionage establishment matured with the creation of the Office Of Strategic Services (OSS). Prior to World War Two, the FBN was the government agency most adept at conducting covert operations at home and abroad. As a result, OSS chief William Donovan asked his friend Harry Anslinger to provide senior FBN agents to manage agent networks, engage in sabotage and subversion and work undercover to avoid security forces in hostile nations.
The relationship grew during the war when FBN executives and agents assisted OSS scientists in “truth drug” experiments involving marijuana. The “extra-legal” nature of the relationship continued after the war: when the CIA decided to test LSD on unsuspecting American citizens, FBN agents were chosen to operate the CIA safe houses where the experiments were conducted.
The relationship formalized overseas in 1951, when Agent Charlie Siragusa opened an office in Rome and began to develop the FBN’s foreign operations. In the 1950s, FBN agents posted overseas spent half their time doing “favors” for the CIA, such as investigating diversions of strategic materials and Marshall Plan largess behind the Iron Curtain. A handful of FBN agents were actually recruited into the CIA while maintaining their FBN credentials as cover.
Officially, FBN agents set limits, Siragusa, for example, claimed to object when the CIA asked him to mount a “controlled delivery” in the US as a way of identifying the American members of a smuggling ring with Communist affiliations. In his autobiography, Siragusa said, “The FBN could never knowingly allow two pounds of heroin to be delivered into the United State and be pushed to Mafia customers in the New York City area, even if in the long run we could seize a much bigger haul.”
In 1960 the CIA asked Siragusa to recruit assassins from his stable of underworld contacts. Siragusa again claimed to have refused. Bu the Mafia drug traffickers, including most prominently Santo Trafficante Jr., were soon participating in CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.
Siragusa did open a CIA safe house in 1960. FBN agents in New York maintained the MKULTRA “pad” and used it to make cases and debrief informants. When the CIA wanted to use the pad, it would call the district supervisor in New York City and tell him to keep the agents away for a few days.
FBN agent Arthur Fluhr served as New York District Supervisor George Belk’s administrative assistant from 1963-1968. As Fluhr recalled, “Belk was given a CIA contract. George said that he never actually met anyone form the CIA, but that Siragusa told him to cooperate if and when he was contacted. Later the CIA did call. They told Belk: You’ll have this checking account, but don’t write any checks other than for rent and the maintenance of the 13th Street apartment...”
ReplyDelete“…The CIA used Belk’s account — which at times held a million dollars and at other times was empty — as a slush fund for foreign officials on its payroll. “Sometimes we were told to baby sit people for the CIA while they were in town,” Fluhr said. “One time it was a group of Burmese generals. They came for a few days and when they weren’t at the UN, they used to money in Belk’s account to go on a shopping spree. They went down to the electronics shops on Canal Street and filled suitcases full of stuff.”
The CIA chaperoned the visiting Burmese generals through Customs without their bags being checked. One can imagine what they brought into New York City in those same suitcase.
The CIA used the safe houses to conduct all manner of illegal domestic operations behind the FBI’s back. Indeed, in the course of investigating illegal FBI wiretaps in January 1967, Senator Edward Long learned that the FBN was managing the CIA safe houses. No one in Congress knew about it. Treasury officials held meeting with the CIA’s Assistant Deputy Director of Plans, Desmond FritzGerald, and MKULTRA boss Sid Gottlieb. After a few days of dissembling, Gottlieb admitted the CIA had used the pads to obtain information “which was of obvious interest to us in connection with our investigative work.”
That particular pad was shut down. “We gave the furniture to the Salvation Army,” Fluhr recalled, “and took the drapes off the windows and put them up in our office.”
And FBN Agent Andrew Tartaglino opened a more luxurious CIA safe house on Sutton Place.
As the dominate partner in the relationship, the CIA exploited it’s affinity with the FBN. “Like the CIA,” FBN Agent Robert DeFauw explained, “narcotics agents mount covert operations. We pose as members of the narcotics trade. The big difference is that we’re in foreign countries legally and through our police and intelligence sources, we can check out just about anyone or anything. Not only that, we’re operational. So the CIA jumped in our stirrups.”
Jumping into the FBN’s stirrups afforded the CIA deniability. To further ensure that the CIA’s criminal activities are not revealed to the public, narcotics agents are organized militarily within the sacred chain of command. Highly indoctrinated, they blindly obey on a “need to know” basis. This institutionalized ignorance maintains the illusion of American righteousness, in the name of national security, upon which their motivation to commit all manner of crimes depends.
But, as FBN Agent Martin Pera explained, “If you’re successful because you can lie, cheat, and steal, those things become tools you use in the bureaucracy.”
Institutionalized corruption originated at headquarters in Washington, where FBN executives provided cover for CIA assets engaged in drug trafficking. In 1966, Agent John Evans was assigned as an assistant to FBN Enforcement Chief John Enright. “And that’s when I got to see what the CIA was doing,” Evans told me. “I saw a report on the Kuomintang saying they were the biggest drug dealers in the world and that the CIA was underwriting them. Air America was transporting tons of Kuomintang opium.” Evans bristled. “I took the report to Enright. He said, ‘Leave it here. Forget about it.’.
“Other things came to my attention,” Evans added, “that proved that the CIA contributed to drug use in America. We were in constant conflict with the CIA because it was hiding its budget in ours, and because CIA people were smuggling drugs into the US. We weren’t allowed to tell and that fostered corruption in the Bureau.”
Heroin smuggled by “CIA people” in the US was channeled by Mafia distributors primarily to African American communities. Local narcotics agents then targeted disenfranchised blacks as an easy way of subduing or criminalizing them, reducing their community organizing and voting power, and thereby preserving the white ruling class’s privileges…”
ReplyDelete“…We didn’t need a search warrant,” explained former New Orleans narcotics chief Clarence Giarusso. “It allowed us to meet our quota, and it was ongoing. If I find dope on a black man, I can put him in jail for a few days. He’s got no money for a lawyer and the courts are ready to convict. There’s no expectation on the jury’s part that we have to make a case. So rather than go cold turkey, the addict becomes an informant, which means I can make more cases in the neighborhood, which is all we’re interested in. We don’t care about Carlos Marcello or the Mafia. City cops have no interest in who brings dope in. That’s the job of the federal agents.”
The Establishment’s race and class privileges have always been equated with national security, and FBN executives preserved the social order. Not until 1968 were black FBN agents allowed to become group supervisors and manage white agents.
The war on drugs is a projection of two conditions peculiar to America. First is the institutionalized white supremacy that has defined it since slave owner Thomas Jefferson declared “All men are created equal.” Second is the policy of allowing anti-communist allies to traffic in narcotics. These deniable but official policies reinforce the beliefs among CIA and drug law enforcement officials that the Bill of Rights is an obstacle to national security.
Blanket immunity from prosecution for bureaucrats who translate these policies into practice fosters corruption in other forms. The FBN’s premier “case-making” agents, for example, routinely “created a crime” by breaking and entering, planting evidence, using illegal wiretaps and falsifying reports. They tampered with heroin, transferred it to informants for sale, and even murdered “straight” agents who threatened to expose them.
All of this was known at the highest level of government and in 1965 the Treasury Department launched a corruption investigation of the FBN. Headed by Andrew Tartaglino, the investigation ended in 1968with the resignation of 32 agents and the indictment of five. That same year the FBN was reconstructed in the Department Of Justice as the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD).
But, as Tartaglino said to me, dejectedly, “The job was only half done.”
The First Infestation
Richard Nixon was elected president based on a vow to restore “law and order” to America. To prove, symbolically, that it intended to keep that promise, the White House launched Operation Intercept along the Mexican border in early 1969. There were, however, unintended consequences; the massive “stop and search” operation so badly damaged relations with Mexico that National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger formed the Ad Hoc Committee on Narcotics (aka the Heroin Committee) to coordinate drug policy and prevent further diplomatic disasters.
The Heroin Committee was composed of cabinet members represented by their deputies. James Ludlum represented CIA Director Richard Helms. A member of the CIA’s Counterintelligence staff, reporting directly to James Angleton, Ludlum had been the CIA’s liaison officer to the FBN since 1962.
“When Kissinger set up the Heroin Committee,” Ludlum recalled, “the CIA certainly didn’t take it seriously, because drug control wasn’t part of their mission.”
As John Evans noted above, and as select members of Congress were aware, the CIA for years had sanctioned the heroin traffic from the Golden Triangle region of Burma, Thailand and Laos into South Vietnam as a way of rewarding top officials for advancing US policies. This reality presented the White House with a dilemma; either curtail the CIA and risk losing the war, or allow tons of heroin to be smuggled into the US for use by rebellious middle-class white kids dabbling in cultural revolution…”
ReplyDelete“…Nixon’s compromise solution was to make drug law enforcement part of the CIA’s mission. This decision forced the CIA to target it’s clients in South Vietnam. Although reluctant to do so, CIA Director Richard Helms told Ludlum: “We’re going to break their rice bowls.”
This betrayal occurred incrementally. Fred Dick, the BNDD agent assigned to Saigon, passed the names of complicit South Vietnamese military officers and politicians to the Heroin Committee. But, as Agent Dick recalled, “Ambassador [Ellsworth] Bunker called a meeting in Saigon at which CIA Station Chief Ted Shackley appeared and explained that there was ‘a delicate balance.’ What he said, in effect, was that no one was willing to do anything.”
Meanwhile, to protect its global network of drug trafficking assets, the CIA began infiltrating the BNDD and commandeering its executive management, internal security, intelligence and foreign operations branches. This act of bureaucratic piracy required the placement of CIA officers in influential positions in every federal agency concerned with drug law enforcement.
CIA Officer Paul Van Marx, for example, was assigned as an assistant on narcotics control to the US Ambassador in France. Van Marx thereafter ensured that BNDD conspiracy cases against European traffickers did not compromise CIA operations and assets. He also vetted potential BNDD assets to make sure they were not enemy spies.
The FBN had never had more than 16 agents stationed overseas, but Nixon dramatically increased funding for the BNDD with the result that hundreds of agents were soon posted abroad. The success of these overseas agents depended entirely on CIA intelligence and cooperation, as BNDD Director John Ingersoll understood.
BNDD agents soon felt the sting of CIA involvement in drug law enforcement operations within the United States. Operation Eagle was the flashpoint. Launched in 1970, Eagle targeted anti-Castro Cubans smuggling cocaine from Latin America to the Trafficante crime family in Florida. Of the dozens of Cuban traffickers arrested in June, many were found to be members of Operation 40, a CIA terror organization active in the US, the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America.
Operation 40 was one of several narco-terrorist groups created, funded and directed by the CIA.
The revelation that CIA narco-terrorists were operating within the US led to the assignment of CIA officers as “advisors” to mid-level BNDD enforcement officials, including Latin American Division chief Jerry Strickler. CIA officers tasked to work with the enforcement division served as political cadre; their job was not to make cases, but to protect CIA drug trafficking assets from exposure and prosecution, while facilitating the recruitment of these assets as informants for the BNDD.
Many of the anti-Castro Cuban exiles arrested in Operation Eagle were indeed hired by the BNDD and sent throughout Latin America to expand its operations. They got ”fantastic information,” Strickler noted. But many were playing a double game…”
“…The Second Infestation
ReplyDeleteBy 1969, Ingersoll’s inspections staff had gathered enough evidence to warrant the investigation of several corrupt FBN agents who had risen to management positions in the BNDD. But Ingersoll could not investigate his top managers without subverting the organization’s drug investigations. So he asked CIA Director Helms for help building a “counterintelligence” capacity within the BNDD.
The result was Operation Twofold, in which 19 CIA officers were infiltrated into the BNDD to spy on corrupt BNDD officials. According to Chief Inspector Patrick Fuller, “A corporation engaged in law enforcement hired three CIA officers posing as private businessmen to do contact and interview work.”
CIA Officer Jerry Soul, a former Operation 40 case officer, was the primary recruiter. In selecting CIA officers for Twofold, Soul chose junior officers whose careers had stalled due to the reduction of forces in Southeast Asia. Those hired were put through the BNDD’s training course and were assigned to spy on the BNDD’s 16 regional directors. No records were kept and some participants have never been identified.
Chuck Gutensohn was on of several Twofold “torpedoes” interviewed. Prior to his recruitment into the BNDD, Gutensohn had spent two years at the CIA’s base in Pakse, a major heroin transit point between Laos and South Vietnam. “Fuller said that when we communicated, I was to be known as Leo Adams for Los Angeles,” Gutensohn said. “He was to be Walter DeCarlo, for Washington, DC.”
Gutensohn’s cover, however, was blown before he got to Los Angeles. “Someone at headquarters was talking and everyone knew,” he recalled. “About a month after I arrived, one of the agents said to me, ‘I heard Pat Fuller signed your credentials’.”
Twofold existed at least until 1974 and was deemed by the Rockefeller Commission to have “violated the 1947 Act which prohibits the CIA’s participation in law enforcement activities.” It also, as shall be discussed later, served as a cover for clandestine CIA operations…”
“…The Third Infestation
ReplyDeleteThe Nixon White House blamed the BNDD’s failure to stop international drug trafficking on its feeble intelligence capabilities, a condition that opened the door to further CIA infiltration. In late 1970, CIA Director Helms arranged for his recently retired Chief of Continuing Intelligence, E. Drexel Godfrey, to review BNDD intelligence procedures. Among other things, Godfrey recommended that the BNDD create Regional Intelligence Units (RIUs) and a Strategic Intelligence Office (SIO).
The RIUs were up and running by 1971, with recycled CIA officers assigned as analysts, prompting regular BNDD agents to view the RIUs with suspicion, as repositories for Twofold torpedoes.
The SIO was harder to implement, given its arcane function as a tool to help senior BNDD managers formulate plans and strategies “in the political sphere.” As SIO Director John Warner explained, “We needed to understand the political climate in Thailand in order to address the problem. We needed to know what kind of protection the Thai police were affording traffickers. We were looking for an intelligence office that could deal with those sort of issues, on the ground, overseas.”
Organizing the SIO fell to CIA officers Adrian Swain and Tom Tripodi, both of whom were infiltrated into the BNDD. In April 1971, Swain and Tripodi accompanied Ingersoll to Saigon, where they were briefed by Station Chief Ted Shackley. Swain had worked in Laos and Vietnam, and through former CIA contacts, he surreptitiously obtained maps of CIA-protected drug smuggling routes in Southeast Asia.
Upon their return to the US, Swain and Tripodi expressed frustration that the CIA had access to people capable of providing the BNDD with additional intelligence, but these people “were involved in narcotics trafficking and the CIA did not want to identify them.”
Seeking a way to finesse the situation, Swain and Tripodi recommended the creation of a “special operations of strategic operations staff” that would function as the BNDD’s own CIA “using a backdoor approach to gather intelligence in support of operations.” Those operations would rely on “longer range, deep penetration, clandestine assets, who remain undercover, do not appear during the course of any trial and are recruited and directed by the Special Operations agents on a covert basis.”
The White House approved the plan in May 1971, along with a $120 million dollar proposal for drug control, of which $50 million was earmarked for BNDD special operations. Three weeks later Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” at which point Congress responded with funding for the SIO and authorization for the extra-legal operations Swain and Tripodi envisioned.
Director John Warner was given a seat on the US Intelligence Board so the SIO could obtain raw intelligence from the CIA. But, in return, the SIO was compelled to adopt CIA security procedures; a CIA security officer assigned to establish the SIO’s file room and computer system; safes and steel doors were installed; and witting agents had to obtain CIA clearances.
Three active-duty CIA officers were assigned to the SIO as desk officers for Europe and the Middle East, the Far East, and Latin America. Tripodi was assigned as the SIO’s chief of operations. Tripodi, notably, had spent the previous six years in Florida with the CIA’s Security Research Services, where his duties included the penetration of peace groups, as well as setting up “notional” private investigation firms to conduct black bag jobs. It is of historical importance that White House “Plumber” E. Howard Hunt inherited Tripodi’s Special Operations unit, which included several of the Watergate burglars…”
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ReplyDelete“…SIO ops chief Tripodi liaised with the CIA on matters of mutual interest, including the covert collection of intelligence outside of routine BNDD channels. As part of his operational plan, code-named Medusa, Tripodi proposed that SIO agents hire foreign nationals to blow up contrabandista planes while they were refueling at clandestine air strips. Another proposal called for ambushing traffickers in America, and taking their drugs and money — which, as I’ve reported elsewhere and in my books on the subject, case-making agents had been doing for decades, albeit unofficially.
ReplyDeleteEnter Lucien Conein
The creation of the SIO coincided with the assignment of CIA officer Lucien Conein to the BNDD. As a member of the OSS, Conein had parachuted into France to form resistance cells that included Corsican smugglers. As a CIA officer, Conein in 1954 was assigned to Vietnam to organize anti-Communist forces in the North, and in 1963 he achieved infamy as the intermediary between the Kennedy White House and the cabal of generals that murdered President Diem and his brother Nhu.
In The Politics of Heroin In Southeast Asia, historian Alfred McCoy alleged that in 1965, Conein arranged a truce between the CIA and drug trafficking Corsicans in Saigon. Conein apparently knew some of these gangsters from his work with the French resistance. The truce, according to McCoy, allowed the Corsicans to traffic in narcotics as long as they served as contact men for the CIA. The truce also endowed the Corsicans with “free passage” at a time when Marseilles’ heroin labs were turning from Turkish to Southeast Asian morphine base.
In a letter to McCoy’s publisher, Conein denied McCoy’ allegation and insisted that his meeting with the Corsicans was solely to resolve a problem caused by Daniel Ellsberg’s “peccadilloes with the mistress of a Corsican.”
It is impossible to find out who is telling the truth. Ellsberg denies that his CIA friends were involved in drug trafficking; McCoy and all the evidence indicate that they were. What is definitely known is that in July 1971, on Howard Hunt’s recommendation, the White House hired Conein as an expert on Corsican traffickers in Southeast Asia. Conein was assigned as a consultant to the SIO’s Far East Asia desk, then under CIA officer Walter Mackem, a veteran of Vietnam. Conein’s activities will be discussed in greater detail…”
“…The Parallel Mechanism
ReplyDeleteIn September 1971, the Heroin Committee was reorganized as the Cabinet Committee for International Narcotics Control (CCINC) under Secretary of State William Rogers. CCINC’s mandate was to “set policies which relate international considerations to domestic considerations.” By 1975, its budget amounted to $875 million, and the war on drugs had become a most profitable industry.
Concurrently, the CIA formed a unilateral drug unit in its operations division under Seymour Bolten. Known as the Special Assistant to the Director for the Coordination of Narcotics, Bolten directed CIA division and station chiefs in unilateral drug control operations. In doing this, Bolten worked closely with Ted Shackley, who in 1972 was appointed head of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division. Bolten and Shackley had worked together in post-war Germany, as well as in anti-Castro Cubans operations in the early 1960s. Their collaboration would grease federal drug law enforcement’s skid into oblivion.
“Bolten screwed us,” BNDD’s Latin American division chief Jerry Strickler said emphatically. “And so did Shackley.”
Bolten “screwed” the BNDD, and the American judicial system, by setting up a “parallel mechanism” based on a computerized register of international drug traffickers and a CIA-staffed communications crew that intercepted calls from drug traffickers inside the U.S. to their accomplices around the world. The International Narcotics Information Network (INIS) was modeled on a computerized management information system Shackley had used to terrorize the underground resistance in South Vietnam.
Bolten’s staff also “re-tooled” dozens of CIA officers and slipped them into the BNDD. Several went to Lou Conein at the SIO for clandestine, highly illegal operations.
Factions within the CIA and military were opposed to Bolten’s parallel mechanism, but CIA Executive Director William Colby supported Bolten’s plan to preempt the BNDD and use its agents and informants for unilateral CIA purposes. The White House also supported the plan for political purposes related to Watergate. Top BNDD officials who resisted were expunged; those who cooperated were rewarded…”
“...Bureau of Narcotics Covert Intelligence Network
ReplyDeleteIn September 1972, DCI Helms (then immersed in Watergate intrigues), told BNDD Director Ingersoll that the CIA had prepared files on specific drug traffickers in Miami, the Florida Keys, and the Caribbean. Helms said the CIA would provide Ingersoll with assets to pursue the traffickers and develop information on targets of opportunity. The CIA would also provide operational, technical, and financial support.
The result was the Bureau of Narcotics Covert Intelligence Network (BUNCIN) whose methodology reflected Tripodi’s Medusa Plan and included “provocations, inducement to desertion, creating confusion and apprehension.”
Some BUNCIN intelligence activities were directed against “senior foreign government officials” and were “blamed on other government agencies or even on the intelligence services of other nations.” Other BUNCIN activities were directed against American civic and political groups.
BNDD officials managed BUNCIN’s legal activities, while Conein at the SIO managed its political and CIA aspects. According to Conein’s administrative deputy, Rich Kobakoff, “BUNCIN was an experiment in how to finesse the law. The end product was intelligence, not seizures or arrests.”
CIA officers Robert Medell and William Logay were selected to manage BUNCIN.
A Bay of Pigs veteran born in Cuba, Medell was initially assigned to the Twofold program. Medell was BUNCIN’s “covert” agent and recruited its principal agents. All of his assets had previously worked for the CIA, and all believed they were working for it again.
Medell started running agents in March 1973 with the stated goal of penetrating the Trafficante organization. To this end the BNDD’s Enforcement Chief, Andy Tartaglino, introduced Medell to Sal Caneba, a retired Mafioso who had been in business with Trafficante in the 1950s. Caneba in one day identified the head of the Cuban side of the Trafficante family, as well as its organizational structure.
But the CIA refused to allow the BNDD to pursue the investigation, because it had employed Trafficante in its assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, and because Trafficante’s Operation 40 associates were performing similar functions for the CIA around the world.
Medell’s Principal Agent was Bay of Pigs veteran Guillermo Tabraue, whom the CIA paid $1,400 a week. While receiving this princely sum, Tabraue participated in the “Alvarez-Cruz” drug smuggling ring.
Medell also recruited agents from Manuel Artime’s anti-Castro Cuban organization. Former CIA officer and White House “Plumber” Howard Hunt, notably, had been Artime’s case officer for years, and many members of Artime’s organization had worked for Ted Shackley while Shackley was the CIA’s station chief in Miami.
Bill Logay was the “overt” agent assigned to the BUNCIN office in Miami. Logay had been Shackley’s bodyguard in Saigon in 1969. From 1970-1971, Logay had served as a special police liaison and drug coordinator in Saigon’s Precinct 5. Logay was also asked to join Twofold, but claims to have refused.
Medell and Logay’s reports were hand delivered to BNDD headquarters via the Defense Department’s classified courier service. The Defense Department was in charge of emergency planning and provided BUNCIN agents with special communications equipment. The CIA supplied BUNCIN’s assets with forged IDs that enabled them to work for foreign governments, including Panama, Venezuela and Costa Rica.
Like Twofold, BUNCIN had two agendas. One, according to Chief Inspector Fuller, “was told” and had a narcotics mission. The other provided cover for the Plumbers. Orders for the domestic political facet emanated from the White House and passed through Conein to “Plumber” Gordon Liddy and his “Operation Gemstone” squad of exile Cuban terrorists from the Artime organization...”
“…Enforcement chief Tartaglino was unhappy with the arrangement and gave Agent Ralph Frias the job of screening anti-Castro Cubans sent by the White House to the BNDD. Frias was assigned to International Affairs chief George Belk. When Nixon’s White House chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman sent over three Cubans, Frias interviewed them and realized they were “plants.” Those three were not hired, but, Frias lamented, many others were successfully infiltrated inside the BNDD and other federal agencies.
ReplyDeleteUnder BUNCIN cover, CIA anti-Castro assets reportedly kidnapped and assassinated people in Colombia and Mexico. BUNCIN’s White House sponsors also sent CIA anti-Castro Cuban assets to gather dirt on Democratic politicians in Key West. With BUNCIN, federal drug law enforcement sank to new lows of political repression and corruption.
Novo Yardley
The Nixon White House introduced the “operations by committee” management method to ensure control over its illegal drug operations. But as agencies involved in drug law enforcement pooled resources, the BNDD’s mission was diluted and diminished.
And, as the preeminent agency in the federal government, the CIA not only separated itself from the BNDD as part of Bolten’s parallel mechanism, it rode off into the sunset on the BNDD’s horse. For example, at their introductory meeting in Mexico City in 1972, Ted Shackley told Latin American division chief Strickler to hand over all BNDD files, informant lists, and cable traffic.
According to Strickler, “Bad things happened.” The worst abuse was that the CIA allowed drug shipments into the U.S. without telling the BNDD.
“Individual stations allowed this,” SIO Director John Warner confirmed.
In so far as evidence acquired by CIA electronic surveillance is inadmissible in court, the CIA was able to protect its controlled deliveries into the U.S. merely by monitoring them. Numerous investigations had to be terminated as a result. Likewise, dozens of prosecutions were dismissed on national security grounds due to the participation of CIA assets operating around the world.
Strickler knew which CIA people were guilty of sabotaging cases in Latin America, and wanted to indict them. And so, at Bolten’s insistence, Strickler was reassigned. Meanwhile, CIA assets from Bolten’s unilateral drug unit were kidnapping and assassinating traffickers as part of Operation Twofold.
BNDD Director Ingersoll confirmed the existence of this covert facet of Twofold. Its purpose, he said, was to put people in deep cover in the U.S. to develop intelligence on drug trafficking, particularly from South America. The regional directors weren’t aware of it. Ingersoll said he got approval from Attorney General John Mitchell and passed the operation on to John Bartels, the first administrator of the DEA. He said the unit did not operate inside the U.S., which is why he thought it was legal.
Ingersoll added that he was surprised that no one from the Rockefeller Commission asked him about it.
Joseph DiGennaro’s entry into the covert facet of Operation Twofold began when a family friend, who knew CIA officer Jim Ludlum, suggested that he apply for a job with the BNDD. Then working as a stockbroker in New York, DiGennaro met Fuller in August 1971 in Washington. Fuller gave DiGennaro the code name Novo Yardley, based on his posting in New York, and as a play on the name of the famous codebreaker.
After DiGennaro obtained the required clearances, he was told that he and several other recruits were being “spun-off” from Twofold into the CIA’s “operational” unit. The background check took 14 months, during which time he received intensive combat and trade-craft training…”
“…In October 1972 he was sent to New York City and assigned to an enforcement group as a cover. His paychecks came from BNDD funds, but the program was reimbursed by the CIA through the Bureau of Mines. The program was authorized by the “appropriate” Congressional committee.
ReplyDeleteDiGennaro’s unit was managed by the CIA’s Special Operations Division in conjunction with the military, which provided assets within foreign military services to keep ex-filtration routes (air corridors and roads) open. The military cleared air space when captured suspects were brought into the U.S. DiGennaro spent most of his time in South America, but the unit operated worldwide. The CIA unit numbered about 40 men, including experts in printing, forgery, maritime operations, and telecommunications.
DiGennaro would check with Fuller and take sick time or annual leave to go on missions. There were lots of missions. As his BNDD group supervisor in New York said, “Joey was never in the office.”
The job was tracking down, kidnapping, and, if they resisted, killing drug traffickers. Kidnapped targets were incapacitated by drugs and dumped in the U.S. As DEA Agent Gerry Carey recalled, “We’d get a call that there was ‘a present’ waiting for us on the corner of 116th Street and Sixth Avenue. We’d go there and find some guy, who’d been indicted in the Eastern District of New York, handcuffed to a telephone pole. We’d take him to a safe house for questioning and, if possible, turn him into an informer. Sometimes we’d have him in custody for months. But what did he know?”
If you’re a Corsican drug dealer in Argentina, and men with police credentials arrest you, how do you know it’s a CIA operation? DiGennaro’s last operation in 1977 involved the recovery of a satellite that had fallen into a drug dealer’s hands. Such was the extent of the CIA’s “parallel mechanism.”
The Dirty Dozen
With the formation of the Drug Enforcement Administration in July 1973, BUNCIN was renamed the DEA Clandestine Operations Network (DEACON 1). A number of additional DEACONs were developed through Special Field Intelligence Programs (SFIP). As an extension of BUNCIN, DEACON 1 developed intelligence on traffickers in Costa Rica, Ohio and New Jersey; politicians in Florida; terrorists and gun runners; the sale of boats and helicopters to Cuba; and the Trafficante organization.
Under DEA chief John Bartels, administrative control fell under Enforcement Chief George Belk and his Special Projects assistant Philip Smith. Through Belk and Smith, the Office of Special Projects had become a major facet of Bolten’s parallel mechanism. It housed the DEA’s air wing (staffed largely by CIA officers), conducted “research programs” with the CIA, provided technical aids and documentation to agents, and handled fugitive searches.
As part of DEACON 1, Smith sent covert agent Bob Medell “to Caracas or Bogota to develop a network of agents.” As Smith noted in a memorandum, reimbursement for Medell “is being made in backchannel fashion to CIA under payments to other agencies and is not counted as a position against us.”
Thoroughly suborned by Bolten and the CIA, DEA Administrator Bartels established a priority on foreign clandestine narcotics collection. And when Belk proposed a special operations group in intelligence, Bartels immediately approved it. In March 1974, Belk assigned the group to Lou Conein.
As chief of the Intelligence Group/Operations (IGO), Conein administered the DEA Special Operations Group (DEASOG), SFIP and National Intelligence Officers (NIO) programs. The chain of command, however, was “unclear” and while Medell reported administratively to Smith, Conein managed operations through a separate chain of command reaching to William Colby, who had risen to the rank of CIA Director concurrent with the formation of the DEA…”
“…Conein had worked for Colby for many years in Vietnam, for through Colby he hired a “dirty dozen” CIA officers to staff DEASOG. As NIOs (not regular gun-toting DEA agents), the DEASOG officers did not buy narcotics or appear in court, but instead used standard CIA operating procedures to recruit assets and set up agent networks for the long-range collection of intelligence on trafficking groups. They had no connection to the DEA and were housed in a safe house outside headquarters in downtown Washington, DC.
ReplyDeleteThe first DEASOG recruits were CIA officers Elias P. Chavez and Nicholas Zapata. Both had paramilitary and drug control experience in Laos. Colby’s personnel assistant Jack Mathews had been Chavez’s case officer at the Long Thien base, where General Vang Pao ran his secret drug-smuggling army under Ted Shackley’s auspices from 1966-1968.
A group of eight CIA officers followed: Wesley Dyckman, a Chinese linguist with service in Vietnam, was assigned to San Francisco. Louis J. Davis, a veteran of Vietnam and Laos, was assigned to the Chicago Regional Intelligence Unit. Christopher Thompson from the CIA’s Phoenix Program in Vietnam went to San Antonio. Hugh E. Murray, veteran of Pakse and Bolivia (where he participated in the capture of Che Guevara), was sent to Tucson. Thomas D. McPhaul had worked with Conein in Vietnam, and was sent to Dallas. Thomas L. Briggs, a veteran of Laos and a friend of Shackley’s, went to Mexico. Vernon J. Goertz, a Shackley friend who had participated in the Allende coup, went to Venezuela. David A. Scherman, a Conein friend and former manager of the CIA’s interrogation center in Da Nang, was sent to sunny San Diego.
Gary Mattocks, who ran CIA counter-terror teams in Vietnam’s Delta, and interrogator Robert Simon were the eleventh and twelfth members. Terry Baldwin, Barry Carew and Joseph Lagattuta joined later.
According to Davis, Conein created DEASOG specifically to do Phoenix program-style jobs overseas: the type where a paramilitary officer breaks into a trafficker’s house, takes his drugs, and slits his throat. The NIOs were to operate overseas where they would target traffickers the police couldn’t reach, like a prime minister’s son or the police chief in Acapulco if he was the local drug boss. If they couldn’t assassinate the target, they would bomb his labs or use psychological warfare to make him look like he was a DEA informant, so his own people would kill him.
The DEASOG people “would be breaking the law,” Davis observed, “but they didn’t have arrest powers overseas anyway.”
Conein envisioned 50 NIOs operating worldwide by 1977. But a slew of Watergate-related scandals forced the DEA to curtail its NIO program and reorganize its covert operations staff and functions in ways that have corrupted federal drug law enforcement beyond repair.
Assassination Scandals
The first scandal focused on DEACON 3, which targeted the Aviles-Perez organization in Mexico. Eli Chavez, Nick Zapata and Barry Carew were the NIOs assigned.
A veteran CIA officer who spoke Spanish, Carew had served as a special police adviser in Saigon before joining the BNDD. Carew was assigned as Conein’s Latin American desk officer and managed Chavez and Zapata (aka “the Mexican Assassin”) in Mexico. According to Chavez, a White House Task Force under Howard Hunt had started the DEACON 3 case. The Task force provided photographs of the Aviles Perez compound in Mexico, from whence truckloads of marijuana were shipped to the U.S.
Funds were allotted in February 1974, at which point Chavez and Zapata traveled to Mexico City as representatives of the North American Alarm and Fire Systems Company. In Mazatlán, they met with Carew, who stayed at a fancy hotel and played tennis every day, while Chavez and Zapata, whom Conein referred to as “pepper-bellies,” fumed in a flea-bag motel…”
“…An informant arranged for Chavez, posing as a buyer, to meet Perez. A deal was struck, but DEA chief John Bartels made the mistake of instructing Chavez to brief the DEA’s regional director in Mexico City before making “the buy.”
ReplyDeleteAt this meeting, the DEACON 3 agents presented their operational plan. But when the subject of “neutralizing” Perez came up, analyst Joan Banister took this to mean assassination. Bannister reported her suspicions to DEA headquarters, where the anti-CIA faction leaked her report to Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson.
Anderson’s allegation that the DEA was providing cover for a CIA assassination unit included revelations that the Senate had investigated IGO chief Conein for shopping around for assassination devices, like exploding ashtrays and telephones. Conein managed to keep his job, but the trail led to his comrade from the OSS, Mitch Werbell.
A deniable asset Conein used for parallel operations, Werbell had tried to sell several thousand silenced machine pistols to DEACON 1 target Robert Vesco, then living in Costa Rica surrounded by drug trafficking Cuban exiles in the Trafficante organization. Trafficante was also, at the time, living in Costa Rica as a guest of President Figueres whose son had purchased weapons from Werbell and used them to arm a death squad he formed with DEACON 1 asset Carlos Rumbault, a notorious anti-Castro Cuban terrorist and fugitive drug smuggler.
Meanwhile, in February 1974, DEA Agent Anthony Triponi, a former Green Beret and member of Operation Twofold, was admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital in New York “suffering from hypertension.” DEA inspectors found Triponi in the psychiatric ward, distraught because he had broken his “cover” and now his “special code” would have to be changed.
Thinking he was insane, the DEA inspectors called former chief inspector Patrick Fuller in California, just to be sure. As it turned out, everything Triponi had said about Twofold was true! The incredulous DEA inspectors called the CIA and were stunned when they were told: “If you release the story, we will destroy you.”
By 1975, Congress and the Justice Department were investigating the DEA’s relations with the CIA. In the process they stumbled on, among other things, plots to assassinate Torrijos and Noriega in Panama, as well as Tripodi’s Medusa Program.
In a draft report, one DEA inspector described Medusa as follows: “Topics considered as options included psychological terror tactics, substitution of placebos to discredit traffickers, use of incendiaries to destroy conversion laboratories, and disinformation to cause internal warfare between drug trafficking organizations; other methods under consideration involved blackmail, use of psychopharmacological techniques, bribery and even terminal sanctions.”
The Cover-Up
Despite the flurry of investigations, Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, reconfirmed the CIA’s narcotic intelligence collection arrangement with DEA, and the CIA continued to have its way. Much of its success is attributed to Seymour Bolten, whose staff handled “all requests for files from the Church Committee,” which concluded that allegations of drug smuggling by CIA assets and proprietaries “lacked substance.”
The Rockefeller Commission likewise gave the CIA a clean bill of health, falsely stating that the Twofold inspections project was terminated in 1973. The Commission completely covered-up the existence of the operation unit hidden within the inspections program.
Ford did task the Justice Department to investigate “allegations of fraud, irregularity, and misconduct” in the DEA. The so-called DeFeo investigation lasted through July 1975, and included allegations that DEA officials had discussed killing Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega. In March 1976, Deputy Attorney General Richard Thornburgh announced there were no findings to warrant criminal prosecutions…”
“…In 1976, Congresswoman Bella Abzug submitted questions to new Director of Central Intelligence George H.W. Bush, about the CIA’s central role in international drug trafficking. Bush’s response was to cite a 1954 agreement with the Justice Department gave the CIA the right to block prosecution or keep its crimes secret in the name of national security.
ReplyDeleteIn its report, the Abzug Committee said: “It was ironic that the CIA should be given responsibility of narcotic intelligence, particularly since they are supporting the prime movers.”
The Mansfield Amendment of 1976 sought to curtail the DEA’s extra-legal activities abroad by prohibiting agents from kidnapping or conducting unilateral actions without the consent of the host government. The CIA, of course, was exempt and continued to sabotage DEA cases against its movers, while further tightening its stranglehold on the DEA’s enforcement and intelligence capabilities.
In 1977, the DEA’s Assistant Administrator for Enforcement sent a memo, co-signed by the six enforcement division chiefs, to DEA chief Peter Bensinger. As the memo stated, “All were unanimous in their belief that present CIA programs were likely to cause serious future problems for DEA, both foreign and domestic.”
They specifically cited controlled deliveries enabled by CIA electronic surveillance and the fact that the CIA “will not respond positively to any discovery motion.” They complained that “Many of the subjects who appear in these CIA- promoted or controlled surveillances regularly travel to the United States in furtherance of their trafficking activities.” The “de facto immunity” from prosecution enabled the CIA assets to “operate much more openly and effectively.”
But then DEA chief Peter Bensinger suffered the CIA at the expense of America’s citizens and the DEA’s integrity. Under Bensinger the DEA created its CENTAC program to target drug trafficking organization worldwide through the early 1980s. But the CIA subverted the CENTAC: as its director Dennis Dayle famously said, “The major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.”
Murder and Mayhem
DEACON 1 inherited BUNCIN’s anti-Castro Cuban assets from Brigade 2506, which the CIA organized to invade Cuba in 1960. Controlled by Nixon’s secret political police, these CIA assets, operating under DEA cover, had parallel assignments involving “extremist groups and terrorism, and information of a political nature.”
Noriega and Moises Torrijos in Panama were targets, as was fugitive financier and Nixon campaign contributor Robert Vesco in Costa Rica, who was suspected of being a middle man in drug and money-laundering operations of value to the CIA.
DEACON 1’s problems began when overt agent Bill Logay charged that covert agent Bob Medell’s anti-Castro Cuban assets had penetrated the DEA on behalf of the Trafficante organization. DEACON 1 secretary Cecelia Plicet fanned the flames by claiming that Conein and Medell were using Principal Agent Tabraue to circumvent the DEA.
In what amounted to an endless succession of controlled deliveries, Tabraue was financing loads of cocaine and using DEACON 1’s Cuban assets to smuggle them into the U.S. Plicet said that Medell and Conein worked for “the other side” and wanted the DEA to fail. These accusations prompted an investigation, after which Logay was reassigned to inspections and Medell was reassigned and replaced by Gary Mattocks, an NIO member of the Dirty Dozen.
According to Mattocks, Shackley helped Colby set up DEASOG and brought in “his” people, including Tom Clines, whom Shackley placed in charge of the CIA’s Caribbean operations. Clines, like Shackley and Bolten, knew all the exile Cuban terrorists and traffickers on the DEASOG payroll. CIA officer Vernon Goertz worked for Clines in Caracas as part of the CIA’s parallel mechanism under DEASOG cover…”
“…As cover for his DEACON 1 activities, Mattocks set up a front company designed to improve relations between Cuban and American businessmen. Meanwhile, through the CIA, he recruited members of the Artime organization including Watergate burglars Rolando Martinez and Bernard Barker, as well as Che Guevara’s murderer, Felix Rodriguez. These anti-Castro terrorists were allegedly part of an Operation 40 assassination squad that Shackley and Clines employed for private as well as professional purposes.
ReplyDeleteIn late 1974, DEACON 1 crashed and burned when interrogator Robert Simon’s daughter was murdered in a drive-by shooting by crazed anti-Castro Cubans. Simon at the time was managing the CIA’s drug data base and had linked the exile Cuban drug traffickers with “a foreign terrorist organization.” As Mattocks explained, “It got bad after the Brigaders found out Simon was after them.”
None of the CIA’s terrorists, however, were ever arrested. Instead, Conein issued a directive prohibiting DEACON 1 assets from reporting on domestic political affairs or terrorist activities and the tragedy was swept under the carpet for reasons of national security.
DEACON 1 unceremoniously ended in 1975 after Agent Fred Dick was assigned to head the DEA’s Caribbean Basin Group. In that capacity Dick visited the DEACON 1 safe house and found, in his words, “a clandestine CIA unit using miscreants from Bay of Pigs, guys who were blowing up planes.” Dick hit the ceiling and in August 1975 DEACON I was terminated.
No new DEACONs were initiated and the others quietly ran their course. Undeterred, the CIA redeployed its anti-Castro Cuban miscreant assets, some of whom established the terror organization CORU in 1977. Others would go to work for Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, a key National Security Council aide under President Ronald Reagan in the Iran-Contra drug and terror network.
Conein’s IGO was disbanded in 1976 after a grand jury sought DEACON I intelligence regarding several drug busts. But CIA acquired intelligence cannot be used in prosecutions, and the CIA refused to identify its assets in court, with the result that 27 prosecutions were dismissed on national security grounds.
Gary Mattocks was thereafter unwelcomed in the DEA. But his patron Ted Shackley had become DCI George Bush’s assistant deputy director for operations and Shackley kindly rehired Mattocks into the CIA and assigned him to the CIA’s narcotics unit in Peru.
At the time, Santiago Ocampo was purchasing cocaine in Peru and his partner Matta Ballesteros was flying it to the usual Cuban miscreants in Miami. One of the receivers, Francisco Chanes, an erstwhile DEACON asset, owned two seafood companies that would soon allegedly come to serve as fronts in Oliver North’s Contra supply network, receiving and distributing tons of Contra cocaine.
Mattocks himself soon joined the Contra support operation as Eden Pastrora’s case officer. In that capacity Mattocks was present in 1984 when CIA officers handed pilot Barry Seal a camera and told him to take photographs of Sandinista official Federico Vaughn loading bags of cocaine onto Seal’s plane. A DEA “special employee,” Seal was running drugs for Jorge Ochoa Vasquez and purportedly using Nicaragua as a transit point for his deliveries.
North asked DEA officials to instruct Seal, who was returning to Ochoa with $1.5 million, to deliver the cash to the Contras. When the DEA officials refused, North leaked a blurry photo, purportedly of Vaughn, to the right-wing Washington Times. For partisan political purposes, on behalf of the Reagan administration, Oliver North blew the DEA’s biggest case at the time, and the DEA did nothing about it, even though DEA Administrator Jack Lawn said in 1988, in testimony before the Subcommittee on Crime of the Committee on the Judiciary, that leaking the photo “severely jeopardized the lives” of agents...”
“…The circle was squared in 1989 when the CIA instructed Gary Mattocks to testify as a defense witness at the trial of DEACON 1 Principal Agent Gabriel Tabraue. Although Tabraue had earned $75 million from drug trafficking, while working as a CIA and DEA asset, the judge declared a mistrial based on Mattocks’s testimony. Tabraue was released. Some people inferred that President George H.W. Bush had personally ordered Mattocks to dynamite the case.
ReplyDeleteThe CIA’s use of the DEA to employ terrorists would continue apace. For example, in 1981, DEA Agent Dick Salmi recruited Roberto Cabrillo, a drug smuggling member of CORU, an organization of murderous Cuban exiles formed by drug smuggler Frank Castro and Luis Posada while George Bush was DCI.
The DEA arrested Castro in 1981, but the CIA engineered his release and hired him to establish a Contra training camp in the Florida Everglades. Posada reportedly managed resupply and drug shipments for the Contras in El Salvador, in cahoots with Felix Rodriguez. Charged in Venezuela with blowing up a Cuban airliner and killing 73 people in 1976, Posada was shielded from extradition by George W. Bush in the mid-2000s.
Having been politically castrated by the CIA, DEA officials merely warned its CORU assets to stop bombing people in the U.S. It could maim and kill people anywhere else, just not here in the sacred homeland. By then, Salmi noted, the Justice Department had a special “grey-mail section” to fix cases involving CIA terrorists and drug dealers.
The Hoax
DCI William Webster formed the CIA’s Counter-Narcotics Center in 1988. Staffed by over 100 agents, it ostensibly became the springboard for the covert penetration of, and paramilitary operations against, top traffickers protected by high-tech security firms, lawyers and well-armed private armies.
The CNC brought together, under CIA control, every federal agency involved in the drug wars. Former CIA officer and erstwhile Twofold member, Terry Burke, then serving as the DEA’s Deputy for Operations, was allowed to send one liaison officer to the CNC.
The CNC quickly showed its true colors. In the late 1990, Customs agents in Miami seized a ton of pure cocaine from Venezuela. To their surprise, a Venezuelan undercover agent said the CIA had approved the delivery. DEA Administrator Robert Bonner ordered an investigation and discovered that the CIA had, in fact, shipped the load from its warehouse in Venezuela.
The “controlled deliveries” were managed by CIA officer Mark McFarlin, a veteran of Reagan’s terror campaign in El Salvador. Bonner wanted to indict McFarlin, but was prevented from doing so because Venezuela was in the process of fighting off a rebellion led by leftist Hugo Chavez. This same scenario has been playing out in Afghanistan for the last 15 years, largely through the DEA’s Special Operations Division (SOD), which provides cover for CIA operations worldwide…”
“…The ultimate and inevitable result of American imperialism, the SOD job is not simply to “create a crime,” as freewheeling FBN agents did in the old days, but to “recreate a crime” so it is prosecutable, despite whatever extra-legal methods were employed to obtain the evidence before it is passed along to law enforcement agencies so they can make arrests without revealing what prompted their suspicions.
ReplyDeleteReuters reported in 2013,
“The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.”
The utilization of information from the SOD, which operates out of a secret location in Virginia, “cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function,” according to an internal document cited by Reuters, which added that agents are specifically directed “to omit the SOD’s involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony.”
Agents are told to use “parallel construction” to build their cases without reference to SOD’s tips which may come from sensitive “intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records,” Reuters reported.
Citing a former federal agent, Reuters reported that SOD operators would tell law enforcement officials in the U.S. to be at a certain place at a certain time and to look for a certain vehicle which would then be stopped and searched on some pretext. “After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said,” Reuters reported.
An anonymous senior DEA official told Reuters that this “parallel construction” approach is “decades old, a bedrock concept” for law enforcement. The SOD’s approach follows Twofold techniques and Bolten’s parallel mechanism from the early 1970s.
To put it simply, lying to frame defendants, which has always been unstated policy, is now official policy: no longer considered corruption, it is how your government manages the judicial system on behalf of the rich political elite.
As outlined in this article, the process tracks back to Nixon, the formation of the BNDD, and the creation of a secret political police force out of the White House. As Agent Bowman Taylor caustically observed, “I used to think we were fighting the drug business, but after they formed the BNDD, I realized we were feeding it.”
The corruption was first “collateral” – as a function of national security performed by the CIA in secret – but has now become “integral,’ the essence of empire run amok...” —END QUOTE.
Clearly, Lt. Col. Conein was a man who knew most of the major suspects in the assassination of President Kennedy, on both ends of the stove-piped, compartmentalized spectrum of international fascist intrigue. I know not who pulled the trigger that blew the president's brains out the back of his head, but I imagine Lt. Col. Lucien Conein broke bread with him.
ReplyDelete