The Strength of the Wolf (25 page)

Anslinger would later excuse himself by writing:

George White, meanwhile, completed his Cuban survey and then mounted investigations in Ecuador and Peru that brought the FBN favorable publicity. He returned to New York in the throes of alcoholism, and resumed his LSD duties in April 1953. The Eisenhower administration had given the program a shot in the arm with the appointment of Allen W. Dulles as director of Central Intelligence and Richard C. Helms as chief of the CIA's clandestine services. Both were willing to use any weapon to fight communism and, with Dulles's support, Helms on 3 April 1953 proposed funding for a biochemical warfare program named MKULTRA, whose purpose was to develop drugs that would enable the CIA to discredit friends and foes alike, and that could be delivered clandestinely and kill without a trace. White's inside knowledge of the Mafia's committee on assassinations and its murder techniques – such as hiring foreigners, and setting up dupes to take the fall – made him uniquely qualified for this lethal aspect of the
job. Dulles approved MKULTRA operations on 13 April 1953, and the CIA's quest to create better killers through chemistry commenced in earnest.
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Next, White moved the MKULTRA operation out of his apartment and into a safehouse at 81 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village. Using the alias Morgan Hall, he began drawing rent money from a CIA bank account. Pat Fox decorated the apartment, and White's closest special employee, Pierre Lafitte (the agent provocateur in the Orsini case), installed an air conditioner, a telephone, and a cabinet full of gin. After CIA technicians had installed a two-way mirror and hidden microphones, and had supplied White with the latest photographic equipment, Lafitte hired call girls to lure spies, diplomats, gangsters, politicians, and even average citizens to their doom. The victims were dosed with aphrodisiacs and/or LSD while White, his FBN cohorts, and assorted CIA scientists watched through the two-way mirror and filmed and tape-recorded the action.

White's first MKULTRA briefing at the Bedford pad occurred on 23 June 1953 and included James Angleton, Dr. James Hamilton, and Gregory Bateson, a former OSS officer with radical ideas about political and psychological warfare. Hamilton had been White's partner in the OSS Truth Drug program, had conducted opium surveys in Burma during the war, and in 1953 was involved in psychologically assessing White's MKULTRA subjects.
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Angleton, the counter-spy, was curious to know how LSD might help him uncover enemy agents within the CIA and penetrate foreign intelligence services. And Bateson was there to explain how LSD and narcotics could be used to reconstruct American society. In a memo he sent to William Donovan nine days after the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Bateson predicted an era in which propaganda, subversion, and “social and ethnic manipulation” would be more critical to national security than guided missiles.
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The expertise these men brought to the June meeting at the Bedford apartment highlights the two new tactics the CIA was about to employ in its quest to conquer the world: 1) using LSD as a weapon of psychological warfare; and 2) turning drug smuggling routes into fifth columns that undermined the ability of foreign nations, and undesirable minorities in America, to organize themselves economically, politically, or militarily.

The only hitch in the plan concocted by Angleton, Hamilton, Bateson, and White was the occasional, unpredictable security breach, such as
occurred in March 1953, when Burma charged Kuomintang General Li Mi with opium smuggling. Knowing the charge was true, the CIA requested “a rapid evacuation in order to prevent the leakage of information about the KMT's opium business,” and in November the State Department announced that Li Mi's troops were being airlifted by the CIA's proprietary airline, Civil Air Transport, to Taiwan.
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In reality, most of the troops were left behind in Burma or dropped in northern Thailand with the consent of General Phao, Thailand's top policeman and drug lord. Even Ambassador William J. Sebald wasn't fooled by this chicanery, and asked if the CIA had deliberately left the KMT troops behind in Burma to continue “the opium smuggling racket.”
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Which they had.

Anslinger's job was to deflect attention away from the CIA, and in June 1953 – while in New York to sign a UN Protocol limiting opium production to Bulgaria, Greece, India, Turkey, Iran, the USSR, and Yugoslavia – he bludgeoned the People's Republic of China with allegations of drug smuggling. He claimed that the PRC's Opium Prevention Bureau was running opium caravans from Yunnan Province into Burma and that its agents delivered narcotics to unnamed Mafiosi in Hong Kong. In remarks delivered to the UN's Commission on Narcotic Drugs in April 1953, Anslinger cited reports, including those issued by the Supreme Command for the Allied Powers (SCAP) in Japan, showing that all heroin seized in Japan “came from Communist China.”
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Not even the US Treasury Attaché in Hong Kong, however, could offer evidence to support these wild allegations about the PRC and, as historian William O. Walker III notes, Anslinger's claims about SCAP were disingenuous too. What SCAP had really said was that the heroin “was of Asian origin, but from an indeterminate source.”
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Anslinger knew full well that indeterminate source was the fabled Golden Triangle, the opium-rich area encompassing portions of Laos, Burma, and Thailand. He also knew, as Agent Bill Tollenger had reported to him in 1948, that opium was “the greatest single source of revenue” for the French in Indochina. In
The Politics of Heroin
, Professor Alfred W. McCoy describes how the French obtained that revenue through what they called Operation X. Starting in 1950, the French foreign intelligence agency, Service de Documentations Extérieure et de Contre-Espionage (SDECE), flew opium from Laos to a French Special Forces camp at Cap St. Jacques in South Vietnam. From Cap St. Jacques the opium was sold to a consortium of Vietnamese gangsters, Kuomintang brokers, and Corsicans in Saigon. The Corsicans moved their share to Marseilles, the KMT distributed theirs in Hong Kong, and the Vietnamese sold their opium locally. That was Operation X.
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According to McCoy, as America displaced France in Vietnam in 1953 and 1954, the CIA inherited many of SDECE's drug-smuggling contacts in Laos and Vietnam. Anslinger knew about this development, and that the Southeast Asian French connection ran through Batista, Lansky, and Santo Trafficante in Cuba, directly to America's ghettos. But he chose to use his position as the world's leading authority on narcotics to fool the American public. He also misused his formidable powers to protect his beloved Bureau from a series of MKULTRA and corruption-related mishaps.

The first potential disaster occurred in New York on 12 September 1953, when aspiring actress Linda King was admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital, ranting and raving, and accusing George White and FBN Agent Paul Gross of having drugged her. As White noted in his diary, he had indeed given Linda King a surreptitious dose of LSD, and Gross was there when he did it. But CIA security officers had anticipated that someday some MKULTRA guinea pig would figure out what was going on and lodge a complaint, so White maintained “close working relations with local police authorities which could be utilized to protect the activity in critical situations.”
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The arrangement existed with area hospitals too, and the doctors at Lenox Hill simply ignored King's charges. After she came down from her trip, King, like Clarice Stein, decided to drop the matter in order to remain part of White's exciting social circle. Had King pursued it, however, the incident could have exposed the FBN's role in the MKULTRA Program; but instead it proved that the security system worked and that White was invincible.

The next close call was the death by heroin overdose of FBN Agent Crofton Hayes in late September. A Fordham graduate and charter member of the Jim Ryan Celtic clique, Hayes was serving as the agent in charge of the FBN's office in Newark, New Jersey. As Agent John L. “Jack” Kelly Jr. recalled in his autobiography,
On The Street
, the day before Hayes died, a group leader offered Kelly seized heroin as bait for his informers. Kelly declined the offer; but the next morning, after being told that Hayes had died of an overdose, he “knew immediately” that the overdose was from “the heroin that the group leader had offered” him.
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If Kelly knew, then Anslinger knew. But launching an investigation into Hayes's death was something the Commissioner dared not do, for it would have revealed that there were other addicts in the New York office and
that agents tempted informers with seized heroin. There was another more sinister reason for looking away, too. There was a rumor that Hayes was about to confess his sins and implicate other agents in illicit activities, and that, as a result, he was murdered – given a hot shot – by a colleague. There was a MKULTRA angle as well. Several agents knew about White's LSD experiments, and in 1979 Agent Pat Ward told CIA investigators that an office clerk had gone “berserk” around the time of Hayes's death and that he suspected that White had dosed the clerk, and perhaps Hayes, with LSD.
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For all these reasons, Crofton Hayes's death was officially attributed to liver failure, again with the apparent complicity of hospital authorities.

Another potential problem arose a few days later, when the chief of the US Attorney's Racket Squad in Washington, DC, Thomas A. Wadden, made two startling charges in a feature article in the 3 October 1953 issue of the
Saturday Evening Post
. According to Wadden, an FBN agent was moving seized narcotics from the drug disposal room at the Treasury Annex to “Big Jim” Roberts, “the Negro crime king in Washington.” Even more sensational was Wadden's accusation that his investigation had been subverted by Anslinger. The Commissioner eventually admitted that there had been pilferage, but he blamed the theft of the narcotics on a Black janitor, and Wadden, who resigned shortly after his investigation, was never able to identify the FBN agent he believed was involved. And he never discovered that Anslinger and George Cunningham were passing drugs from the drug disposal room to the CIA for its MKULTRA Program experiments.

The next complication occurred a few weeks later, in late November 1953, when Garland Williams unexpectedly announced his retirement from the Treasury Department. The chain of events that led to this surprising development began in September 1952, when Williams finished his tour as commander of the 525th Military Intelligence Group. He wanted to return to his former position as district supervisor in New York, but, as Howard Chappell recalls, “There was no room at the inn. Jim Ryan was firmly entrenched, so Garland was made assistant Commissioner of the IRS Intelligence Division, where he was not well received.”

Unfortunately for Williams, he had intruded on IRS turf at the wrong time. The IRS had recently created an Inspections Unit and, just after Williams arrived on the scene, this Inspections Unit investigated the upper echelons of the IRS and uncovered wrongdoings by several bureaucrats and political appointees, including Williams, who had failed to pay taxes on some bonds he owned. Williams was allowed to cite ill health as the official reason for his resignation, but his reputation was tarnished. Some FBN agents
believe that he must have committed a far greater crime, or perhaps taken a fall for Anslinger, or the CIA. In any event, Williams sought solace in what was most familiar to him: secrecy. After his formal retirement in March 1954, he embarked on a two-year odyssey that took him from Washington, DC, through undisclosed activities in San Francisco (where George White set up another MKULTRA safehouse in 1955), and back to Washington, where he organized a special unit in the Army Chemical Corps.
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Then came the suicide of Frank Olson on 28 November 1953. A CIA scientist specializing in the airborne delivery of diseases like anthrax, Olson was attached to the MKULTRA Program under cover of the Department of Defense. His bizarre tale began on the night of 19 November 1953, when, at a secluded country lodge outside Washington that served as a retreat for MKULTRA researchers, one of Dr. Gottlieb's equally deranged colleagues dropped LSD in Olson's Cointreau. Unaware that he'd been drugged, Olson embarked on a bad trip that triggered a nervous breakdown and, a week later, a compulsory visit to Dr. Harold Abramson in New York. An allergist with a MKULTRA contract, Abramson treated Olson with a combination of goof balls and bourbon. The effect was hardly therapeutic, and after spending Thanksgiving Day with Abramson on Long Island, Olson returned to his room at the Statler Hotel in Manhattan and, in the presence of CIA psychiatrist Robert Lashbrook, allegedly dashed across the room, dove through the window, and plummeted to his death.
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New York detectives first called it a “homocide” because Lashbrook was in the room, then backed away and allowed CIA Inspector General Lyman B. Kirkpatrick Jr. to close the case without further ado. Olson's death is still officially recorded as a suicide. However, Eric Olson had his father's body exhumed in 1994 and, based on a belated autopsy, he contends that Frank Olson was hit on the head with a blunt object and then pushed out the window, to prevent him from revealing MKULTRA secrets, like the CIA's use of biochemical weapons in North Korea.

Even if Eric's theory is correct, George White (according to his diary) was in California when Frank Olson died and could not be considered a suspect in his murder. That was fortunate for the FBN because White's soft-porn helper, Gil Fox, was aware of the implications of Olson's death at the time it occurred – which suggests that Olson may have visited the Bedford Street safehouse while he was in New York. But the connection between the FBN and the MKULTRA Program was never made, and like the Linda King incident, the Olson mishap was contained.