The Strength of the Wolf (31 page)

“The CIA guy in Rome, John Riordan, also asked me to drop off things and eyeball people,” Frias adds. “Riordan's area of interest was in the Middle East, and he asked me who I knew there. I knew a Maronite in the Bekka Valley who'd been a priest in East Los Angeles, so Riordon recruited him as an asset. Riordan ran his operation out of the Merrill Lynch Brokerage House in Rome, and the money he paid to his assets in the Middle East was funneled through it. Hank and Charlie knew about Riordan's operation, and they used the Brokerage House to make money on the side for themselves and to pay for things for the office. I had an account there as well, which I used when I set up a deal with Dom Albertini.”

The Merrill Lynch Brokerage House not only funded CIA operations in Beirut, Italy, and Greece, the CIA also used it to launder money for P2, Italy's ultra-right-wing Masonic Lodge. Hank Manfredi was at the center of these espionage intrigues, and by 1957 his contacts in the Vatican and Italian security services had earned him a reputation as “the fount.” According to Colonel Tulius Acampora, an Army counterintelligence officer detached to the CIA and assigned as an advisor to the Italian Carabinieri, “Hank had more contacts across the board than Charlie. The problem was that he went to work full time for Bob Driscoll and the CIA.

“The CIA succeeded in putting the Christian Democrats in Italy,” Acampora explains, “but the communists made gains anyway, so the Pentagon's counterintelligence staff drew up plans to change the political climate of Italy through counter-subversion. Jack Kennedy was a key player in Congress, as was Fig Coleman in Rome. The Dulles complex made it a unified thing: State, CIA, military, the Church. And that's where Hank comes in. The Dulleses knew what Hank was doing and they were covetous of his friendship with Paul Marcinkus. Marcinkus was right-hand man of Giovanni Montini, the Vatican's Secretary of State, and the real power behind the Pope.”

A native of Chicago and a protégé of Cardinal Cody, Marcinkus initially went to work for Montini in 1952, serving as his emissary in Canada and then Bolivia. Montini had worked with the OSS in the war and had relationships with the Mafia, the P2 Masonic Lodge, and neo-fascist ultras
within the Italian security services. Montini's link to the Mafia was Massimo Spado, a financier he later hired to invest the Vatican's money. Spado in turn hired tax attorney Michele Sindona. Now famous for his role in the collapse of the Franklin National Bank in 1979, Sindona had formed relations with the Mafia in 1943 when, as a budding black marketeer, he was granted permission by Vito Genovese to provide produce to certain cities in Sicily. Sindona prospered and with his profits he opened an accounting office in Milan, where Montini was serving as Archbishop. In November 1954, at Montini's request, and certainly with Hank Manfredi's knowledge, Sindona channeled the CIA funds that enabled the Italian security forces to hire goon squads to suppress striking communist workers in Milan. In 1960 Sindona purchased the Banca Privata Italiana, into which the Vatican began making deposits. Sindona came to occupy a pivotal position in Italian politics, as the wedge between the Vatican, the Mafia, and the P2 Masonic Lodge.
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“After Montini became Pope Paul VI in 1963,” Acampora continues, “Marcinkus became his personal secretary and later boss of the Vatican Bank. And that's when Marcinkus got into all sorts of mischief with Sindona.” Acampora winks. “Hank was so close to Marcinkus that on a moment's notice he could get Anslinger's friends an audience with the Pope.

“Back in Washington,” Acampora continues, “CIA director Allen Dulles decided to send Bob Driscoll to Rome under commercial cover. Driscoll was a Navy commander with a low key style. A few years earlier he'd snatched the British contacts in the Greek police, so Dulles gave him a charge to create the same sort of alternative in Italy. But in order to do that, Driscoll needed to get away from Angleton's commitments in the military. The police are the crucial element in countering subversion, and what Driscoll wanted were Hank's contacts in the Carabinieri in Trieste. Driscoll wanted to hire them as the nucleus of a special operations unit he could use to reshape the political climate in Italy. From his years in Trieste, Hank knew all the Carabinieri, as well as all the top policemen in Rome.

“I remember the night that Hank made his decision to go with Driscoll,” Acampora says softly. “Charlie, Hank, and I were having dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Washington. Charlie kept saying, ‘Hank, don't go. Stick with me.' Charlie was in a race with Giordano to succeed Anslinger, and if Hank went with Driscoll, then Charlie wouldn't be able to contend with Giordano. But Hank thought he'd find more personal fulfillment with the CIA. And once Hank went with the CIA, Charlie, who was heading back to Washington, lost a lot of influence over foreign operations.”

Hank Manfredi was a father figure and raconteur, admired by all the agents and their wives. Yet he was secretly infatuated with Jackie Kennedy, whom he adoringly called “the lady.” They'd met while she was visiting her sister in Ravello, and thereafter he served as her advance man and bodyguard whenever she was in Europe. His dream was to become the caretaker of her estate when he retired. But none of his or Siragusa's dreams would ever come true, thanks to the CIA.

“Charlie used to say that Hank wasn't good at reporting,” Andy Tartaglino recalls. “But he was just too busy giving information to the CIA. There was a segment of the Mafia he was interested in, an intelligence angle dating back to World War Two, Sicily. He knew organized crime, but he was interested in intelligence. And that's where he went.”

Hank Manfredi's obsession with the intelligence angle of drug smuggling ultimately led him to “the Conspiracy” Harry Anslinger had been seeking all his life. Manfredi began to assemble the evidence in late June 1957, when the Carabinieri informed him of Luciano's presence in Palermo. Manfredi alerted his Italian police contacts and, in October 1957, a series of Mafia summit meetings at the Delle Palme Hotel were carefully monitored, and verified Anslinger's theory that an International Grand Council of Mafiosi existed. Among the Americans at the summit were Joe Bonanno and Santo Sorge, the Mafia's financial advisor. According to Marty Pera, Sorge desperately tried to convince the bosses to get out of the drug business.

“Bonanno was polished,” Pera explains. “Lucchese and Lansky had sent their sons to West Point. They were rich and they didn't need the hassle.”

Representing the Sicilians, among others, were Vito Badalamenti and Leonard Greco, the most powerful Mafiosi in Sicily. Leonard's brother Salvatore had a fleet of ships that sailed under the Honduran flag and, through Frank Coppola, moved narcotics to Cuba in food shipments. But the Sicilians were not as diversified as their American counterparts and could not afford to pull out of the drug trafficking business, despite Sorge's admonitions.
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“The Sicilians gave the Americans an ultimatum at Palermo,” Pera explains. “They knew there were a number of rebellious young hoods in America, so they told the bosses, ‘If you don't deal with us, we'll deal with them.' Not having control over narcotics would have put all their other rackets at risk, so the Americans had no choice but to go along.”

Once the ultimatum was accepted, arranging political protection became the main order of business. Coppola and Greco were the principal negotiators and they authorized Michele Sindona to move drug-generated protection money through the Italian Secret Service to ultra powerbrokers in the Italian government. This was the intelligence angle that fascinated Manfredi – though it was fascist, not communist in nature – which meant he was nearly powerless to stop it in Italy. However, he was able to track Palermo summit-attendee Philip Buccola to Boston, and by wiretapping Buccola in Boston, FBN agents were able to learn of a follow-up American Mafia summit to be held in Apalachin, New York, the overarching significance of which will be discussed in the next chapter.

Another narcotics route with an intelligence angle was uncovered in Iran in 1956, when Charlie Siragusa and Paul Knight, working with Iranian police chief General Alavi Moghaddam, raided a lab in Tehran that was producing 100 pounds of heroin a week! It was a huge bust, but the operation persisted, so in February 1957, Knight escorted Garland Williams to Tehran to solve, at President Eisenhower's personal request, Iran's drug problem. With Williams was CIA officer Byron Engle, chief of the Agency for International Development's Office of Public Safety (OPS) Program. Two years after his forced retirement from the Treasury Department, Williams had resurfaced as an employee of the OPS. His job was to create a narcotic squad in Tehran, at the same time that Engle and the CIA were forming, with the Mossad, Iran's brutal secret police force, SAVAK.
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The Williams expedition was nothing new. America had been enmeshed in Iran's opium business since 1943, when the Third Millspaugh Mission arrived in Tehran to take control of Iran's economy, in return for the granting of oil, air transport, and various other commercial rights to American industrialists. As part of its job, the Millspaugh Mission also collected opium revenues, managed the Pharmaceutical Institute, and directed the Royal opium factory, prompting critics to call the Millspaugh team “drug sellers.”
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In his defense, team leader Arthur Millspaugh pointed out that the US Army, which provided Iranian narcotics to Kachin soldiers in Burma during the Second World War, operated beyond his control through its “wild-cat” Bank Sepah. “Our long term program looked to the eventual elimination of the opium business,” he wrote, but “a large part of Persia's production went into the illicit trade” anyway.
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As Garland Williams had reported to Anslinger in 1949, and as the Prince Pahlevi case had proven in 1954, the Iranian royal families never stopped overproducing or selling black-market opium. Perched perennially atop the UN's list of nations that violated international drug laws, Iran was aware of its addiction problem, and in 1953, newly elected president Mohammed Mossadegh banned opium production. But he also nationalized American and British oil firms, so the British Secret Service called upon Kim Roosevelt and the CIA. Roosevelt in turn concocted a
coup d'état
with Lebanon's security chief, Faroud Nashashibi, a CIA asset employed as Pan American airlines' chief of security in Beirut.
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After the successful completion of the bloody takeover, the American and British oil companies regained their properties in Iran, and Roosevelt became a vice president at Gulf Oil. The CIA moved in and from Iran launched penetration operations inside the Soviet Union. In so far as Iran, along with Turkey, was one of only four allied nations that bordered the USSR, supporting the Shah was a matter of national security that eclipsed local issues of drug law enforcement.

Through the Office of Public Safety, CIA officers would also organize and support repressive security forces in Lebanon and South Vietnam, which were both protecting narcotics traffickers. In exchange for their silence, and the type of favors described by Ralph Frias, FBN agents in return received tips on politically incorrect drug smugglers from CIA officers working under OPS cover. And through OPS's chief, CIA officer Byron Engle, the FBN would form a relationship with TWA like the one it enjoyed, through Sam Pryor, with Pan Am.
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While national security interests were served by making allowances for foreign leaders involved in drug trafficking, these accommodations caused difficulties for overseas FBN agents. In Lebanon, as we know, the major hash growers were legislators and officials of cabinet rank, which is why Customs Captain Edmond Azizi and Sûreté officer Haj Touma were able to protect Sami Khoury and Mounir Alaouie, and profit from their drug smuggling operation. In addition, the Middle East faced an explosive political situation. After the Israelis seized the Suez Canal, the Sinai Desert, and the Gaza Strip in 1956, the US government – in order to maintain good relations with the oil producing Arab nations – agreed to provide Israel with billions of dollars of financial aid so that some of these stolen
territories would be returned to their rightful owners. But the extent of Israel's military power terrorized the Arab world and widened the gulf between the Christian and Muslim sects in Lebanon. As a result, arms smuggling proliferated between Beirut and Damascus, making drug law enforcement all the more difficult.

Arriving in Beirut in 1956 to help Paul Knight manage the situation was Joe Salm. Born in Egypt and raised in America by Benedictine monks, Salm was the most improbable FBN agent imaginable. He met his father (who owned 3,000 acres of land at the mouth of the Nile) once a year, and he met his mother, a French poetess, for the first time in 1939, when at age eighteen he went to work for the Ford Motor Company in Cairo. During the war, Salm served with the Royal Air Force and then the US Army CID. He joined the CIA after graduating from Harvard, serving undercover in the State Department's Refugee Program in Genoa. In 1954 he transferred to Beirut, where he processed visa applications for Palestinian and Armenian refugees wishing to emigrate to America.

Birds of a feather, Joe Salm and Paul Knight became fast friends in Beirut. Relying on Frias to do most of the undercover work, Salm and group leader Knight made whatever cases were politically permissible, such as the June 1957 case against Youseff el-Etir and Syrian chemist Omar Makkouk. But their ability to operate in Beirut diminished in 1958 when Muslim nationalists and communists revealed that the CIA had rigged Lebanon's presidential elections in favor of the Christian Maronite candidate, Camille Chamoun. In August, communists and outlawed Syrians bombed the American Embassy, and Ambassador Donald Heath ordered the evacuation of American women and children to Athens and Cyprus.