The Strength of the Wolf (42 page)

What this means is that for eighteen months, under the guidance of FBN agents, QJ/WIN dealt narcotics as a cover for CIA double agent recruitment and provocation activities aimed at the Soviets. He was fully protected in this endeavor – and in others afterwards. The Church Committee Report notes that in 1962, QJ/WIN “was about to go on trial in Europe on smuggling charges,” but the CIA wished to “quash charges or arrange somehow to salvage QJ/WIN for our purposes.”
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Obviously, the importance of FBN agents, and their drug smuggling employees, in providing cover for CIA operations cannot be overstated – and should never be forgotten when analyzing FBN statements and operations. For example, Charlie Siragusa was in Miami in March 1962, when FBN agents arrested five Cubans with a half-pound of opium they had allegedly obtained from China. Siragusa said that with that particular arrest, “the international drug conspiracy had assumed communist overtones.”
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Although the Chinese Communist–Cuban drug connection was based largely on dubious information, some of which the CIA itself discarded as
implausible, Siragusa's charges prompted Senator Charles Keating (D-NY) to initiate a congressional study into the problem, and added steam to the CIA's churning propaganda war against Castro's Cuba.
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Siragusa was not the only FBN agent involved in Harvey's ZR/RIFLE Program. As Luxembourg station chief Arnold Silver noted in an 11 October 1960 memo to Harvey, candidate Number Seven had two expert safecrackers at his service “who were introduced to Cusack on July 19, 1960, in Barcelona.”
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Arturo Ureta Gallardo, a Spanish policeman, was candidate Number Seven, and as a way of proving his bona fides for the QJ/WIN position, he introduced Cusack to a pair of expert safecrackers, while Cusack and Anthony Mangiaracina were in Barcelona on a multipurpose narcotics investigation. The pretext for the Spanish investigation was the elusive Communist Chinese narcotics connection. As Cusack explained in a 29 July 1960 report to Anslinger, he and Mangiaracina had met ten days earlier with Luis Pozo, chief of Spain's Central Narcotics Bureau, and falsely claimed that an American seaman in Naples had told Mangiaracina that he could obtain Communist Chinese heroin from a Mr. Sung Hon Yung in Barcelona. Cusack unabashedly told his Commissioner that “it was necessary to fabricate this background to give us a concrete reason for our visit to Spain.”
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Though he knew Cusack was lying, Pozo provided him with an introduction to Arturo Ureta Gallardo, the Spanish policeman Bill Harvey was thinking of recruiting for the QJ/WIN position. Apparently, Ureta Gallardo was auditioning for the part, and when Cusack and Mangiaracina arrived in Barcelona, he graciously offered to produce his file on Sung – although it was locked in a rusty old combination-style safe, which had recently gotten jammed. Not to worry; there just happened to be two professional safecrackers in the local jail, and Ureta Gallardo had them released, and they opened the safe.

This sequence of staged events would have appeared highly providential under normal circumstances. But Cusack, of course, was expecting a demonstration and he never told Mangiaracina what was going on. And while it's unclear if Cusack actually made a pass at Ureta Gallardo in Barcelona, he could have done so very easily. As Mangiaracina recalls, Cusack was staying
in a separate hotel room and could have interviewed Ureta Gallardo later that night. When approached by the author, Cusack declined to address the subject of using an expensive federal narcotics investigation for nefarious CIA purposes.

Next, after reading the file on Sung Hon Yung, Cusack and Mangiaracina engaged in their undercover narcotics assignment and approached the suspected Chinese drug trafficker at his apartment. They initially presented themselves as businessmen who sold appliances to American soldiers and sailors, but after dinner Cusack disingenuously confessed that he and Mangiaracina were really after heroin. Sung and his compatriots recoiled in horror and responded with unsolicited denunciations of Communist China. But wiley Jack Cusack didn't believe them, and he reported to Anslinger that he was sure they were part “of a ChiCom espionage organization and that their tailoring business [was] merely a vehicle to carry out their mission [which, along with drug smuggling, included spying on the Sixth Fleet] and give them cover.”
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Finally, he alleged that the Spanish police officials were in cahoots with the Chinese.

On this last detail, Mangiaracina is in total agreement with Cusack. “I'd developed the lead,” he says, “and it was supposed to be my investigation, but Cusack decided that he had to handle it, because the Chinese were part of a spy ring. They were with the Thin Blade Gang out of Macao and Hong Kong. But the Spanish police told them we were narcotic agents, so they amused us and sent us on our way.”

As the Sung Hon Yung case illustrates, it was standard procedure for the CIA to hide its espionage operations inside FBN investigations. It also shows how an FBN agent could advance his career by accommodating the CIA. Cusack knew this, and he carefully cultivated his relationship with CIA officer Raymond Rocca, whom he had reportedly met in Rome in 1952. By 1960, Rocca was Angleton's chief of research and was in close liaison with Bill Harvey; which is how Harvey knew to approach Cusack for the mission in Barcelona. And that is why ambitious Jack Cusack began to envision himself as Siragusa's successor, under the forthcoming Giordano regime, as the FBN's chief of foreign operations and its primary liaison to the CIA.

One of the people QJ/WIN sought to recruit in the Congo was Joseph Brahim, also known as Joe Attia.
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A hero of the Resistance, Attia had
worked for SDECE in Morocco and Tunisia in the 1950s. Then in 1960, he purchased the Refuge Nightclub in Abidjan, the capital city of the Ivory Coast. The Refuge was the unofficial hangout of Jacques Foccart's SAC spy ring, as well as various spies and smugglers operating across Africa.
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As one might expect, the CIA was on top of the situation, and its freelance expert on such matters, Garland Williams, arrived in Abidjan in September 1961 undercover as a narcotic specialist for the Agency for International Development's Public Safety Program.
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His cover job was to develop security programs throughout the Entente states, at a time when the Belgian consul in Syria was accused of running guns to the Congo, and Liberia (with its liberal banking and shipping laws) had become a banking center for drug smugglers. It was also, according to Ike Feldman, a period when the CIA was using the Dark Continent to test its germ warfare capabilities.
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While Garland Williams established a spy network to monitor Corsican drug smugglers in Africa, Feldman was transferred to New York and began working in Chinatown. Siragusa was the Deputy Commissioner by then and would not allow Feldman to use the 13th Street pad. So, behind Siragusa's back, Feldman procured apartment 1B at 212 East 18th Street. He did this with the help of Treichler and money provided by George White. He also brought along all the erotic literature and technological devices from the Plantation Inn in San Francisco and, true to form, established himself as a pimp.
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Taking over Feldman's responsibility for the Plantation Inn in San Francisco was Albert Habib. Born in Tunisia, where he had served as a policeman until 1955, Habib worked closely with White and Gottlieb, and they provided him with an undercover box at the San Francisco Post Office for secret MKULTRA correspondences. On one occasion, he accompanied White and Gottlieb to an air force base in Nevada where MKULTRA experiments were being conducted. According to Habib, White was as powerful as ever in the early 1960s and could get anything he wanted from the mayor, the governor, the police chief, or FBN headquarters. He was still influential enough to prevent West Coast inspector Lee Speer from looking into his MKULTRA records and facilities.

White was the CIA's original MKULTRA contact in the FBN, and its ranking expert on Mafia murder techniques, and on 21 November 1960, just three weeks after Harvey had recruited QJ/WIN, Siragusa and Gottlieb visited White in hopes of recruiting Harold Meltzer into Harvey's ZR/RIFLE hit team. One of the premier drug smugglers of all time, and a contract killer to boot, Meltzer was recently out of prison and operating a sportswear company in Los Angeles. White, of course, knew all the top
hoods on the West Coast, including CIA Agent Johnny Roselli, and thus it is not surprising that on 19 December 1960, one month after Siragusa and Gottlieb's visit to San Francisco, Roselli introduced Meltzer to Harvey. There can be no doubt about who brought about this meeting. As Feldman confessed in 1994, “On more than one occasion White sent me to the airport to pick up Roselli and bring him to the office.”
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The existence of CIA-connected FBN agents working with CIA-connected Mafiosi was not, in a word, conducive to effective federal drug law enforcement. It was impossible for such relationships – in all their manifestations – not to compromise agents in the US who were attempting to make cases on the same CIA-connected Mafiosi and their associates. It was wrong, in so many ways. For example, the Agency, as Charlie Siragusa feared, was providing Bureau credentials to its operatives. One FBN report stated that a man named Harry Martin was traveling through Europe in the late 1950s posing as an FBN agent. According to Ralph Frias, “There were two or three cases like that.”
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The CIA probably was providing FBN credentials to its ZR/RIFLE assassins-cum-drug smugglers. It could have provided them to anyone, including drug smuggling Mafiosi in its employ. According to Jill Jonnes, when FBN agents were closing in on Guatemalan Ambassador Mauricio Rosal and Corsican drug smuggler Etienne Tarditi in October 1960, “a corrupt New York agent was seen running full tilt up Lexington Avenue to the stakeout site to warn off Nick Calamaris. The agent working with Calamaris's underworld boss arrived too late.”
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Dismissing Jonnes's assertion as preposterous, George Gaffney exclaims: “How could anybody rush to warn Calamaris when we didn't even know he was involved? And if the bad agent did know he was involved, why didn't he just call him up on the phone?”

But there's a possibility Gaffney hadn't considered. Perhaps the CIA had planted one of its agents in the New York office, and maybe he was working with Calamaris's boss in the Gambino family – someone, perhaps, from back in the Luciano Project days. There are so many possibilities. As noted earlier, Tarditi claimed he was involved in intelligence work beneficial to American interests. Maybe he was one of the Corsicans working for Bill Harvey. As a hero of the Resistance, he certainly fit the bill. Maybe some deeply sequestered CIA faction, like Bill Harvey's, decided to pull the plug on one of the Agency's own operations. Or maybe it
was
just a corrupt agent working for the Mafia.

What is perfectly clear is that Jonnes's unsubstantiated and unattributed allegation, against nobody in particular, casts suspicion on every FBN agent
in New York in October 1960. Someone in the FBN, the person who made the allegation to Jonnes, knew about it at the time; and what better way to discredit an entire organization and justify its destruction, eight years later, when the FBN had finally become a liability to both the CIA and FBI.

In any event, as the Kennedys burst upon the scene, the CIA had turned the FBN completely upside down. CIA agents were blackmailing spies, diplomats, and politicians at three Bureau safehouses. With the support of complicit FBN agents, the CIA was hiring Corsican drug smugglers as assassins and using Mafiosi to smuggle MKULTRA poisons into Cuba in an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro. On behalf of the Agency, FBN headquarters focused public attention on the phantom Chinese Communist–Cuban connection – even going so far, as explained in the previous chapter, as to allow top members of a Kuomintang drug smuggling ring in San Francisco to escape punishment, while George White covered for them by telling the press that their heroin had come from Communist China. Meanwhile, the CIA's anti-Castro terrorists were smuggling spies and assassins into Cuba, and returning with shiploads of narcotics for sale in America. And the United States had conceded defeat in its war on drugs.

On 21 October 1960, FBN agents and detectives from the Westchester County Sheriff's office arrested Salvatore Rinaldo and Matteo Palmieri for possession of ten kilograms of high-grade heroin. While the case did not receive the same sensational headlines as L'affaire Rosal – which involved the seizure of 100 kilograms of heroin and the arrest of an ambassador – the ramifications of the Rinaldo-Palmieri case were equally important, leading to the arrest of dozens of drug traffickers in Italy and America, and indirectly to the death of Lucky Luciano.

The Rinaldo–Palmieri case also brought Agent Frank Selvaggi into the limelight. Tall, edgy, and tragically hip, Selvaggi rivaled Lenny Schrier as the premier case-making agent of their era. During the course of his nine-year career, Selvaggi took into custody dozens of the most dangerous drug traffickers in America, many of whom he bruised and bullied while managing their passage from predator to prisoner. Belligerent when necessary, always astute, he knew how to be charitable, pleasant, and cool. Very cool. When he walks, with one hand in his blazer pocket and the other holding a cigarette, it's as if he were shuffling to a Tony Bennett tune. Frank Selvaggi was not someone to trifle with, but to his friends he was a reliable and eminently likeable man.

“Frank was a great raconteur,” George Gaffney says with unabashed affection. “He spoke in the authentic idiom of the Mafia, and he could tell a fabulous story. Sitting for hours on a stakeout with Frank passed by in a
minute. Customs agents would come to the office and sit around him like little kids while he told stories about the Mafia hoods he knew. He was a true hero,” Gaffney adds with emotion, “the greatest agent the Bureau ever had. No man made a greater contribution. I wanted to give him the Treasury medal, but instead he got the rawest deal of any man I've ever known.”