The Strength of the Wolf (68 page)

For thirty-six years, the FDA had complemented, not challenged, the FBN. The reason for this is quite simple: there were only two-dozen agents in the FDA's Central Investigative Unit, and they had to call in FBN agents, US Marshals, or state or local cops just to make arrests. But a simple stroke of the president's pen gave BDAC as many agents and as big a budget as the FBN. BDAC wasn't handicapped by an outdated orthodoxy or a legacy of bureaucratic rivalries either. As part of his progressive philosophy, Finlator encouraged cooperation with other law enforcement agencies, and he actively forged close ties with charter members of Anslinger's Army in the Pharmaceutical and Wholesale Drug Associations. He even persuaded the American Medical Association to submit to BDAC oversight, and he formed a good working relationship with Customs Commissioner Lester Johnson.
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Finlator's style was effective, and in 1966, to the horror of FBN agents and executives, long-haired BDAC undercover agents – dressed in bell bottoms and wearing love beads – started making splashy busts across the nation. They even started arresting marijuana users, sparking a contentious
jurisdictional battle between Giordano and Finlator. Worst of all, dozens of FBN agents jumped to Finlator's shiny new ship. Many were agents whose careers had stalled; others were under investigation by Tartaglino and the IRS; all were enticed by the instant promotions that were part of the deal. Giordano complained to David Acheson in a futile attempt to stop the mass migration, but the Civil Service Commission ruled that the transfers and promotions were legal. And, adding insult to injury, it prohibited Tartaglino from telling BDAC's managers about the jumpers he suspected of wrongdoing. They all got a clean bill of health and a fresh start in life.

About seventy FBN agents transferred to BDAC, including Dennis Dayle (who became its chief of special investigations), Jack Brady, Peter Niblo, and Charlie McDonnell. Summing up the sentiments of his fellow jumpers, Tony “Grapes” Mangiaracina said, “After the government legalized gambling, which pushed the mob deeper into drugs, I'd finally had enough. So I joined BDAC in Baltimore. It wasn't the popular thing to do, but I didn't take it to heart.”

Taking it very much to heart, loyal FBN agents branded the jumpers as treacherous opportunists who couldn't have gotten promoted otherwise. And because some FDA personnel had degrees in animal husbandry, or had served as poultry inspectors prior to joining BDAC, all BDAC agents were mockingly referred to as “chicken pluckers.” Cooler heads found comfort in the notion that BDAC was freeing the FBN to concentrate on international heroin conspiracy cases. But BDAC's mere existence was a painful reminder that the FBN was moribund, and that a new breed of professional, progressive managers was changing the tenor of drug law enforcement – a game whose stakes were growing higher as the children of narcotic agents began to experiment with pot, uppers, and downers, and the CIA's bastard brainchild, LSD.

After the Drug Abuse Control Amendments were enacted in 1966, there was no more licit production of LSD. Senator Thomas Dodd railed against the drug at congressional hearings, and in March 1966,
Life Magazine
published an article claiming that it drove people insane. There were even rumors that it caused chromosome damage and mutant babies. The bad (though totally inaccurate) publicity prompted the world's largest producer of LSD, Sandoz in Switzerland, to voluntarily recall all of the acid it had
distributed to research scientists. From then on, only the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) was permitted to toy with LSD.
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Ironically, two CIA specialists were assigned to the joint FDA/NIMH Psychotomimetic Advisory Committee that processed research applications: Dr. Harris Isbell, who'd kept seven heroin addicts addled on acid for seventy-seven days straight at the Lexington Farm, and Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, who'd tested LSD on unwitting convicts at the Atlanta Penitentiary. Under their dubious direction, all independent scholastic and scientific research involving LSD ground to a halt, leaving the CIA alone in possession of the psychedelic's sacred secrets – secrets it had gleaned over fifteen years of experimentation, much of which had been conducted in FBN safehouses. And the government began pursuing terrible Tim Leary, America's most vocal promoter of acid for the masses.
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A flagrant self-promoter with a self-destructive Messiah complex, Leary, in one respect, was a victim of government propaganda. By any measure, his methods were more humane than those of Isbell or Pfeiffer, for Leary's subjects were all willing volunteers. But he vociferously advocated the use of what had become an illegal substance, and he'd made the unforgivable mistake of giving LSD to Mary Pinchot Meyer, the ex-wife of CIA officer Cord Meyer, Jr. Mary's murder on 12 October 1964 remains unsolved, and may have been related to the fact that she had given LSD to members of the Washington Establishment, including, perhaps, her lover, President Kennedy. Mary Meyer and Leary had struck up a friendship in the early 1960s, and she had kept him apprised of the Establishment scions to whom she gave LSD.
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There was an espionage angle as well. Her sister was married to
Washington Post
editor Ben Bradlee, a CIA asset, and Mary had attended Vassar with James Angleton's wife, Cicely d'Autremont. Angleton became the custodian of Mary's children, and for reasons that undoubtedly concerned the CIA's relationship with Leary and LSD, he absconded with her diary within days of her death.
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If not directly involved in the CIA's intrigues, Leary was at least aware of its central role in sprinkling LSD at the upper levels of society and academia, from whence, with his assistance, it trickled down to the hoi polloi. But he was neither a physician nor a protected CIA specialist. On the contrary, he advocated LSD as an antidote to authority, and after being fired from Harvard for distributing acid without a medical license, he became the resident LSD guru on the New York estate of William M. Hitchcock. A nephew of Andrew Mellon, Hitchcock had financial ties to Bernie Cornfeld's shady international mutual fund, Investors Overseas Services. Leary also teamed up with the grand wizard of acid, Augustus
Owsley Stanley, the inventor of a floating lab technique for making top-notch LSD. Hitchcock, Leary, and Owsley (the grandson of a Kentucky Senator) joined forces with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love – the official church of LSD, formed in 1966 by motorcycle gang leader John Griggs in Laguna Beach, California – and thus became the object of every decent American mother's disapproval.
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After his dismissal from Harvard, Leary relocated to Mexico and on 23 December 1965, while returning to the United States, was arrested in Laredo, Texas, for possession of three ounces of pot. The charge carried with it a potential thirty-year prison sentence. The process of public vilification accelerated in April 1966, when a demented county prosecutor, G. Gordon Liddy, led an old fashioned swoop raid on Hitchcock's Millburg utopia. Tim Leary was acquitted of all charges, because dimwitted Liddy hadn't read him his rights, but the blundering former FBI agent gained the admiration of law and order advocates everywhere, and the spectacular arrest catapulted Leary into a
bête noire
status formerly reserved for Lucky Luciano.
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With all the publicity generated by Leary, the focus of federal drug law enforcement came to encompass LSD and pharmaceuticals, as well as heroin. But the CIA was still immune from scrutiny and continued to subsidize LSD specialists like Dr. Louis West. Famous within his circle for having administered a lethal dose of LSD to an elephant, West had also examined Jack Ruby prior to Ruby's cryptic 1964 interview with Warren Commission chief, Earl Warren.
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Through cutouts like West, the CIA established second-generation MKULTRA substations around the country. The Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence at UCLA, for example, programmed “pre-delinquent” urban Black males at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville State Prison. The ulterior motive was to create a covert army of push-button agent provocateurs, in anticipation of a general uprising by society's new barbarians. As part of this secret police program, George White's friend from the OSS days, Dr. James Hamilton, conducted LSD experiments on an estimated 1,000 inmates at Vacaville, starting in 1967.
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Ever eager to expand its arsenal of biochemical weapons, the CIA, through its Special Operations Division, searched the world for wonder-drugs. In this endeavor it hired retired CIA officer J. C. King (former head of the Western Hemisphere Division and initiator of assassination plots against
Fidel Castro) to form the Amazon Natural Drug Company in 1966 in Peru. A CIA proprietary company, ANDCO's stated purpose was to “explore the commercial uses of natural plants and chemical derivatives thereof.”
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Helping King were CIA officers familiar with the local folklore and trained to identify the region's various lethal and hallucinogenic drugs, including yage, a potent psychedelic called “the final fix” by William Burroughs.
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Curiously, a CIA officer named Garland “Dee” Williams arrived in Peru in 1967 as ANDCO's director of operations. This is intriguing, first because Garland H. Williams is such an important figure in FBN history, and because he retired from government service in May 1964, which left him available for a secret assignment in South America. Our Garland Williams was a career narcotic agent, and Garland “Dee” Williams “knew the way of drug smugglers.”
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Our Garland was a professional soldier and dedicated anti-communist, and “Dee” Williams and J. C. King used ANDCO as a cover to advise Peru's special forces in jungle warfare operations, so they could combat the indigenous people and their Cuban advisors. Furthermore, our Garland had a background in chemical warfare, and may have helped George White set up the MKULTRA pad in San Francisco, while Garland “Dee” Williams was involved in MKULTRA research. To this end he hired exotic animal exporter Mike Tsalickis as his guide. Tsalickis based his operation in Leticia on the Amazon River, where Peru and Colombia rub shoulders. While serving as the government's consular officer in the region, Tsalickis helped Williams and King obtain plant specimens for use in post-MKULTRA projects.

Arrested for smuggling over a ton of cocaine into Florida in 1988, Tsalickis was still in prison in 1996 when the author sent him a photo of former FBN agent Garland H. Williams and asked if the man in the photo was Dee Williams from ANDCO. Tsalickis said he was not. Garland Williams's family insists that after leaving Africa in 1963 and retiring in 1964, he married and settled down near Memphis, Tennessee.

Despite this curious case of the name “Garland Williams” appearing in regard to an espionage affair with a drug angle – for there was also the “Colonel Williams” who funded the Pawley–Cooke public relations blitz in Taiwan in 1950 – it seems more than mere coincidence that the CIA was present at the hub of world cocaine production in 1966, just as Ricord's Group France, with Mafia financing through Tom Buscetta, was organizing the business into a global industry. One member of Group France, Corsican Paul Chastagnier, had been an associate of Paul Mondoloni since 1954 and was based in Guayaquil, Ecuador, which is described by researcher Gerard Colby as “home of a bevy of cocaine processing plants thriving under a
CIA-backed military dictatorship.”
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The implication is that Chastagnier's operation, which would become a target of the FBN's largest international investigation, was known to the CIA, if not actually protected by it until 1967, when the CIA decided to reorganize the region's drug trade.

In the same way that big-city vice squads across America managed the Mafia's drug distribution operations, the CIA oversaw the international narcotics trade on behalf of the Establishment. In South America, as elsewhere, it invariably did so in concert with right-wing dictatorships. CIA counterinsurgency advisors (like Dee Williams) in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador “greatly enhanced the power of drug-smuggling uniformed warlords and Nazi refugees.”
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The purpose in bolstering these mercenaries was to facilitate the anti-communist crusade, and in April 1967, CIA officer Felix Rodriguez, a former subordinate of anti-Castro terrorist and drug smuggler Manuel Artime, traveled to Bolivia to assassinate Che Guevara. Notably, the cocaine trade “was already so widespread in the guerrilla's area of operations that Guevara's training camp was first discovered by police looking for a cocaine-processing plant, not for revolutionaries.”
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CIA officer Felix Rodriguez led the team of Bolivian soldiers that captured, killed, and dismembered Che Guevara. But Guevara's whereabouts were discovered by a Bolivian narcotics unit and, in this respect, his assassination illustrates how the CIA selectively exploits drug law enforcement for political purposes. As FBN/CIA Agent Tom Tripodi explained, the Communist Chinese, through Guevara, were believed to have set up a network of cocaine labs in Chile among the Chinese population. The network soon spread to Peru and Bolivia. “It was a classic case of a covert intelligence operation utilizing drug trafficking as a double-barreled weapon,” Tripodi said.
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It was classic in the sense that all the major intelligence agencies, be they American, French, Bulgarian, or Chinese, use the illicit drug trade to advance their national security interests.

Back in the states, the FBN continued to cover the CIA's MKULTRA political and sexual blackmail schemes at its various safehouses. As Art Fluhr recalls, “After Gaffney was sent to headquarters as part of the general house cleaning, Belk stepped in as district supervisor in New York and was given a CIA contract. How it happened I don't know. George said that he never actually met anyone from 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.' ”