The Strength of the Wolf (76 page)

Two things are factually noteworthy about this fictional story. First, the US Information Service did produce 50,000 Eye of God playing cards in South Vietnam. As noted by Georgie-Anne Geyer in the February 1970 issue of
True Magazine
, the cards were “left on bodies after assassinations.” But what is truly remarkable is that Geyer's source was none other than Dan Ellsberg's housemate, Frank Scotton, “whose movement,” she explained, “evolved into something called the … Counter-Terrorists” – which was another name for the death squad facet of Phoenix.
²⁴

The second notable fact is that the Phoenix drug security unit was still in place in 1971. That year, Customs officer Dave Ellis was traveling with Thailand's finance minister when they stopped to attend a party in Chiang Mai. Around midnight, the US counsel pulled Ellis aside and said there were two men upstairs who wanted to talk to him. One was an Army major on loan to the CIA, working with Vang Pao's troops on the Plain of Jars. The major told Ellis they were trying to win the war, and asked him to please stay away. Then Ellis went across the hall to another room. The man in the room said to him, “You don't remember me, but I used to work for you. You hired me for the Customs school in Houston. Then I went to another organization.”

This former Customs agent, now employed by the CIA, told Ellis that five provinces in Eastern Thailand belonged to the Thais by day and the communists by night. The Thai officials in charge were furnishing the communists with weapons in exchange for drugs. It was an inside job by greedy Thai generals and, according to Ellis, federal narcotic agents on the scene were letting them get away with it, for their own purposes. The man in the room told Ellis that he had two helicopter gunships and twenty-five
men. They called themselves “the Trackers,” and their job was to kill the members of this communist-connected drug smuggling ring, whether they were in Laos, Thailand, or Vietnam.

Moore's
roman-à-clef
alludes to other unspeakable truths, like the fact that the CIA's management of the region's drug trade was approved by the highest members of the US government. As Forrester tells the undersecretary of state, “oriental gangsters pass on the morphine base to the Mafia, who make it into heroin.”
²⁵

All of this brings us back to the French connection. Moore visited Fort Bragg in 1963 and, with the permission of the commander of its Special Warfare School, General William Yarborough, he was allowed to tag along with a Special Forces A-Team in South Vietnam for several months. Moore then wrote
The Green Berets
, glorifying America's elite unconventional warriors. He became enmeshed in their secret culture, which included trafficking in precious commodities, and then wrote
The Country Team
, detailing the CIA's involvement in drug trafficking. But only after being initiated into the CIA's inner circle did Moore follow the heroin trail to New York and, in 1972, publish
The French Connection
. It may not be included in Moore's book, but Frankie Waters, the FBN agent who made the French Connection case, identified a Michelin rubber-plantation executive as a potential co-conspirator in the case.
²⁶

Taken together, the facts are compelling: Lansdale's truce with the Corsicans; the Mafia receivers in Saigon and Hong Kong; Ky's operation in Pakse; Loan's operation in Bangkok; the 118A caravan in Houei Sai; the heroin-producing Pepsi plant in Vientiane; Vang Pao's opium business; and the complicity of numerous anti-communist Thai, Laotian and Vietnamese officials – the entire apparatus required protection, and so the assassination of rival drug smugglers, or anyone who might blow the operation, became official, albeit unstated, CIA policy. This policy was also applied to the political war in South Vietnam and in June 1967, the CIA asked vice president Ky for permission to implement its Phoenix Program in South Vietnam. But Loan was a committed patriot who feared, correctly, that the CIA planned to use the program to eliminate Ky's supporters, and he advised Ky to reject the proposal, which he did. At which point the CIA began to plot Ky and Loan's demise.

Eager to take over some of Ky's rackets in Vietnam, President Thieu agreed to support Phoenix as a way of ousting Ky. To this end, Thieu allowed CIA officers, posing as US Customs officials, to arrest Customs Director Loc's niece, a stewardess for Air Laos, at Ton Son Nhut Airport in December 1967. The niece had 200 pounds of opium in her luggage.
²⁷
Not long after that, Loc was forced out of office and Ky relinquished control of the Air Force. General Loan lost a leg in a firefight in May 1968, Ky's inner circle was wiped out by a missile from a Marine helicopter in June, and the New World Narcotics Order was established in South Vietnam simultaneously with Santo Trafficante's meeting in Saigon “with some prominent Corsican gangsters.”
²⁸
After this meeting with Corsicans he'd probably known since their happy days in Cuba, Trafficante began supplying sleeper Louis Cirillo through Benny Indiviglio in Montreal.

By 1967, with its attendant erosion of respect for corrupt authority and fatally flawed traditional values, the Vietnam War was altering the American psyche and drug scene; to wit, the abundance of Southeast Asian heroin had opened the door to enterprising Afro-Americans, who realized they no longer needed the Mafia and went into business for themselves. One example is the famous Body Bag case involving Herman Jackson and his partner, Leslie Atkinson. Retired soldiers, Jackson and Atkinson opened a bar in Bangkok in 1967, and began using a network of Black enlisted men to move heroin, stuffed in the cadavers of dead soldiers, from Saigon on military transport planes to military bases in America. Heroin shipments transported in this way were seized in 1967 and 1968, and in 1969 the smugglers were put on trial. But the government's informant was murdered, and they continued to operate until 1972.

The Vietnam War altered federal drug law enforcement too, and contributed mightily to the decimation of the FBN and the formation of a new drug law enforcement organization whose overseas operations were almost totally under CIA control. A federal narcotic agent would not be assigned to Vietnam until 1969, when Fred Dick got the job. To their credit, the few federal narcotic agents in the Far East had, by 1968, accumulated a wealth of informants and intelligence on the region's drug trade, but the CIA prevented them from acting on the information. As a result, drug abuse in America steadily increased, and concerned citizens were wondering, as ever, why.

Vic Maria sums up this schizophrenic policy as follows: “We went overseas to prove that opium was grown and converted into morphine base in Turkey, then moved through Syria and Beirut to France, where it was made into heroin. We proved you could buy opium in Turkey and morphine base in Beirut. It got to the point that, when the bosses wanted to make a case in
Milan, we could send someone to Milan to set up a buy, and we could make the bust in Milan. We developed the ability to make cases anywhere, but it was all for the aggrandizement of the bosses! Then we began to imagine that all the drugs in the world concerned us, to the point of chasing down some little guy with an ounce of hashish in a bicycle pump in Calcutta.”

Maria asks, “But why go to Beirut to get informants and make heroin cases? Was it there before we arrived?” It sounds as if he doesn't think so. “One day Osman Osman took me to the Bekka Valley and showed me three areas where they were growing marijuana. We looked around, and then he pulled out a press clipping from California. It said the best pot in the world was being grown in Eureka. Osman asked me, ‘Why are you here? Most of our crop goes to Egypt!'

“Who developed the heroin traffic out of the Middle East?” Maria inquires rhetorically.

The answer is that it was the same crowd that developed it out of the Golden Triangle. And much of it reached New York, where conservative estimates in 1967 put the addict population at 35,000; half of what it supposedly tallied nationwide. Shaking his head in disbelief, Frank Selvaggi swears there were that many addicts in one Harlem neighborhood alone. He describes a midnight walk along tenement rooftops, amidst the surrealistic image of dozens of junkies nodding out, and the unearthly sensation of not knowing if they were alive.

Meanwhile, the Black Panthers were blaming the CIA for Harlem's heroin epidemic. Determined to squelch such outbursts, the CIA imported Phoenix to America and called it Chaos. Monitored by James Angleton and designed to connect foreign enemies with leaders in the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements, Chaos opened files on some 300,000 American citizens. In conjunction with military intelligence, the CIA pursued those it considered most dangerous, while the FBI, through its aptly named Operation Hoodwink, used fabricated documents to pit the Mafia against the Communist Party, to the Establishment's glee.
²⁹

As part of Chaos, the CIA, through the NYPD's Bureau of Special Services and Intelligence (BOSSI), infiltrated the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, and even its own creation, Alpha 66, the anti-Castro Cuban terrorist organization. Alpha 66 financed its operations through drug trafficking, and reportedly obtained its heroin from Albert Larrain-Maestre. One BOSSI member investigating Alpha 66 was Richard Nixon's future security chief, Jack Caulfield. And in this way the intelligence aspect of international drug trafficking impacted the deep politics of America long after the FBN was destroyed.

Several FBN agents got involved in the crusade to rid America of security risks. Having helped hunt down Che Guevara in Bolivia in March 1967, Tom Tripodi was transferred to James Angleton's Special Operations Division, where Chaos was headquartered. His cover was with a private security firm set up to conduct extralegal domestic covert activities. When he left the CIA to rejoin the FBN in 1968, Tripodi's functions “were transferred to a unit supervised by Howard Hunt.”
³⁰
A few years later, Hunt would bring that program, and its anti-Castro Cuban drug smugglers, into the Nixon White House, with a little help from his friend, Lucien Conein.

Hunt and Conein had served together in the OSS and, at Hunt's request, Conein became a narcotic advisor to the Nixon White House in 1971. In 1972, Conein became an employee of the FBN's successor, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. And in 1974, he would head a special operations unit in the DEA that utilized Hunt's anti-Castro Cuban assets to investigate Santo Trafficante (without success), and which was investigated by Congress for mounting assassination plots.

As demonstrated, the CIA's ability to manage political developments in America relied, to some extent, on its ability to manage international drug trafficking. By 1967, that meant abolishing the FBN, and its main weapon in that regard was Andy Tartaglino's integrity investigation in New York, which focused on case-makers Lenny Schrier, Frankie Waters, and Frank Selvaggi – all of whom had worked on the Nebbia case. Waters and Schrier had investigated the Brown–Castellani case, and Waters was still plumbing the depths of the 1962 French Connection case. All these investigations tracked back to Golden Triangle Enterprises and, to put it mildly, the CIA was afraid these most effective agents might unmask the Mafia and Corsican smugglers in its employ. So, to prepare the way for a drug enforcement agency that would exist under the CIA's control, the Establishment enabled Andy Tartaglino to destroy the FBN from within.

Frank Selvaggi sits at a table in an Italian restaurant, looking forlorn. The waiter has cleared the dishes away, and we're having a glass of wine. Over dinner he explained how he made Joe Valachi, and how, out of revenge, Valachi accused him of being a made member of the Bronx mob. After that, Charlie Siragusa had seen the end in sight and had invited Frank to come with him to the Illinois Crime Commission. But Selvaggi stayed in New York. There was really no other choice. “I was thinking about your father having been a prisoner of war,” he says to me. “That's the way it was in the New York office: we were trapped, and there was no place to go.

“After the Valachi Hearings,” Selvaggi says, “I went back to New York and everything was okay for about a year. Then Gaffney calls. He wants me to come down to Washington to meet Jack Anderson, right away, to talk about Valachi. George is looking to make points, and Belk says, ‘Okay, do it.' This is February 1965. I'm driving to the airport and I skid on the ice on the Saw Mill River Parkway. The car hits a tree and my head goes through the windshield. I end up with a hundred stitches, and miss the interview. Meanwhile Peter Maas is working on an exclusive article about Valachi, so Gaffney arranges for me to meet Anderson at the CIA pad in New York. Anderson's a nice guy, and at Gaffney's insistence, I give him a photo we'd taken of Valachi with his Jewish girlfriend at a bar on Castle Hill Avenue in the Bronx.”

One result of Anderson's interview with Frank Selvaggi was a March 1965 article in
Parade Magazine
, titled “The Underworld of Killer Joe Valachi,” giving the FBN the credit it deserved for making the case. The other result was that the FBI decided to rewrite history. The FBI opened up its files (including the notes Selvaggi had taken while interrogating Valachi) to its chosen author, Peter Maas, and it introduced Maas to Valachi. In 1968, the same year the FBN was abolished, Maas published his very successful book
The Valachi Papers
, which credited the FBI with making the case.

“If you read
The Valachi Papers
,” one agent quips, “you wouldn't even know the FBN was involved.” Another agent takes it a step further and swears that the FBI kept a file on every FBN agent. He says that Frank Selvaggi – having made Valachi and given the Anderson interview, and thus having upstaged J. Edgar Hoover – was tops on the FBI's hit list, and that, out of revenge, the FBI set him up in Florida. Selvaggi has come to agree with that conclusion, and he tells how it happened.