War on Drugs, part 2:
1961 – 1973 - From Kennedy to Kent State

First published by Znet on 11th September 2017.

In 1961 the 35th POTUS was elected to office, inheriting a USG embroiled in a deteriorating crisis in South-east Asia[i]. The French had withdrawn from the region, and the U.S. had stepped in. Laos was caught in the middle of the opium Golden Triangle and the ideological fault line between the U.S. and the PRC[ii]. It’s was to be consumed by a war between the nationalist liberation army of the Pathet Lao and the Agency’s proxy, the Hmong mercenaries[iii]. The region was the world’s largest grower and producer of opium, and the CIA had been actively training, funding and arming many of the key organisations and players in it’s sprawling drug trade[iv]. To make matters worse, part of the handover between administrations was the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion plan and the entrenched DCIA, Allen Dulles. The Bay of Pigs was a military and diplomatic catastrophe, played out by a cast of inept CIA agents, Florida Mafiosi, and Anti-Castro Cubans[v]. When the invasion failed, the strategy changed. A plan to assassinate Fidel Castro was out-sourced to Santo Trafficante Jr., the Tampa Mafia boss who had been chased out of Cuba[vi]. It also failed[vii].

After Cuba, across much of the USG the ‘Domino Theory’ was beginning to take root[viii]. Washington was behind Langley on this. The CIA had been signed up to the theory for years, having already masterminded the coup that ousted Arbenz in Guatemala[ix], and had been openly preparing for more of the same since the 1959 Rand Corporation conference. At the beginning of ’62, General Yarborough reported to the Joint Chiefs that Colombia also needed a nudge in the right direction. Before long, terrorist counter-revolutionaries were part of the Colombian state security. Those same paramilitaries were also moonlighting as contract workers for U.S Corporations and their supply chains as strike-breakers[x]. In ’63 the CIA supported the Ba’ath party in it’s overthrow of the Iraqi government. The same Ba’ath party that Saddam Hussein was a member of[xi]. Not long after that, in 1964, there was a right wing military coup in Brazil[xii]. And yet another domino, teetering between democratic nationalism and economic exploitation was given the nudge in the right direction[xiii].

Domestically, the American people were becoming increasingly radical in their pursuit of equality, fairness and justice, at exactly the same time as the recreational use of narcotics was exploding. Perhaps less coincidentally with hindsight, we can now see that the USG was one of the main players in the psychedelic revolution that was unfolding. The civil rights organiser and future Yippie, Abbie Hoffman was introduced to LSD by an Army Psychologist. Similarly Allen Ginsburg, one of the key evangelists of LSD, took his first trip with a U.S. Navy LSD researcher, as part of a convoluted series of relationships which included a former OSS LSD researcher and the CIA’s chief LSD specialist. And of course Leary’s Castalia Foundation; a group of hallucinogen obsessed Harvard behavioural psychologists with establishment connections, were being housed and financed by the Mellon Hitchcock fortune[xiv], the same fortune that Anslinger had married into and helped him get his job at the FBN[xv].

In the year Anslinger finally retired from the FBN, his subordination of the Bureau to the CIA was further reinforced when James Angleton, the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence, assigned an official liaison into the FBN and began to exert direct control over their case-making officers. In December of ’62, the Anti-Castro Cuban Manuel Artime was released from prison and his handler, E. Howard Hunt promptly installed him near the top of the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC) in Miami. It has since been argued that Hunt, Angleton and Richard Helms would all have known that Artime was funding his CRC activities with drug money. By the end of ’64 Artime and his associates were sinking ships off the coast of Cuba from their base in Costa Rica, a ranch owned by the CIA-supported Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza[xvi].

By ’63-64 the FBN had permanent agents based in Southeast Asia. It wasn’t long before they started investigating the KMT trafficking, only to find their work being just as quickly shut down by the CIA. Then, when one of them tried to set-up a buy with a member of the Vientiane police force, not realising it was the CIA asset General Vang Pao, the case was again shut down. This time with the General being released, having his car and morphine returned to him, and a holiday in Miami courtesy of the USG for his trouble. The agent on the other hand got thrown out of the country. When the new head of the FBN asked the CIA about it after reading the report, the Agency denied it. Then, at the end of August ’64, Major Hobbs, believed to be part of the Military Assistant Command Vietnam advisory team was caught smuggling fifty-seven pounds of opium between Bangkok and Vietnam. Only a few months later his court martial was held in secret, and according to one leading researcher, the trial records are said to have since been lost[xvii].

Back home the domestic situation was becoming increasingly volatile. In 1964 Black civil rights leaders, like Malcolm X were making the case that U.S. law enforcement were allowing the Mafia to sell drugs in poor neighbourhoods. And a year after Malcolm was assassinated, Representative Adam Clayton Powell repeated the accusation to congress, going as far as to name seven protected drug dealers, outline the cost of actually buying cops in Harlem and then finally taking aim at the New York Times’ for their bias in the reporting of it. The political tensions were rising as more and more oppressed people demanded equality, at exactly the same time as narcotics was crashing across American society in waves[xviii].

By 1965-66 the Castalia group were taking on a cult-like status just as LSD was moving from research topic to dinner conversation topic. It was at this time that an ex-President’s personal physician, Dr Max Jacobson, as well as visiting Castalia, was also supplying Andy Warhol’s Factory community with ‘speedball injections’. Meanwhile, the Englishman attributed to first introducing Leary to LSD and one of the founding partners of Castalia, Michael Hollingshead, returned to London with five thousand doses of Acid and proceeded to ‘turn-on’ Roman Polanski, Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones. When he was finally arrested for possessing marijuana he was given 21 months in prison. While inside he did LSD with George Blake[xix], an MI6/KGB double agent who was serving 42 years for espionage[xx]. During the trip, Blake accused Hollingshead of being an intelligence agent. Several weeks later, after serving only five years, Blake escaped from prison and fled to Moscow[xxi].

The ‘psychedelic’ movement in the U.S. was becoming politicised as the counter-culture evolved from self-conscious to class-conscious. After taking psilocybin with Leary, Aldous Huxley made the case that to affect the greatest change in society, “the talented, the well-born, the intelligent rich and others in position of power” should share in their experience. Arguably, exactly what Michael Hollingshead had been doing on the Kings Road, Jacobson had been doing at the Factory, and Leary had been doing with Huxley. Similarly, while the President of Time-Life was mobilising his publishing empire in support of the CIA, his wife, who would later sit on a Presidential advisory board overseeing the Agency, was publicly advocating keeping acid in the hands of the wealthy and their psychiatrists. Publicly, Leary and the Castalia Foundation were arguing that LSD should be mass-marketed to the general population “like beer, not champagne”. It was at this point that Leary began sounding evangelical, expressing himself in mystical language and conjuring up images of sex-fuelled enlightenment. In a 1966 interview with Playboy Magazine, Leary, as well as implying having worked as an Army Psychologist, made the case for Acid being a conduit for a more enlightened hedonistic state and a pathway to a more erotic form of politics. He even went as far as to suggest that it could “cure” homosexuality. In a nation divided, a political fault-line in the LSD revolution was beginning to open up[xxii].

A correlation between drug use and political radicalism was starting to show. At the University of Berkeley, Michael Rossman of the Free Speech Movement (FSM), one of the key radical groups, suggested that “When a young person took his first puff of psychoactive smoke … [he] became a youth criminal against the state”. Carl Oglesby of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), another leading radical left organisation, suggested that the psychology of taking LSD and rebelling against authority were basically one and the same. Although the campus groups of LSD-embracing radical leftists were a very narrow sub-section of society, tending to be wealthy white young adults, that profile was beginning to change in an area of San Francisco called Haight-Ashbury. The same city that George White had been running Operation MIDNIGHT CLIMAX out of for nearly a decade was about to become the global epicentre of LSD counter-culture. And in addition to drawing the radicals and the revolutionaries, the disaffected and the disenfranchised were also on the way to San Francisco.[xxiii]

While Leary was telling the psychedelic movement “Don’t vote. Don’t politic. Don’t petition. You can’t do anything about America politically”; people like John Starr Cooke, who had personal ties to the Wall Street DCIA and a number of other CIA operatives, and Mary Pinchot, the wife of the CIA official in charge of the infiltration of the U.S. National Student Association and the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Europe, were in contact with Leary and the wider Castalia Foundation. In direct opposition to the establishment position, in the heart of San Francisco a new group called the Diggers, were both practising and preaching a form of LSD infused libertarian communism. And as the gravitational pull of the ‘psychedelic revolution’ drew ever greater numbers from around the world, the two groups stepped up their campaigns to define its future. The Leary group initiated a Madison Avenue type publicity campaign engaging with the mainstream media, while the Diggers gave out free food, free acid, set-up places to crash, free medical services and a free shop. And then, a conservative republican was elected Governor of California in a landslide victory[xxiv].

While San Francisco was awash with tripping hippies dancing through the streets with flowers in their hair, the debate on the heroin epidemic in poor neighbourhoods, and the role played by the USG in aiding the Mafia in supplying the drugs was not going away in the rest of the country. Amidst all the other criticisms and allegations being made against the Agency, in ’67 the Black Panthers started directly blaming the CIA for the heroin in Harlem. The Agency responded to these attacks by bringing their counterinsurgency assassination program called Operation PHEONIX back home. Operation CHAOS, working with the FBI’s Operation HOODWINK and U.S. Military Intelligence, opened up files on 300,000 American citizens as domestic enemies of the state[xxv].

Then, as nearly one hundred thousand ‘drop-outs’ descended on San Francisco, the local conservative media responded by starting a moral panic. They found the worst possible stories they could and projected them across the country. The Diggers recognised this, and tried to raise awareness of what was happening. They worked with underground printing presses to produce leaflets and posters informing the communities. By June ’67, at the height of the summer of love, the Chief of the Bureau of Drug Abuse and Control (BDAC) was warning that “hard core Cosa Nostra-type criminal figures, [were behind] an extremely well-organized traffic in hallucinogenic drugs”. It would later come to light that the CIA had also been helping underground chemists to set up LSD labs in the area. An agent later claimed to have infiltrated the LSD networks to monitor the, as they called it, “human guinea-pig farm”. It was at this time that Abbie Hoffman’s Yippies began arguing that with the right marketing messages and the right amount of acid, the entire youth population of the U.S. could be turned into revolutionaries and mobilised against the “repressive society”.[xxvi]

When John Finlator, the BDAC Chief made the link between the Mafia and the LSD epidemic he also set-up a joint investigation with U.S. Customs, Scotland Yard in the UK and the Ministry of Health in Italy. Finlator began investigating a network of international organised crime and narcotics trafficking that would lead all the way to the Vatican. The investigation focussed on Michele Sindona, a banker for the Mafia. In 1964 Sindona had set up a process for laundering money called ‘Moneyrex’. With over 800 banks involved in the process, funds were invested for the Vatican, the Italian Masonic lodge P2 and the Mafia via the Italian Christian Democratic party and Sicily’s State Mining Corporation. The Pope at that time, Pope Paul IV had worked closely with the OSS during the war in his role as Head of Vatican intelligence, and had been the first Pope to visit the U.S. in 1965[xxvii]. With BDAC about to stumble into the European division of the global drugs trade, and the FBN opening case after case into the Southeast Asian division of the global drugs trade things were getting dangerously exposed for the Agency. That year’s CIA Inspector General’s report, contained a section discussing the aspects of MKULTRA and assassination plots that were being touched on by Jim Garrison’s investigation into the Kennedy assassination. The section was called “Should we try to silence those who are talking or might later”. It was the same year that senior members of the CIA hierarchy made the decision that drugs in an international context should be within their remit, It was 1967[xxviii].

In the first few months of 1968 the 36th POTUS put forward Reorganization Plan No.1 and had it signed into law. The new plan merged the FBN and BDAC into the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), which then sat within the Justice Department. Effectively this was one of the key steps needed to bring drug enforcement under the control of the CIA[xxix]. Meanwhile in Vietnam the Viet Cong launched the Tet offensive. Then, in March ’68 the POTUS said he would not stand for re-election. Within a week Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated and in 125 Cities across the country riots broke out. Congress responded by making it a federal crime to cross state lines to take part in a riot. Police and students clashed at Universities across the nation. The growing anti-establishment fervour seemed contagious. In France students took to the streets in Paris as workers across the country took part in a General Strike[xxx]. De Gaulle’s Intelligence Advisor organised a covert paramilitary force of five thousand men, containing many Corsican and French organised criminals. The Service d’Action Civique (SAC) was commanded by senior military and intelligence officers and tasked with silencing hecklers, breaking up demonstrations and guarding government officials[xxxi]. In the UK the Police Special Branch with support from MI5 engaged in a smear campaign against the anti-Vietnam protests that were focussing their anger on the American Embassy[xxxii].

In spring of ’68, the Castalia sugar daddy, William Mellon Hitchcock and one of his LSD Chemist friends contacted an old college friend at the Fiduciary Trust Company in the Bahamas, which was at the time a money launderer for OC, dictatorships and wealthy tax avoiders. They were looking for someone to manage their investments in Resorts International, the gambling consortium with alleged ties to OC and what would be one of the most notorious election campaigns in history[xxxiii]. On June 6th Robert Kennedy, who some thought was the shoe-in for the Democratic candidacy for President was assassinated[xxxiv].

The 1960s had been a dark time in American history. Civil rights, the war in Laos and Vietnam, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Dr Martin Luther King and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X), the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, an increasingly totalitarian response to “un-american activities”, the growing anti-war movement and an overwhelming quantity of mind-altering drugs were all coming together to create what appeared to be a turning point in the nation’s story. And with a political vacuum in the Democratic party, the National Convention where this would be decided became a focus for much of the anger. Many of the different campaigning groups across the country, from the civil rights movement, to the new left, the hippies and the anti-war movement all started making preparations to make their discontent felt at the conference[xxxv].

With the Democratic convention in the Chicago diary for the end of August 1968, the Yippies started ratcheting up the tension. They promised to put acid in the city’s water supply and then, while thousands of protesters ran naked through the streets, they would seduce delegates and their families in to having sex so that they could dose them with Acid directly. With overtones of Operation MIDNIGHT CLIMAX in their rhetoric, perhaps it is not surprising to realise that the FBI had infiltrated many of these groups. One FBI Agent had so effectively infiltrated the Yippies he had been put on to the steering committee and given the job of body-guarding Abbie Hoffman. Amongst other things, the agent used his position to try and provoke the blowing up of the Brooklyn Bridge. And he wasn’t the only one. The law enforcement and intelligence communities, as part of a massive campaign actively monitoring over 250,000 Americans, with files on millions more, had infiltrated many groups within the movement with informants and agent provocateurs.[xxxvi] As the fog of war began to lift, the battle lines became increasingly apparent.

When the protesters started arriving at the Convention[xxxvii] they found “U.S. Army armoured personnel carriers in Soldier Field under Secret Service control. There were six thousand Regular Army troops in full field gear, equipped with rifles, flame throwers, and bazookas …. 6,000 Illinois National Guard troops [and] … 12,000 … Chicago Police” waiting for them[xxxviii]. It wasn’t long before large sections of Chicago degenerated into running street battles between protesters and police. Over a thousand protesters were injured and one was killed[xxxix]. A government report later concluded, “To read dispassionately the hundreds of statements describing at first hand the events … is to become convinced of the presence of what can only be called a police riot … a club-swinging melee. Police ranged the streets striking anyone they could catch. To be sure, demonstrators threw things at police and at police cars; but the weight of the violence was overwhelmingly on the side of the police”. Amongst the protesters 63 journalists reporting on the event “were physically attacked by police: in 13 of these instances, photographic or recording equipment was intentionally damaged”[xl].

The democrats lost the presidential election to a republican veteran of the McCarthy witch-hunt. And with the career intelligence officer and long term colleague of the Wall Street DCIA, heading up the Agency[xli], the war on domestic dissent quickly accelerated. The CIA’s Operation CHAOS[xlii] had already included a massive University campus surveillance program across the country; and working with local police departments, the targeting of domestic radicals with break-ins and wire-taps. Then the Huston Plan, the White House’s proposal for widening Operation CHAOS, argued the need for mail-opening, no-knock searches, selective assassinations[xliii], and an increase in the Agency’s collaboration with local police forces, providing training, technical assistance, exotic equipment and intelligence data. At the same time, the FBI was escalating it’s own covert war against radical dissent[xliv], CoIntelPro[xlv]. Part of the FBI’s strategy was to take advantage of the widespread use of drugs, as an off-the-shelf conviction. An FBI memo suggested, “Any information concerning the fact that individuals have marijuana or are engaging in a narcotics party should be immediately furnished to local authorities and they should be encouraged to take action”[xlvi].

As the American people fought to build an equal and fair society, their government was using organised crime, drugs and violence against them. As people of colour across the nation were fighting for equality, “heroin smuggled by ‘CIA people’ into the U.S. was [being] channelled by Mafia distributors primarily to African-American communities. [Where] Local narcotic agents then targeted disenfranchised blacks”[xlvii]. This was all going on while undercover operatives were inciting radical groups to greater militancy, in order to prosecute the entire movement in the media. Larry Grathwohl, the ex-green beret infiltrated the Weatherman, supplying them with guns and drugs and training them in bomb-making. He never lost sight of his loyalties, eventually informing on two of the Weatherman to the FBI.[xlviii]

As the 1960s drew to a close The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) reported on how the LSD phenomenon had started with “small groups of intellectuals at large … Universities”, and how it had then spread to other campuses via undergraduate students. The report didn’t mention the role of government scientists, intelligence agents, soldiers, or their ties to organised crime[xlix]. This report was issued at the same time as it was becoming increasingly apparent that evermore GI’s were returning home from the Golden Triangle addicted to heroin, alongside ever greater quantities of the drug flooding the domestic market. It wasn’t long before the number of wealthy white kids using heroin began to increase. The anger was starting to manifest at the nice dinner tables. The POTUS’s public fanfare response was to add drug enforcement to the remit of the CIA. The Agency’s response was to begin infiltrating the BNDD and undermining any cases implicating or hindering CIA relationships.[l]

Over the course of the 1960s, the French Connection narcotics network had gone from strength to strength. Even as late as 1968 the SDECE agent Michael Mertz who had been one of the key players in establishing and running the France/Montreal/New York network for nine years was allegedly still trafficking close to ¼ of ton of heroin annually. The SDECE was France’s equivalent to, and long-standing ally of the CIA. When he was finally arrested in November 1969 he ended up serving only six months before retiring to a 1,400 acre estate. The network had highly influential and politically connected friends. Part of one of the investigations into the French Connection, included following the American Mafia’s financial involvement. This led to Meyer Lansky, which in turn led to investments in Italian real estate via the Geneva based Banque de Credit International and the Mossad agent who owned the bank, and possible links to the Italian royal family as well as James Angleton’s Latin American money laundering operation and possible CIA front Investors Overseas Services (IOS). It is little wonder that the FBN had failed so miserably in putting all the pieces of the network together; instead satisfying themselves with low-level individuals[li].

The USG found itself stuttering from one catastrophe to another. In December 1969 the new administration reintroduced conscription, forcing many eligible young men to flee across the border into Canada[lii]. In 1970, a Senate subcommittee reported over 4,300 bombings across America between 1969 and 1970[liii]. The media responded by using the violence to alienate many Americans from the wider progressive movements. The tension increased when the USG officially expanded the war into Cambodia at the end of April[liv]. On May 1st students began organising a week of protests[lv]. At Kent State University, after a few incidents of “criminality”, the Mayor responded by declaring a state of emergency, and the Governor mobilised the National Guard, accusing the protesters of being unpatriotic, well-trained, militant and revolutionary. On 4th May seventy seven national guardsman, with bayonet tipped rifles closed in on a protest. Twenty nine of the guardsman opened fire on the protesters, wounding nine[lvi] and killing four[lvii]. After a moment of stunned silence, the anti-war and anti-government sentiment reignited, with protests and strikes continuing across the country[lviii].

It was in this environment that the full implications of the CIA being given official responsibility for America’s drug policy began to unfold. After allegations of widespread criminal corruption, the remodelled BNDD, working with the CIA, launched Operation EAGLE. The operation targeted a large network of anti-Castro Cubans shipping South American cocaine into the Trafficante network in Florida. 70% of the people arrested in EAGLE had taken part in the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion[lix]. Many of those arrested, still secretly working for the CIA, were quickly rehired by the BNDD as assets and put back into the Latin America narcotics networks on the Government’s dime. By the middle of 1971, out of a $120 million War on Drugs budget, $50 million was going to the Office of Strategic Intelligence (SIO), a joint CIA-BNDD program sending operatives deep undercover into the narcotics trade for long periods of time[lx].

A few months earlier, in February ’71, Daniel Ellsberg approached the New York Times with the Pentagon Papers, the Department of Defence’s secret report on U.S. Vietnam relations between 1945 and 1967. It outlined the secret wars in Cambodia and Laos and how a POTUS had lied to Congress and the Press about them. On the morning of 25th April 1971, the Ambassador to France and member of the Asian People’s anti-communist league Prince Sopsaisana of Laos, landed at Orly Airport in Paris. In his suitcase was discovered 60 kilos of high grade heroin. McCoy, one of the only people who did report at length on it, concluded that it was most likely destined for the U.S. via the ‘French Connection'[lxi]. The Bureau of Narcotics later explained, that particular heroin had been financed by the Hmong General Vang Pao, the man commanding the CIA’s secret army in Laos, and was most likely to have been refined at the Long Thien refinery, the CIA’s Northern Laos base for clandestine operations. In Vietnam, evidence was coming to light that senior officials in the navy, customs, army, port authority, national police and national assembly were all competing with the air force to manage the trafficking of opium through the country.[lxii]

By March ’71, a U.S. Army survey of 1,000 troops returning home reported that 11% admitted to having used heroin regularly. Two years later the figure had tripled to 34%[lxiii]. That meant, that potentially 1 in every 3 U.S. servicemen lucky enough to be coming back from Southeast Asia alive, could be addicted to heroin. A leaked CIA report shows exactly how many of the opium refineries and heroin factories in the Golden triangle at the time were known by the Agency to be operating in the regions under the control of their proxies[lxiv]. In the June, the New York Times started publishing extracts from the Pentagon Papers[lxv]. In November, a New Jersey prosecutor indicted Colonel Fourier of the SDECE for being part of a smuggling ring bringing 45 kilos of heroin into America. By 1972, the Golden Triangle was estimated to be supplying 70% of the entire world’s illegal opium, and 30% of America’s heroin. The costs were there for all to see, but the benefits were more clandestine. After twenty years of supporting the worldwide production and trafficking of heroin, the CIA and the USG had secured the power to “create new nations where none existed, hand-pick prime ministers, topple governments, and crush revolutions” across the world[lxvi]. An Hegemony in everything but name.

Over the the previous two decades some of the wealthiest families, the intelligence community, the military and organised crime had all been involved in developing and establishing the wide use of mind-altering drugs inside the U.S., at precisely the same time that progressive movements calling for equality were growing. The ‘coincidence’ wasn’t going unnoticed. Burroughs had already expressed a fear that the Leary revolution might be playing into the hands of the more extreme groups in the USG. Similarly, John Sinclair of the White Panther Party had been asking what role the CIA had been playing in the LSD revolution. And under increasing pressure, the former DCIA finally addressed the question. He told the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1971 that the Agency does not target American citizens, going on to explain that the “nation must to a degree take it on faith that we who lead the CIA are honourable men, devoted to the nation’s service”. This was the same man that had originally proposed MKULTRA in 1953[lxvii].

From June ’71 the New York Times and the Washington Post started publishing extracts from the Pentagon Papers, which sparked a series of events that led to the Watergate Hotel, the FBI declaring a political conspiracy in the White House, a landslide re-election of the 37th POTUSl[xviii] and the DCI being forced to stand down after allegedly refusing to hamper an FBI investigation into Watergate[lxix]. As 1973 began, the U.S. and North Vietnam signed a ceasefire in Paris. In March the last U.S. combat soldiers withdrew, leaving behind certain “advisors and marines”. After spending between $120-160 billion[lxx], 58,000 Americans were dead, 150,000 wounded and 1,000 MIAl[xxi]. It has been estimated that the victory cost Vietnam 2,000,000 dead, 3,000,000 wounded and 12,000,000 made refugees[lxxii]. Apparently, the war was over. One of the last acts of the outgoing DCI when he stepped down in 1973 was to order most of the files on the CIA’s drug and mind control work to be destroyed[lxxiii].

With the new DCIA in post, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) came into being, and with it the DEA Clandestine Operations Network (DEACON). DEACON was tasked with developing intelligence domestically and internationally on traffickers, politicians, terrorists, gun runners, Cubans and the Trafficante organization. One of the key departments in the DEA was the Special Operations Group (DEASOG) which was busy being staffed by long standing CIA employees, some of which were returning home from the CIA’s operations in Laos and General Vang Pao’s Long Thien heroin refinery. As more agents were employed the reach of the DEASOG extended internationally and domestically. Some have argued that DEASOG was set-up specifically to engage in covert black operations, such as break-ins, thefts, kidnapping, torture and assassinations[lxxiv], much like the CIA’s Operation PHEONIX which had been under the command of the new DCIA, when he was in Vietnam[lxxv].

Word count; 5,017

Nicolas Lalaguna, author of Seven May Days

i The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p128, 137

ii https://history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/laos-crisis

iii The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p120, 128, 289

iv The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p191, 192, 227

v http://europe.newsweek.com/bay-pigs-newly-revealed-cia-documents-expose-blunders-67275?rm=eu

vi Cocaine Politics, Jonathan Marshall & Peter Dale Scott, 1998 – p27

vii Mr Nice, Marks, Howard, 1996 – p172

viii http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/domino-theory

ix http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/world/americas/an-apology-for-a-guatemalan-coup-57-years-later.html

x Drugs, Oil and War, Dale Scott, Peter, 2003 – p76, 77

xi Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p172

xii The Wikileaks Files; the world according to U.S. empire, Wikileaks contributors, 2015 – p57

xiii http://www.dominionpaper.ca/international_news/2004/04/06/us_role_in.html

xiv Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p40, 58, 85, 97, 99, 102-106, 202

xv Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p15

xvi Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p279, 305, 353

xvii Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p332, 333, 334, 336,

xviii Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p342

xix Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p102-106, 113, 115, 116

xx http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-spy-who-stayed-out-in-the-cold-george-blake-at-90-8290141.html

xxi Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p116

xxii Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p71, 75, 113, 171, 174

xxiii Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p32, 128, 132, 153

xxiv Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p85, 153, 157, 166, 168, 171, 174

xxv Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p431

xxvi Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p175, 176, 188, 205, 207

xxvii Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p356, 357, 415

xxviii Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p391, 393

xxix Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p432, 454, 456, 457

xxx Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p211

xxxi The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p67

xxxii undercover; the true story of Britain secret police, Evans, rob, 2013 – p10, 12

xxxiii Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p244

xxxiv https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/nov/20/usa.features11

xxxv www.chicago68.com/

xxxvi Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p211, 219, 223, 224

xxxvii http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1968-democratic-convention-931079/

xxxviii http://www.chicago68.com/ricsumm.html

xxxix Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p220

xl http://www.chicago68.com/ricsumm.html

xli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Helms

xlii Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p224

xliii The CIA’s Greatest Hits, Zepezauer,Mark 1994 – p46

xliv Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p224

xlv Agents of Repression, Churchill, Ward & Vander Wall, Jim, 1988

xlvi Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p225

xlvii http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/11/creating-a-crime-how-the-cia-commandeered-the-dea/

xlviii Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p227, 232

xlix The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’, Marks, John, 1991 – p129

l http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/11/creating-a-crime-how-the-cia-commandeered-the-dea/

li Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p366, 369, 370, 373

lii http://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/vietnam-war-protests

liii Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p261

liv http://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/vietnam-war-protests

lv https://depts.washington.edu/antiwar/may1970strike.shtml

lvi http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Kent_State_Shootings?rec=1595

lvii http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0504.html

lviii http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Kent_State_Shootings?rec=1595

lix Cocaine Politics, Jonathan Marshall & Peter Dale Scott, 1998 – p26

lx http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/11/creating-a-crime-how-the-cia-commandeered-the-dea/

lxi https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/197239_os.pdf

lxii The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p197, 284, 380

lxiii The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p 258, 325

lxiv The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p288, 289, 305

lxv https://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/24/how_the_pentagon_papers_came_to

lxvi The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p67, 325, 383, 384

lxvii Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p82, 218, 285, 286

lxviii http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/watergate/timeline.html

lxix http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/24/us/richard-helms-ex-cia-chief-dies-at-89.html

lxx http://thevietnamwar.info/how-much-vietnam-war-cost/

lxxi http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/timeline/index4.html

lxxii http://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/vietnam-war-history

lxxiii The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’, Marks, John, 1991 – p105

lxxiv http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/11/creating-a-crime-how-the-cia-commandeered-the-dea/

lxxv The CIA’s Greatest Hits, Zepezauer,Mark 1994 – p404