The Drug War and "National Security"
Byrne, Malcolm & Morley, Jefferson
As long as there exists a narcotics problem, intelligence agencies will be involved. William Colby, Director of Central Intelligence in Perspective of the Intelligence Community, August...
...Second, the aide said, there was a problem of "adjusting Agency priorities...
...He met with John Ingersoll in October about DEACON I. Helms offered to recruit a former CIA contract employee to work for BNDD in Miami...
...Within nine months, Helms's actions in the drug war were the subject of reappraisal within the agency...
...There is every reason to believe that the CIA continues to protect "intelligence officers and sources abroad from investigative or legal disclosures...
...When the CIA station chief in Santiago objected, saying that Alarcon had been a useful asset, the issue was kicked back to DEA headquarters in Washington...
...The electronic surveillance operation was suspended in January 1973 when the CIA 44 • DISSENT General Counsel told Helms it was illegal...
...He blamed the bureau's system of basing promotions on fulfilling arrest quotas...
...When the Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control convened for an unusual two-day meeting, CIA involvement in the drug war was discussed...
...The war on drugs is entering its twentieth year...
...Helms refused...
...First, a mechanism for coordinating with law enforcement agencies was needed...
...A study commissioned by the White House in August 1971 found that crucial figures on drug use, numbers of addicts, and the link between drugs and crime were "not known to within a factor of four or five...
...The head of the new office was told to avoid involvement in domestic enforcement operations as well as foreign operations targeted against American citizens...
...Helms's tenure at the CIA had a perverse and enduring effect on the drug war: The more the CIA learned about the drug trade, the less the rest of the U.S...
...He introduced the Chilean manufacturer to the distributor and received one thousand dollars for every kilo of cocaine shipped to New York...
...Ingersoll later claimed not to have been thinking of assassinations, but, as we shall see, others in the government were not so restrained...
...Civilian political authorities demand better drug intelligence...
...Yet even after twenty years the paperflow that documents and directs the war on drugs is, to an astonishing degree, deliberately hidden from the American people...
...Yet there is still no prospect of success...
...In June 1972, the month of the Watergate break-in, he reorganized the Office of Narcotics Coordinator...
...A lifelong, strait-laced CIA bureaucrat, Helms was not one to share his information with others, certainly not the judiciary...
...The establishment of the Plumbers unit represented a grafting together of drug enforcement and national security...
...This financier-con man employed two relatives of President Richard Nixon and had contributed $200,000 to the Nixon campaign fund...
...Most important, between 1969 and 1973 drug enforcement became a matter of U.S...
...Krogh was already developing an intelligence/enforcement weapon for White House use in the drug war...
...The drug warriors and Plumbers soon went to work on a series of ventures that blurred the WINTER • 1989 • 41 War on Drugs distinction between drug enforcement and "national security...
...To understand government you must first understand the paperflow," says awardwinning investigative reporter Scott Armstrong, head of the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C...
...The agent went public with his story in November 1973...
...Also on the agenda was drug enforcement in Southeast Asia...
...Our notions of drug enforcement and national security are mutually exclusive...
...At one point in 1971, he refused point-blank a White House request to boost the number of narcotics arrests for the sake of Nixon's re-election campaign...
...William Colby, Director of Central Intelligence in Perspective of the Intelligence Community, August 1973...
...The acronyms rolled on, crushing all comprehension...
...national security...
...Frustrated, Ingersoll suggested at one point that the only way to get at the kingpins was to assassinate them...
...While working for the Plumbers, he also reportedly recruited Cubans for hit squads aimed at Latin American drug dealers...
...Caught in the vast currents of corruption, politics, and the growing demand for drugs, this "czar" fails...
...government could attack it...
...Ingersoll also faced obstacles in his relations with his fellow drug enforcement bureaucrats and the White House...
...Helms and his top aide, General Robert Cushman (the fellow who aided Howard Hunt), fended off this pressure...
...Lucien John Conein, as head of strategic intelligence for BNDD...
...According to Anderson, Congressman Charles Rangel had asked Helms for ten CIA studies on worldwide drug routes to the United States...
...Ingersoll was just as concerned about corruption of officials at home...
...Ingersoll also suspected, with justification, that the White House wanted to take over BNDD's authority...
...There were, however, limits to CIA cooperation...
...Nevertheless, the CIA prevailed...
...Helms was DCI at a time of historical transition for the world drug trade...
...The catch is that conducting covert operations and improving drug intelligence inevitably means deeper governmental collaboration with drug traffickers...
...Vesco had long since fled to Costa Rica and then the Bahamas, where he remained strangely immune to extradition attempts...
...Charles Cecil, a DEA agent in Santiago, then asked the U.S...
...Myles Ambrose, the Customs Commissioner, was slated to become the first head of DEA...
...The DEA was prepared to accept the CIA's argument, when somebody took a shot at Charles Cecil as he drove with his wife in Santiago...
...Ironically, Alarcon lost his job after the CIA-sponsored destabilization campaign succeeded in September 1973 and General Augusto Pinochet took power...
...One evening in December, 1971, he "almost fell out of my chair" while watching an NBC documentary that included a staged meeting on narcotics enforcement attended by Nixon, to which he, Ingersoll, hadn't even been invited...
...The agency informally obtained valuable drugrelated material from NSA eavesdropping operations...
...Embassy to ask Pinochet to extradite the cocaine kingpin...
...The DEA decided it had to protect its agent in the field...
...The Senate investigation of the Vesco coverup eventually led to a broader investigation of the DEA, which concluded in 1975 that the agency's "environment was conducive to corrupt and irregular practices...
...But BNDD never managed to isolate all the sources of narcotics abroad and was even less successful at pinning down the possible routes for shipping drugs into the United States...
...46 • DISSENT...
...Krogh never quite fulfilled the quest of his superiors for a super agency that would serve their political ends under the guise of fighting the drug war...
...It works like this...
...Nominally chaired by Secretary of State William Rogers and including Richard Helms among its members, the group was left to the daily charge of Krogh...
...Alarcon's whereabouts today are not known...
...Domestically, BNDD never had the benefit of reliable statistics, without which it was impossible to evaluate antidrug programs...
...Ingersoll impressed Attorney General John Mitchell enough to be able to keep his job under the new regime...
...It should be clear by now that "the war on drugs" is not merely dogged—it is dominated— by the contradictions between drug enforcement and national security...
...Rounding out the principal actors in the new unit were Krogh's old spy from the Treasury, Gordon Liddy, and a pal of Liddy's, former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt...
...The CIA told the prosecutors that Alarcon was a valuable source...
...Even when BNDD could identify big-time drug entrepreneurs abroad, Ingersoll complained that they were usually protected by corrupt local officials on the payrolls of the dealers...
...For example, when Krogh couldn't convince the Treasury Department to share information about an IRS program to seize the assets of suspected drug traffickers, Krogh turned to two willing colleagues—Myles Ambrose of Customs and G. Gordon Liddy, then an aide at the Treasury Department, who gave him the information he wanted...
...Federal prosecutors estimated that the Chileans were shipping scores of kilos every year...
...His new assignment, to head something called the Special Investigations Unit, was quite similar...
...The DEA insisted on seeing the wiretapping information that Alarcon had provided and found it contained little of interest to anyone...
...Thus, drug traffickers who can identify such officers or who serve (a la Alarcon and Noriega) as "sources" will enjoy a competitive advantage over their commercial rivals...
...Covert operations and the drug trade always — always — overlap in the shadowy corner called "drug intelligence...
...The office ran a domestic spying operation using agents detailed from the CIA and elsewhere...
...Helms was allowed to plead nolo contendere...
...ODALE was the brainchild of none other than Gordon Liddy...
...security quickly became appar ent, if not entirely understood...
...Helms, wanting to know more about the Latin America drug trade, established a secret program in the Miami office of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs known as "BUNCION" and later, DEACON I. This was the program in which Hunt placed his friend Lucien Conein...
...Helms quickly invited the investigative reporter to lunch, apparently trying to learn what he knew...
...Not everyone who can do all these things is a drug trafficker, but many are...
...The DEA immediately shut down its investigation of the case and withdrew the undercover agent...
...The DEA was found to be remarkably corrupt at its highest levels...
...Individual skullduggery aside, the early days of the drug war saw the White House take over the antidrug effort, the CIA formalize its narcotics intelligence collection, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) brought into existence...
...There WINTER • 1989 • 39 War on Drugs do not seem to have been substantive changes in the years since...
...On November 27, the New York Times reported that the Senate was investigating the charges...
...His agency had too little intelligence on the drug situation and not enough agents to take advantage of the information it had...
...In July Alfred McCoy published his book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, which documented the Agency's congenial relations with heroin kingpins...
...Alarcon promptly threatened the prosecutors with graymail...
...Helms continued to develop drug intelligence...
...The perverse effects of linking drug enforce ment and U.S...
...On October 24, 1969, President Richard Nixon called a press conference to issue the initial declaration of war...
...Whether the two discussions were in any way related is not known...
...The temptation for many agents to become involved in the growing drug business was irresistible...
...The document is available at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C...
...ground and air equipment had "formed the backbone of the Laos opium trade...
...The problem of personal corruption, while serious and growing, is modest compared to the systemic corruption of drug enforcement by national security doctrine...
...I. A Cop Of the fifteen federal agencies initially responsible for fighting President Nixon's drug war in 1969, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) was first among equals...
...It is not necessary to claim that senior national security policymakers condone drug trafficking because they are corrupt or inept...
...An unexpected event added urgency to the White House's campaign to centralize drug enforcement intelligence...
...The most important question facing the Justice Department was whether to take Helms to court for his role in the CIA's illegal wiretapping programs...
...To understand why the drug war has failed, we need to go back to its earliest days, between 1969 and 1973, when current U.S...
...Colby did not misspeak: "As long as there exists a narcotics problem, intelligence agencies will be involved...
...That same month, the story of DEACON I was included in the agency's compilation of all of its possible abuses of power...
...This bureaucratic coup, 40 • DISSENT War on Drugs coming at the expense of the Customs Service, wound up hurting the drug campaign by fostering hard feelings among officials whose only hope for success lay in cooperation...
...Soon afterward, Hunt got a job for an old friend, former CIA agent Lt...
...Manuel Antonio Noriega, an intelligence officer turned drug trafficker (like Alarcon), enjoyed a cozy relationship with the CIA that enabled him to escape the full weight of the law...
...Liddy had received CIA security clearances for his antidrug efforts on behalf of the White House in December 1969...
...Newsweek reported that Hunt traveled to Mexico with one such team just before a plot to kill Panama's Omar Torrijos was aborted...
...As Edward Jay Epstein notes in Agency of Fear, it was Krogh who first linked drugs with crime, a key plank in Nixon's 1972 reelection campaign...
...William Casey (a man who kept secrets, like WINTER • 1989 • 45 War on Drugs Richard Helms) assisted the White House's abuses of power in the drug war and ignored the needs of drug enforcement...
...Far from it...
...He resisted investigation or prosecution of suspected drug traffickers that might disrupt CIA operations...
...Despite the private White House criticisms, the CIA could count on public support from Nixon...
...If anything, Ingersoll's corruption problem was worse than ever...
...The creation of the CCINC was followed by the creation of the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement in January 1972...
...The best way—often the only way—to gather such intelligence is to do business with drug traffickers...
...Agents in the New York office of the Bureau of Narcotics (the predecessor of BNDD) were either protecting drug dealers or trafficking heroin themselves...
...The CIA operatives installed in the new agency quickly convinced Bartels to establish what was called an "overseas source registry" —a listing of suspected drug traffickers...
...Ingersoll resisted the efforts of Nixon's aides to draw him into political stunts, such as high-profile arrests of international drug figures, because he believed their impact on the drug war would be negligible or counterproductive...
...the original idea for ONNI was credited to Hunt...
...The agency's program of leniency for suspected drug traffickers remained a secret...
...Oliver North (a clean-cut kid like Krogh) used drug enforcement as a cover for "national-security" operations...
...Krogh was quickly frustrated both by the stonewalling of suspicious bureaucrats and the inability of the drug agencies to cooperate with each other...
...In the early years of the drug war, Alarcon was a versatile and disloyal soldier: He was both the chief of drug enforcement in Chile and a major cocaine trafficker...
...Helms left his post on February 3, 1973, and became ambassador to Iran...
...Ingersoll, who finally quit in mid-1973, was America's first drug czar and he failed—as has every drug czar since, including George Bush...
...BNDD, ODALE, ONNI, and DEA were followed in 1982 by the SFTF (South Florida Task Force), which was replaced in 1983 by NNBIS (National Narcotics Border Interdiction Service), which was in turn replaced in 1985 by NDEP (National Drug Enforcement Policy Board), now known as NDP (National Drug Policy Board...
...In 1976 the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, the attorney general of the United States (Edward Levi), and the Ford White House were all apparently informed of the good fortune of Alarcon and several other drug traffickers...
...Helms got the CIA taken out of the picture...
...In March and May, columnist Jack Anderson reported on the involvement of top Panamanian officials in drug trafficking...
...The president-elect refuses to say if he was informed at that time of the CIA's intervention on behalf of Rafael Alarcon...
...By July 1973, when the DEA came into existence, Ingersoll had been forced out and Ambrose disgraced...
...Various sources say that thirty to sixty CIA operatives were hired for the war on drugs through DEACON I. Helms also had access to findings of the National Security Agency, the supersecret organization that can intercept electronic communications almost anywhere in the world...
...The Alarcon case ties together the stories of Ingersoll, Krogh, and Helms...
...Its director was John Ingersoll, a career lawenforcement officer appointed during the Johnson administration...
...Sensing a hostile takeover, he made a frantic call to Mitchell, who assured him he knew of no plans to remove him...
...Latin America was emerging as a center of drug commerce, first as a transshipment point for heroin refined in Europe, then as a production center for cocaine...
...Their dual roles as drug warriors and Plumbers belied an underlying congruence of interests between "drug enforcement" and "national security" as defined by all the president's men...
...Like Ingersoll, Francis "Bud" Mullen, the head of the DEA in the early 1980s, denounced the politicization of the drug war by the White House and effectively ended his own career...
...Egil Krogh, the number-one drug warrior and Plumber in the Nixon White House, described the bureaucratic challenge at a 1971 antidrug meeting: "Ways [must] be found to make our narcotics suppression effort consistent with the requirements of national security...
...It is also known that the committee received a State Department report citing "corruption and indifference" of top narcotics officials in Thailand and South Vietnam According to partially declassified minutes of the meeting, one of Helms's assistants stated in response to criticisms of the CIA that Nixon's drug war "raised two problems for the Agency...
...A Drug Kingpin "We'd been after the guy for years," says one DEA agent of Rafael Alarcon...
...Ingersoll faced tough challenges from the start...
...Ingersoll's BNDD was reduced to a supporting role...
...The conflict between Helms's CIA and Nixon's White House came to a head in February 1972...
...In the long run, then, it is not illogical to assume that the drug business will be increasingly dominated by trafficking organizations that can count on protection from the U.S...
...In September Jack Anderson, citing documents from the CIA and other intelligence agencies, confirmed that U.S...
...Helms was on the defensive...
...The Agency had "moved slowly for good reason," the official said...
...Within days of the creation of the DEA in July 1973, the new agency received credible reports from a reliable undercover agent about a $300,000 heroin deal financed by Robert Vesco...
...Ingersoll made foreign drug interdiction a top priority in 1969 and requested (and apparently received) help from both the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA...
...When a prominent physician told Krogh he opposed the idea, Krogh retorted, "Anyone who opposes us, we'll destroy...
...By 1976 Colby had been succeeded as DCI by George Bush...
...Thus was the drug war established as a high priority in the White House...
...Conein later admitted his purpose was to oversee a unit that could be used to assassinate drug traffickers...
...As part of an early effort to expand BNDD's effectiveness abroad, he drafted a plan suggesting a fund "set up along the lines of the CIA" to carry out "disruptive activities...
...There is a way to do this that is sanctioned by law, the Congress, the president, and national security doctrine: covert operations...
...In late August 1974, Alarcon was kidnapped from his home, handcuffed, and put on a plane to New York...
...q Eric Gravely provided research for this article...
...Two books, Alfred McCoy's The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1973) and Edward J. Epstein's Agency of Fear (1977), examined how antidrug efforts had been compromised by U.S...
...But this somewhat obscure history is critical to understanding the war on drugs today, because it was in those years that the operations of the drug enforcement bureaucracy and the national security bureaucracy were formally coordinated...
...Alarcon, from his position as head of the narcotics and gambling brigade of the Chilean federal police since 1969, provided the Agency with electronic surveillance information...
...In late March 1971, Egil Krogh told the Narcotics Office that CIA station chiefs needed to be reminded "that their role in narcotics intelligence collection overseas was an active role...
...Since then every administration has followed this same procedure...
...Otherwise the intelligence community will find itself where it cannot afford to go—in court as a witness...
...And so it goes...
...The White House staff, for political reasons, wanted to control the war on drugs...
...In May 1973, the CIA acknowledged that it had helped Liddy in his narcotics work in 1969...
...But there is an even more disturbing logic to the drug enforcementnational security system...
...In August 1972, the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence (ONNI) was established by the White House...
...Krogh drew up plans for yet another antidrug agency, this one to be called the Drug Enforcement Administration...
...Alarcon, at the time, was prospering as the middleman in a lucrative Santiago—to—New York cocaine connection...
...The findings of these inquiries in the mid-1970s, if less than exhaustive, indicated that the drug war was a fiasco...
...The dictator purged the government of dozens of corrupt officials, some of whom squealed to the DEA about their superiors...
...That was the state of things in 1976 when George Bush became director of the Central Intelligence Agency and when Jimmy Carter came to office...
...He succeeded in establishing BNDD as the lead agency in overseas interdiction...
...Cushman, according to the minutes of the November meeting, responded that the CIA did not have "the assets or expertise required to do the job by itself...
...Although the target of each sphere of activity was different—drug traffickers and abusers versus Nixon's "enemies" —both shared the ultimate goal of establishing White House authority over an investigative and enforcement apparatus that could be used for any "national security" purpose White House aides chose...
...A memorandum of mitigating circumstances was entered in Alarcon's file, and he was allowed to plead to minor charges...
...III...
...As a matter of fact, anyone who doesn't support us, we'll destroy...
...But on November 20, two weeks after Nixon won reelection by a landslide, the president suddenly fired Helms as Director of Central Intelligence...
...Nevertheless, ten days later, Nixon declared that CIA had "performed superbly" in the drug war...
...The agency was deeply involved in efforts War on Drugs to overthrow the government of Salvador Allende...
...In December 1971, Nixon tried to incorporate CIA operatives into ODALE, one of the many antidrug agencies he established...
...In September 1971, Krogh was named by Nixon to be executive director of the Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control (CCINC), which was set up to coordinate the "global war" on drugs...
...In June 1971, during one of the administration's well-orchestrated media blitzes on the drug war, the New York Times stole the headlines by publishing the Pentagon Papers...
...strategy was established and failure institutionalized...
...Then in May 1973 it was revealed he had visited a gun smuggler at his large ranch on the Texas-Mexico border...
...The drug warriors became the Plumbers...
...A CIA Director Richard Helms viewed his role in the drug war narrowly...
...He also faced corruption, turf battles with rival agen cies, and an intrusive White House staff trying to impose their political agenda...
...Every president since has escalated the hostilities...
...None is involved today, yet their generic roles are familiar, having been assumed by others...
...Nobody ever proved the gunman was connected to Alarcon, but suspicions ran high...
...IV...
...The drug enforcement–national security issue faded over the next decade, to be revived with the indictment of Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega, a longtime CIA informant, on drug-trafficking charges...
...Drug entrepreneurs with relationships to the intelligence community are less likely to be driven out of business than are their less well-connected competitors...
...Helms's first step in the drug war was to establish the Office of Narcotics Coordinator in late 1969, which was to supply both the White House and the BNDD with routine drug intelligence...
...The heroin business, based in Southeast Asia, although it had enjoyed explosive growth in the 1960s, was already beginning to level off...
...The House and Senate opened investigations in the early 1970s of the DEA and the CIA...
...The leader of an international narcotics syndicate received all of three years in jail...
...then, as now, "better intelligence" was demanded from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA...
...government...
...The threat of "investigative or legal" disclosures of CIA involvement in drug traffickWINTER • 1989 43 War on Drugs ing was growing...
...They condone drug trafficking because it is often the only way to conduct a far-reaching program of covert action...
...We tell below the story of four high-level participants in the early years of the drug war...
...Among these are Edward Jay Epstein's Agency of Fear, Thomas Powers's biography of Richard Helms, The Man Who Kept Secrets, and Anthony Lukas's Nightmare...
...Cushman provided logistical help for Hunt...
...The problem was not merely individual corruption for financial gain but systematic corruption for "national security" reasons...
...Hunt apparently did not limit himself to spying...
...This is where national security became important...
...The New York Times and Washington Post (which published Jack Anderson) were invaluable...
...The CIA had proved helpful...
...Ambrose said his resignation "had nothing to do with Watergate...
...Krogh and his boss, John Ehrlichman, soon concluded that the answer to the drug problem lay in gaining White House control over the drug enforcement and intelligence agencies...
...intelligence operatives and White House operatives...
...then, as now, the White House organized (and reorganized) the antidrug effort...
...That same day, Nixon attended a CCINC meeting and emphasized that he wanted to "continue his personal involvement in drug control as appropriate...
...In 1971 Erlichman told Robert Cushman, CIA deputy director, that Hunt had "carte blanche" from the White House...
...Egil Krogh spent four months in jail for his role in the Watergate coverup, then took a job with the Swenson Ice Cream Company...
...The United States requested extradition and Pinochet obliged...
...Its purposes have been variously described as assassination, "counterintelligence," and "agent recruitment...
...One of Hunt's first acts was to break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, using a plan drawn up by Krogh...
...Such operations require people who can work clandestinely, keep tabs on their rivals, operate small aircraft, conceal cargo, launder money, and employ violence selectively...
...According to the minutes, the CIA insisted that it had to "protect intelligence officers and sources abroad from investigative or legal disclosures...
...It is known that Nelson Gross, the State Department representative on the committee, criticized the CIA's involvement in the drug war...
...Borrowing the theory that drug abuse leads to crime, Krogh suggested in early 1970 that attacking the former problem was the way to crack the latter...
...A White House Aide The White House point man in the drug war was Egil "Bud" Krogh...
...But by that time the Watergate scandal was engulfing Nixon and control of the DEA was slipping away...
...Helms himself attended the meeting (which apparently was also unusual) and spoke...
...That same month Helms, at the request of the National Security Agency, authorized a CIA program to intercept the radio transmissions of drug traffickers in the United States and South America...
...The 1976 Justice Department inquiry into CIA electronic surveillance activities listed the Alarcon case as one of several drug investigations that had to be curbed or killed in order to protect CIA "sources and methods...
...Ehrlichman assigned a National Security Council (NSC) staff investigator to the group...
...Congress, the media, and the public then demand a real "drug czar," meaning a federal official of higher rank, under stricter White House control, with greater operational powers and less congressional oversight...
...That was when the CIA's tampering with major narcotics cases was documented...
...Alarcon's case was taken away from the federal prosecutors in Manhattan and given to the Brooklyn prosecutors...
...The same aides The Making of a Quagmire, 1969-1973 to President Nixon who were in charge of the war on drugs were also in charge of the Watergate breakin in 1972...
...The BNDD, according to Agency documents, used him as a "live source for information concerning Latin American narcotics traffickers and their organized crime connections in Miami...
...The systemic corruption is in the nature of the drug war...
...Overseas, the problem was worse...
...V. A Familiar Story The cycle of failure between 1969 and 1973 repeated itself in the 1980s...
...Alarcon informed them that he was working for the CIA and claimed the agency knew all about his drug smuggling...
...The CIA could only rebut several minor details of McCoy's thesis...
...As Director of Central Intelligence 42 • DISSENT War on Drugs (DCI) from 1967 to 1973, he sought to improve the CIA's knowledge of the international drug trade...
...then, as now, investigations into the drug trade were launched by Congress and resisted by the Executive...
...As long as there exists a narcotics problem, intelligence agencies will be involved...
...Some of this intelligence was passed along to the White House...
...Whether the claim was true or not, the CIA, now under the direction of Helms's successor, William Colby, intervened on Alarcon's behalf...
...President-elect Bush promises to do the same...
...Nor was he the last...
...The agency then recruited the targets of DEA investigations to serve as CIA sources— including one longtime narcotics suspect by the name of Rafael Alarcon...
...The White House then named an amiable federal prosecutor named John Bartels to head the DEA...
...Then, as now, conventional law enforcement agencies were judged incapable of handling the antidrug effort...
...In their stories we can see what we have learned since the early 1970s—and what we have forgotten...
...The article also draws on several books about the Watergate scandal...
...Within a month of Ingersoll's phone call to Mitchell, Myles Ambrose, the Customs Commissioner, was appointed head of the newly created Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE), an organization with unprecedented enforcement powers...
...At Cabinet-level meetings in November 1971 and February 1972, Krogh asked for more help from the CIA...
...President-elect Bush has promised a new agency and presumably a new acronym...
...One official is designated to run the drug war...
...The Rockefeller Report on the CIA discussed, cursorily, the agency's relationship with drug traffickers...
...By the fall of 1973, William Colby, the new director of the CIA, had discontinued DEACON I. In 1976, the Ford Justice Department launched its inquiry into CIA electronic surveillance activities...
...The CIA regularly fixed drug cases between 1972 and 1976—and the Justice Department regularly approved...
...For example, the CIA supplied the BNDD with a report "Cocaine Trafficking Network in Colombia...
...Quotas, he felt, encouraged agents to become dependent on informants, and informants were merely drug entrepreneurs who understood that they could obtain government protection by ratting on the competition...
...Sources This article is based in part on a declassified version of a "Top Secret" Justice Department report entitled, "Inquiry Into CIA-related Electronic Surveillance Activities...
...In April 1974, a New York grand jury secretly indicted Alarcon and four other senior Chilean police officers...
...To update Colby: the larger the drug problem, the larger the involvement of the intelligence community...
...He was not the first national– security drug enforcer to prosper because of the operating procedures established in the early years of the war on drugs...
...II...
...The experiences of Ingersoll, Krogh, Helms, and Alarcon recurred...
...What little documentation is available covers the years 1969 to 1973...
Vol. 36 • January 1989 • No. 1
