The Strength of the Wolf

by Douglas Valentine

  With Dondola having already lined up the ducks, Siragusa was able to persuade the chiefs of the Lebanese, Greek, Turkish, and Syrian police forces to support his investigation. Accompanied by Greek and Turkish officials, Siragusa arrested Ozsayar in early April 1955. The Syrian police, assisted by George Abraham, arrested Tifankji in Aleppo two days later, while the chief of Lebanon’s Sûreté, Emir Faoud Chehab, raided a clandestine lab in Beirut with Lebanese Customs chief Edmond Azizi and Paul Knight. In total, twenty-seven traffickers were arrested, ringleader Omar Makkouk was identified (though he remained at large), and 800 pounds of opium and forty-four pounds of morphine base were seized.12

  As Siragusa said with pride: “We got the Greeks to work with the Turks and, as you know, they’re dedicated enemies. We also got the Syrians to work with the Turks at a time when there was no love lost between them either.”13

  Soon thereafter, Paul Knight cautiously opened the FBN’s second overseas office in Beirut. At the time, Lebanon was a bubbling cauldron of political intrigues. Having been carved out of their country by the French, the Syrians considered Lebanon to be stolen property, and Syrian agents enthusiastically smuggled weapons to the Lebanese Muslim factions that were fighting the Maronites. Lebanon was also flooded with Palestinian refugees; the Egyptians were unleashing the Fedayeen on Israel; and Israel was raiding Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. As the British withdrew from their commitments in the region, America stepped gingerly into the breach. To keep the Soviets at bay and protect the Arab–American Oil Company (ARAMCO) pipeline that stretched from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon’s coast, the CIA began secretly arming its Christian and Israeli allies, buying politicians, and backing Stravos Niarchos in his competition with Aristole Onassis for the lucrative Saudi oil-shipping contract.

  When Knight arrived in Beirut, he was given a room in the American Embassy, in the Agency for International Development’s Office of Public Safety, which provided material aid to the Lebanese police forces. But Lebanese security officials were aware that CIA officers were operating undercover of the Public Safety program, so Knight had to keep his distance from the Embassy. He also had trouble forming relations with Lebanese police officials. He had a personal, not a diplomatic, passport, and he lived at the St. George Hotel, posing as a travel agent, in order to make undercover cases. As a result of his multiple identities, some Lebanese officials were suspicious. “They weren’t quite sure why I was there,” Knight recalls. “Was I an Israeli spy?”

  Knight’s initial contact was Lebanon’s national security chief Emir Faoud Chehab, but the influential Chehab family had been involved in corruption under the French mandate, which ended in 1945. As a result, Knight says, “for political, economic and cultural reasons” there wasn’t much Chehab could do to help him make narcotics cases. It was not until Captain Azizi of the customs service introduced him to Hannah Yazbek, a Maronite strongman, that Knight was able to begin recruiting informers and gathering intelligence on local drug traffickers.

  As Knight explains, “They had a system in Beirut not unlike that in Chicago, in which the city was divided into ethnic and religious neighborhoods. Each neighborhood had a strongman, the abada, from whom criminals and businessmen alike bought protection. Hannah Yazbek, otherwise known as Abu George [meaning father of George], was the Maronite abada. He was a hashish smuggler connected to the Gemayel family, which controlled the Fascist Phalange and had collaborated with the Vichy French, so he was not beloved of the British or Israelis. But he was essential to getting the job done.”

  At first Knight would meet Abu George at his house, where the abada would introduce him to the right people. Soon informants were visiting Knight’s office. But some were “dragging their coats,” intending to deceive him, so Knight would tell Abu George who they were and what they said. Like Orlando Portale in Rome, Abu George would authenticate the informants’ stories – if doing so did not conflict with his own prosperous hashish business. “He would confirm,” Knight explains, “if it helped make a case against Sami Khoury or the Druze.”

  The Maronites were deeply involved in financial crime and hashish smuggling. It was a part of Lebanese culture Knight did not like, but he came to regard Abu George as indispensable. After it became known that they were friends, however, they were no longer able to meet, so Abu George introduced Knight to his nephew, Elie, a concierge at the Capitol Hotel, and thereafter Elie served as Knight’s indispensable link to Beirut’s teeming underworld.

  Through Abu George, Elie, and his own unilateral contacts, Knight began to collect intelligence on drug smuggling operations in Beirut and the nearby Bekka Valley, the ancient Biblical land between Syria and Lebanon where hashish was grown and narcotics were smuggled. In concert with Customs officer Azizi, Knight provided the intelligence to undercover Agent Jim Attie, the initiator of a string of significant cases.

  JIM ATTIE, UNDERCOVER ACE

  Jim Attie was uniquely qualified for undercover work in the Middle East. His father had led a band of Assyrian rebels that protected Christian settlements from the Ottoman Turks. Slated for a hangman’s noose in Istanbul, Attie senior fled to Detroit, where Jim was raised in abject poverty. During the war he served with the US Navy and fought his way to the welterweight championship of the Pacific Fleet. After the war he earned a college degree and took a job as a therapist with the Veteran’s Administration. Proud, restless, and adventurous, Attie joined the FBN in Detroit in 1950. In 1954, under the direction of District Supervisor Ross Ellis, he made a major case on a hapless Lebanese baker. The case brought him to Anslinger’s attention and launched his career as an undercover agent in the Middle East, where he came into serious conflict with Paul Knight and Charlie Siragusa.

  “It all started with the case I made in Detroit,” Attie says ruefully. “I still pity the poor guy [Hussine Hider] to this day. He was merely thinking about getting into the business, and I talked him into it. Eventually he gave me a number, and they sent me to Beirut to meet a politician and rug merchant named Amir Ghoriab. I persuaded Ghoriab to deliver two kilograms of morphine base to me in Beirut, where Lebanese Customs agents arrested him in May 1955.

  “After he was arrested, Ghoriab told me, ‘You’ll never leave here alive.’ And he was almost right. I was staying at a hotel we suspected of being a depot for dope dealers and, a few days after the Ghoriab bust, I walked into the lobby and was arrested. I was taken to Sûreté headquarters and brought before Haj Touma, director of the Sûreté’s security branch. Touma was a big dope dealer himself, and at his direction the interrogator asked me who I was. I said I was a tourist and I demanded to know why I’d been arrested. At which point they handcuffed me. Then Touma reached over and punched me in the face.

  “Well,” Attie says coolly, “I’d been cuffed in front, so I dove at him. But before I could grab his throat, the others jumped on me. They cuffed my hands behind my back and worked me over pretty good. Luckily the Customs chief, Edmond Azizi [Paul Knight’s contact] came in and saw my face was smeared with blood. Azizi, who was a big dope dealer too, took me to Customs headquarters and tried to smooth everything over.”

  Attie held no grudge against Touma, but he did harbor tremendous resentment for Knight over the incident – a personal animosity that was inflamed after Knight’s mother-in-law referred to Attie’s son as “a dirty little Arab.” Attie also came to hate Charlie Siragusa. He felt that Siragusa was more concerned with feathering his own nest, through investment opportunities at the Merrill Lynch brokerage house in Rome, than in making cases. There was another reason, too, which happened later on. But his first adversary was Paul Knight.

  As Attie recalls, “Knight was always partying with Elie Yazbek. Elie’s uncle was the gangster over gambling and smuggling in Beirut. He worked with the Gemayels, who controlled the waterfront and got a fee from all the ships that docked there. President Chehab was involved too. And everything Knight said, whether he knew it or not, went directly from Yazbek and Azizi to Sami Khoury, who sold 50,000 submac
hine guns to the Israelis while I was there.”

  According to Attie, the Israelis spent millions of CIA dollars bribing officials in Europe and the Middle East for information and protection. He claims that Khoury relied on Customs chief Edmond Azizi for protection in Lebanon, and that the Israelis provided the contacts and money that enabled Khoury to move narcotics across Europe. With protection guaranteed by the Mossad, Khoury packed his car full of morphine base and drove to France, where he stayed at an Israeli safehouse. Attie also claims that the Israelis prevented the FBN from conducting investigations against drug-dealing Israeli agents in Aleppo, Syria, the major transit point in the region.

  THE FOUR HORSEMEN

  Despite political impediments and a minuscule budget, operations in the Middle East generated tremendous publicity for the FBN. In November 1955, Attie single-handedly stole a significant quantity of heroin from drug lord Mohammed Oz Yurik in Turkey. And in May 1956 (a year after the League of Arab States named Israel as the major source of illicit drugs in Lebanon), FBN agents and Lebanese Customs official Edmond Azizi arrested Omar Makkouk, the biggest laboratory operator in Beirut. The case was widely reported in the press, as was a shoot-out Paul Knight had, around that time, with drug smugglers in the Syrian desert.

  Each of Knight’s and Attie’s adventures helped Siragusa to better understand how illicit drugs were moved to America, with the result that cases made in the Middle East led to arrests in America, where it mattered most. For example, a tip given to undercover Agent Tony Zirilli in Italy allowed the FBN to arrest fugitive George Mallock in New York, and force his brother John to flee to Mexico. The Mallock brothers case led to bigger cases in Hollywood and Chicago, and to members of the French connection in Mexico, Canada, and New York.

  FBN successes in the Middle East were also beneficial to Harry Anslinger. In June 1955, the Commissioner proudly told a Judiciary Subcommittee that the Army, Navy, Coast Guard, and FBI combined could not stop heroin smuggling into New York. But four men – Charlie Siragusa, Paul Knight, Hank Manfredi, and Jim Attie – by themselves stopped 40 percent.

  “These four men,” Anslinger said, “are worth one hundred men here.”14

  9

  THE SECRET POLICEMAN

  “A. J.’s cover story? An international playboy and harmless practical joker. It was A. J. who dosed the punch with a mixture of Yage, Hashish and Yohimbine during a Fourth of July reception at the US Embassy, precipitating an orgy.”

  William S. Burroughs, The Naked Lunch

  While Charlie Siragusa was establishing his overseas empire and envisioning himself as Harry Anslinger’s successor, his erstwhile mentor, George White, was embarking on a secret mission that would forever pervert American drug law enforcement.

  The process began during the Second World War, when the OSS concocted a Truth Drug derived from marijuana, and White was chosen to test it on human subjects. White’s marijuana experiments continued at least through 1947, but failed to produce the desired results. Then in 1950, several US soldiers were captured in North Korea and publicly claimed they were members of a secret bacterial warfare unit. This changed everything. On the assumption that the POWs had been brainwashed – and that America, like it or not, must now enter a race against the communists to perfect methods of mind control – the CIA established covert research programs in several major psychiatric hospitals, universities, and pharmaceutical companies, in an effort to find a drug more powerful than marijuana that it could use to manipulate thoughts and behavior. By February 1951, Harry Anslinger and his deputy, George Cunningham, were providing the CIA with every drug imaginable, and the CIA was performing potentially lethal experiments on scores of unwitting American citizens.1

  It wasn’t long before the CIA decided that lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was the most effective drug for identifying double agents, eliciting information from prisoners of war, and for “implanting suggestions and other forms of mental control.”2 LSD could also be used to discredit the opposition’s politicians. In one case, according to author Michael McClintock, CIA agents in 1953 drugged President Elpidio Quirino of the Philippines before he gave a speech, “so that he would appear incoherent.”3

  LSD also had the potential to expose and disable the enemy within, especially labor leaders and citizens suspected of spying for the Soviets. A clause in the National Security Act was interpreted as sanctioning CIA participation in domestic Internal Security programs, and by 1952 the CIA had hired George White to test LSD on unwitting American citizens in New York. Earnest and experienced in such matters, White’s status as a federal agent provided him with carte blanche to conduct experiments on anyone anywhere. His references included CIA counterintelligence expert James Angleton, and former OSS chief William Donovan. But White’s major qualification was a wicked mean streak.

  After Paul Newey left the FBN and joined the CIA in 1951, he met with the CIA security officer who had conducted White’s background check. The CIA security officer told Newey that White’s sadomasochism was a way of overcompensating for a poor body image he’d developed in 1945, when his second wife Ruth deserted him, calling him “a big fat slob.” The words hurt, so the five-foot-seven 200-pounder tried to overcome his hang-up by inflicting pain on others. Several pertinent cases will be discussed.

  White’s operational relationship with the CIA began in April 1952, when he was introduced to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the club-footed, stuttering research scientist selected to manage the CIA’s LSD-testing program. A native New Yorker, Gottlieb headed the Chemical Branch of the CIA’s Technical Services Staff. Gottlieb and White formed an instant rapport, and together they would manage the LSD testing program in New York until 1955; then in San Francisco until 1957, when Gottlieb was reassigned; and again from 1961 until White’s retirement in 1965. It could safely be said that these two eccentrics ushered America into its psychedelic age.4

  To assist him in finding unwitting subjects for his LSD experiments in New York, White recruited Gilbert Fox, a softcore pornographer he met in October 1952.

  “I knew George well,” Fox says. “Extremely well, in a strange sort of way. We met through John Wiley, an artist who was putting out a little magazine called Bizarre that featured scantily-clad women wearing high heels. George liked it. As a child he’d been infatuated with an aunt who wore high heels. So George’s fetish was spiked high-heeled shoes and leather boots. He liked my books too, and he asked me to write about high heels.

  “George was an interesting guy with a sensitive side,” Fox explains. “He loved little birds, like canaries. But he was a gin drunk. He drank morning, noon and night. He was playing out his sexual fantasies too. One time my wife Pat and I went with George to see a hooker at a hotel. She tied him up and strapped him to the bed and whipped his ass. She had on high heels.

  “George’s wife, Albertine [whom he married on 18 August 1951] knew George was playing around,” Fox continues, “but she was a social climber, and she pushed him to succeed. At the time George was big into the New York mayoral election. The man he was backing, Rudolph Halley, had been chief counsel on the Kefauver Committee, and was running for mayor on the Fusion Party ticket. If Halley won the election, he was going to make George Commissioner of the New York City Police Department.”

  It’s rumored that White put LSD in the drinking water of one of Halley’s opponents at a political debate, much as the CIA drugged Philippine president Elpidio Quirino.5 But while that is just a rumor about White, in his own diary he told how, on 28 November 1952, he dosed Gil and Pat Fox, and their friends Kai and Jo Jurgenson, with LSD.

  As Fox recalls, “We were all boozing and smoking pot in those days, and one night George gave us LSD. He slipped it to us secretly. Kai and Jo were visiting us, and we had gone to the Whites’ for dinner. Afterwards we went slumming around the Lower Village. It was snowing. We stopped the car on Cornelius Street and the snow was red and green and blue – a thousand beautiful colors – and we were dancing in the street. Jo thought she
had on lace gloves up to her elbows. Then we went into a lesbian bar and Pat freaked out. Pat had trouble coming off the trip. Kai’s wife Jo later went wacko, like Eliot Smithe’s wife.

  “I was angry at George for that,” Fox says. But he and his wife remained good friends with the Whites, as if nothing unusual had happened. And considering their proclivities, that was true. Indeed, Gil Fox introduced White to his next unwitting victim only a few days later.

  Eliot Smithe knew Gil Fox from the swinging Greenwich Village sex scene, and in mid-December 1952, Eliot and his nineteen-year-old wife, Barbara, joined the Foxes for dinner and drinks at the Whites’ apartment on West 12th Street. In an attempt to entice the Smithes into an orgy, White proudly displayed his pretty wife’s closet full of stiletto heels. Eliot found George way too repulsive, however, so White’s orgy didn’t happen. But everyone remained friends and while Eliot was out of town, his young wife Barbara accepted an invitation to join the Whites for dinner and drinks. Barbara was so naive that she brought along her twenty-month-old baby daughter, Valerie.

  Also present on the evening of 11 January 1954, and also surreptitiously dosed with LSD, was Clarice Stein, Albertine’s friend and colleague at the Abraham & Strauss department store in Brooklyn. For Clarice it was an experiment that ended in trauma.

  According to Clarice, the evening started out happily enough. White served Martinis, and about half an hour later, Clarice, Barbara, and Albertine embarked on a “laughing jag.” But the fun ended when Clarice got home and she began to see multicolored images whenever she closed her eyes. She got frightened and called White for help, but he was totally unsympathetic; his response was to mock her and then hang up the phone. Her fear grew into abject terror as the trip intensified, and she promised herself that if she never fell asleep again, which seemed a distinct possibility at the time, she would kill herself. But her symptoms subsided later the next day, and she elected to remain friends with Albertine.6