The Strength of the Wolf

by Douglas Valentine

  W. H. Auden, “The Double Man”

  While the case-making agents were dodging enforcement assistant Lee Speer’s corruption investigation in the conflicted New York office, the CIA was adding to the organization’s mounting ethical woes by employing FBN agents and informants, as well as major drug traffickers, in an official assassination program codenamed ZR/RIFLE. Charlie Siragusa was the main player, through the CIA’s MKULTRA Program.

  George White, of course, had set up the first MKULTRA pad in New York in 1953, and in 1955 had moved his operation to Chestnut Street in San Francisco, where Ike Feldman joined him. Siragusa got involved in 1959 in his capacity as the FBN’s field supervisor, when he inspected White’s second MKULTRA facility (the Chestnut Street pad having been closed in 1958) at 261 Green Street in Mill Valley, across the Bay from San Francisco in Marin County. There White (increasingly debilitated by alcoholism), Feldman, and sundry CIA scientists tested stink bombs, itching powders, diarrhea inducers, and other “harassment substances.” Also tested was “a fine hypodermic needle to inject drugs through the cork in a wine bottle.”1 The needle was so fine it could pierce a person’s skin without being felt, and had potentially lethal applications.

  The Mill Valley safehouse proved unsuitable, for a number of reasons, and in February 1960 the CIA opened a new one in San Francisco. Used until 1965, the so-called Plantation Inn was a favorite watering hole for San Francisco’s inner circle of FBN agents. Siragusa described it as “one large room and a small kitchen and bath.” He said that “White had the place wired up, and there was a two-way mirror. When White wanted to use the mirror, he would rent the adjoining apartment.” Ike Feldman had the key to the safehouse and any agent who wanted to use it had to clear it with him. “Feldman was a wise little guy, a fast talker, and overly aggressive,” Siragusa said.2

  Feldman operated the Bay Area safehouses with Dr. Ray Treichler, a reclusive and timid, yet effective spook. Treichler had been assigned as the CIA’s liaison to the major American pharmaceutical companies, and had acquired the MKULTRA account in 1957, when Sid Gottlieb embarked on an overseas assignment. White, Feldman, Treichler, and various CIA scientists conducted an array of experiments at the MKULTRA pads and at nightclubs in the Bay Area. One exotic weapon they tested was a gas cartridge, calibrated to fit certain types of guns, and designed to spray an incapacitating chemical more disabling than tear gas.

  Despite being aware of these MKULTRA operations and facilities, Siragusa was prohibited from reading White and Feldman’s reports, or listening to their tape recordings. All that changed, however, in January 1961, when Treichler asked Siragusa to open a safehouse in New York City, at 105 West 13th Street, at which point he too, perhaps unwittingly, became a part of the MKULTRA Program. By Siragusa’s account, Treichler did not tell him why the CIA was opening the 13th Street pad; but in 1977, he told a Senate Subcommittee that he assumed it was because the CIA wanted “to uncover defectors in their own organization.”3 The New York pad had hidden tape recorders, bugs in the telephone, spike mikes (microphones that looked like nails) in the molding along the floor, and a two-way mirror behind a sofa bed, in the wall between the adjoining apartments.

  Treichler gave Siragusa cash, which he deposited in an account under the alias Cal Salerno, for furniture and rent. Andy Tartaglino, having just returned from Europe and joined the Court House Squad, helped his mentor furnish the pad. The FBN’s firearms instructor, veteran Agent John Tagley, was assigned as its caretaker.

  Siragusa then introduced George Gaffney to Treichler at a restaurant in New York. Gaffney recalls that Treichler spoke with a British accent, wore a derby hat, carried an umbrella, and gave him two very specific instructions. He said the CIA had priority over the safehouse, that Siragusa would call him when the CIA wanted to use it, and that he should keep the FBN agents away when that happened. Gaffney was also told to make the apartment look “lived in.” In compliance with this second instruction, the 13th Street pad became a convenient place for FBN agents to make cases, quiz informants, and have parties. It was also a place where out-of-town agents, family members, old friends, and dignitaries could stay while in New York.

  Few agents knew that the mysterious apartment was funded by the CIA, and its existence fueled rumors that headquarters was involved in corruption – that the bosses, perhaps, were receiving “things,” if not money, from Establishment benefactors like Pan Am executive Sam Pryor. In this way the 13th Street pad further undermined the integrity of the stressed-out New York office. But bigger CIA-related problems were looming.

  THE PATRON SAINT OF ASSASSINATIONS

  Through MKULTRA, the FBN factored in the CIA’s plots to murder Fidel Castro. One of these plots was launched in March 1960 at the direction of President Eisenhower, and relied on what the CIA euphemistically called “the gambling syndicate” for help in recruiting assassins inside Cuba. To implement the plan, CIA security chief Sheffield Edwards recruited Robert Maheu, a private investigator whose firm had been subsidized by the Agency since 1955, when it helped Stavros Niarchos wrestle a lucrative Saudi Arabian oil-shipping contract from Aristotle Onassis. Maheu in turn enlisted Johnny Roselli, a Mafioso he’d met through criminal defense attorney Edward Bennett Williams. Then managing a vending machine concession on the Vegas Strip, Roselli (born Francesco Sacco) had been arrested for peddling heroin in 1921, and had served three years in prison (1941–44) for his role in a Hollywood union extortion scam. A very well known and influential gangster, he traveled to New York in September 1960 to meet his CIA case officer, James O’Connell. One month later in Miami, Edwards, O’Connell, and Maheu (all former FBI agents) brought Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante, the patron saint of drug traffickers, into the murder plot.4

  Santo Trafficante was the indispensable man in the Castro assassination plot, even though he was listed as No. 234 in the FBN’s International List book, and even though there were serious doubts about his loyalty. The CIA knew, for example, that during the four months he’d been detained in Cuba, Trafficante had lived in relative luxury while he negotiated the return of seized Mafia assets with Fidel Castro’s brother Raoul. The CIA also knew that after his release, Trafficante traveled freely to and from Havana. But the doubts were set aside because he was intimately connected to leaders in the anti-Castro Cuban exile community and could contact their secret agents in Cuba. One of the purported secret agents, Juan Orta Cordova, was the director of Fidel Castro’s ministerial office in Havana. On the assumption that Orta was willing and able to kill Castro, CIA security chief Edwards had Trafficante arrange the delivery of MKULTRA poison pills to him. The plan was that Orta would drop the pills in Castro’s coffee. But Cuban security officials discovered that Orta was a counter-revolutionary, and a Mafia flunky, and he was fired on 26 January 1961. By the time the pills arrived in February, he was unavailable to do the job.

  Immediately after this plan failed, Trafficante – not the CIA – allegedly devised a second assassination plot in which one of Castro’s mistresses, Marita Lorenz, was (like Orta) to administer a lethal dose of MKULTRA poison to the prime minister. This hit, for which Trafficante was to be paid $150,000, was contingent on his business partner, Dr. Manuel Antonio de Varona. Linked with former Cuban president Carlos Prio Socarras, Tony Varona in 1961 headed the Meyer Lansky-financed, CIA-created, avidly anti-Castro political front, the Frente Revolucionario Democratico, in Miami.5

  After Trafficante had introduced the various conspirators to one another, CIA officer Jim O’Connell passed a handful of poison pills to mobster Johnny Roselli. On 13 March 1961, Roselli, in the Boom Boom room in Miami’s Fontainebleau Hotel, passed them to Varona’s son-in-law for delivery to the femme fatale, Marita Lorenz. But the Bay of Pigs invasion disrupted that particular scheme and, three months later, in July 1961, Siragusa denounced Trafficante as a double agent. He insisted that Castro had jailed the Mafioso as a ruse, and that Trafficante was in fact working with Castro’s agents in the lucrative bolita gambling busin
ess in Miami.6 The implication was that he had sabotaged the CIA’s first assassination attempt on Castro, and had probably betrayed the CIA in other ways as well. But Trafficante – like Dr. Chung before him – was never arrested for treason or drug trafficking, and though closely monitored, continued to manage his bolita and narcotics trafficking businesses with impunity.

  How could this be, one might ask? The answer is quite simple: so that Trafficante, and other international drug smugglers and degenerate hoods like Johnny Roselli, could arrange assassinations for the CIA.

  THE CENTRAL INSTITUTE OF ASSASSINS

  In 1960, the CIA derived its authority to conduct assassinations from President Eisenhower, through the National Security Council’s Special Group. The members of the Special Group were Allen W. Dulles, National Security Advisor Gordon Gray, Undersecretary of State Livingston Merchant, and Assistant Secretary of Defense John N. Irwin. Gray, it should be recalled, had buried Guenther Reinhardt’s exposé on drug dealing by US military officers in Germany after the Second World War.7

  After the Special Group decided to create an assassination program, Dulles passed along the president’s wishes to Richard Bissell, the CIA’s deputy director of plans. Bissell in turn activated a super-secret assassination unit under William K. Harvey, chief of Division D of the CIA’s Foreign Intelligence Branch. Harvey’s “executive action” (a euphemism for assassinations) unit was hidden within a larger program, codenamed ZR/RIFLE, which was designed to obtain foreign ciphers and codes through burglaries and safecrackings, and by kidnapping couriers and spies who sometimes doubled as narcotics smugglers, and stealing the contents of their diplomatic pouches.8

  Harvey was, in some ways, George White’s doppelganger in the CIA. An overweight, pear-shaped, belligerent drunk and womanizer with a close association with James Angleton, he had resigned from the FBI in 1947 to become chief of counterintelligence in the Office of Special Operations. In 1948, he joined the CIA and achieved instant fame by discovering that Kim Philby, the British liaison officer to the CIA, was a Soviet spy. In 1953, he was assigned as chief of the Berlin station, where he served for several years until returning to headquarters to take charge of Division D.9

  Division D was cloistered in the most secluded chamber in the CIA’s enchanted mansion, and most of Harvey’s minions remain unknown. The little that is known about them is contained in Harvey’s handwritten notes, outlining his search in the fall of 1960 for a principal agent, codenamed QJ/WIN, whose task was to recruit underworld assassins and burglars. In his notes, Harvey displays an intimate knowledge of the underworld’s drug smuggling milieu, and in considering candidates for the QJ/WIN position, he suggested using “former resistance personnel” from OSS days. “Corsicans were recommended,” Harvey wrote, “as Sicilians could lead to the Mafia.”10

  So we have it from the horse’s mouth that the CIA hired Corsican drug smugglers as assassins, in order to protect certain Mafiosi in its employ. If only we knew who they were!

  Harvey considered nine candidates for the QJ/WIN position, though in the documents the CIA released to the public it deleted the names of eight, as well as the name of the CIA station chief who recommended them. The anonymous station chief said very little about each candidate. Candidate One thought the matter was being handled by the FBN! Two was fully informed, and had identified a possible assassin. Four was an American in Rome, experienced with criminals, and may have been Jack Cusack, Hank Manfredi, or Paul Knight. Five was in Milan, which “offered good possibilities.” Six was a multilingual bar owner in Florence, acquainted with Belgium’s criminal milieu, and thus suitable for work in the Congo, where the CIA was planning on assassinating Premier Patrice Lumumba. Seven had introduced Jack Cusack to two expert safecrackers on 19 July 1960 in Barcelona. Eight was a Russian living in Antwerp, and was reachable through the Army CID in Frankfurt. Nine was a Frenchman involved in the commercial film industry.

  And Three was Charlie Siragusa. The station chief who proposed the list to Harvey described Siragusa as a “source on Corsicans and Sicilians,” and suggested that Harvey “query him whether District 2 [New York] has any West Indian colored contacts usable for our purposes.”11

  Harvey was so dependent on the FBN and its underworld contacts that he scribbled the words “the Magic Button” beside a reference to the Bureau in his notes. But the need to exclude Mafiosi and Americans from the operation prevailed, and another individual was selected in November 1960 – although, even then, Harvey wondered, “How much does Siragusa know?”12

  He knew a lot. Sometime between the summer of 1960 and the spring of 1961, CIA officer Vincent Thill, a veteran of the Berlin station, where he had served under Bill Harvey, asked Siragusa “to recruit an assassination squad.”13 In making this request, Thill referred to Siragusa’s many contacts in the underworld and said the CIA was prepared to pay $1 million per hit. He also asked Siragusa to set up a detective agency as a front for illegal CIA operations in America.14 Siragusa said he refused on moral grounds, and his acknowledgment of Thill’s overture seems to clear him of any involvement in Harvey’s ZR/RIFLE Program. However, at least one expert, according to Professor Alan Block, believed that Siragusa was dissembling, and that he was, in fact, QJ/WIN.15

  QJ/WIN’s nationality itself is uncertain. His background file (called a “201-file” by the CIA) contains twenty-seven documents, spanning the period from February 1955, when he was caught smuggling nickel behind the Iron Curtain, until his termination as an agent in 1964. None of the documents reveals his name. Not that it matters. Harvey in his notes insisted on a “phony 201” that was thoroughly “back-stopped” and looked like a counterespionage file. So even the extant evidence on QJ/WIN is dubious at best.

  The best evidence suggests that this mysterious operative was Jose Marie Andre Mankel, as Mason Cargill (a staff member of vice president Rockefeller’s Commission to Investigate CIA Activities within the United States) reported in a 1 May 1975 memo.16 Harvey in his notes refers to QJ/WIN as “FNU Mankel,” which seems to corroborate Cargill’s claim. But author Richard Mahoney claims that QJ/WIN was Mozes Maschkivitzan, a Russian émigré living in Luxembourg. Mahoney is the son of a CIA officer who served in Africa at the time, and he may have inside knowledge. Without citing sources, he also claims that among the assassins on Harvey’s payroll were two Corsicans, “Santelli and Garioni,” holding Italian passports, as well as “Italians from the Trieste area [Manfredi’s area of expertise] who were ready to use the gun.”17

  What is known, and what is most important, is that Harvey wanted to recruit Corsicans to spy on the Soviets, and the man he selected for the QJ/WIN position was hired in Frankfurt on 1 November 1960 for the Lumumba assassination operation in the Congo. He was told that the “Soviets were operating in Africa among nationality groups, specifically Corsicans [italics added], and that he was being asked to spot, assess, and recommend some dependable, quick-witted persons for our use.”18

  THE TIE-IN BETWEEN DRUG SMUGGLING AND ESPIONAGE

  According to documents contained in his 201-file, QJ/WIN was tall and thin, married (although homosexual), with many friends in well-to-do Parisian circles. He was a conman extraordinaire! He’d been a double agent during the war and had testified at the trial of Marshall Pétain. After the war he got involved in smuggling, and one of four or five FBN agents in Europe at the time recruited him and set him up in a business in Luxembourg. Through this FBN agent, the CIA’s Luxembourg station chief, Arnold Silver, contacted QJ/WIN in the autumn of 1958 “in connection with an illegal narcotic operation into the United States … in behalf of the Bureau of Narcotics.”19

  QJ/WIN worked for the FBN and CIA over the next eighteen months, during which time Silver came to view him as a potential agent provocateur against the Soviets.

  Curiously, and perhaps not by coincidence, the CIA hired QJ/WIN shortly after Henry J. Taylor, the US ambassador to Switzerland, was quoted in the 18 July 1958 New York Times as saying that the Communist Chinese,
in league with the Soviets, were using Bern as the center of a huge narcotics enterprise, and were using the profits to finance spy operations, as well as Colonel Abdul Karim el-Kassem’s revolution in Iraq. (If the reader will recall, Sid Gottlieb sent Kassem a MKULTRA “Black Valentine” shortly thereafter.) A week later Taylor retracted his claim, but the stage was set for Silver’s provocateur, QJ/WIN, and his master, Bill Harvey at Division D, to exploit the situation.20

  The machinery was set in motion and in April 1959, QJ/WIN told Silver that he had been approached by a French national and asked to join a narcotics ring that was receiving huge amounts of opium from the Chinese Communists. The Frenchman had brown hair and brown eyes, and was a heavy smoker. Born in Basque country, he’d smuggled narcotics before and after the war from North Africa, and had been convicted three times on criminal charges, most recently in December 1958. The Frenchman told QJ/WIN that two Sicilians living in Paris were already engaged in this traffic (perhaps the aforementioned Santelli and Garioni), and that one had received fifty kilograms of free opium in Hong Kong and had delivered it to the US through Canada. The Frenchman said that the Chinese provided the narcotics free of charge, on condition that they were delivered to the US.21

  QJ/WIN stated his willingness to infiltrate the Chinese Communist drug ring, but the CIA had doubts about his reliability – and Silver felt the Frenchman was involved in some shady side deal, and had offered his services simply because he wanted free passage to smuggle drugs as a special employee of the FBN – so on 29 April 1959, Allen Dulles directed that “the nearest narcotics bureau officer” be summoned to interrogate QJ/WIN and the Frenchman, assess their stories, and decide what action, if any, was warranted.22 Dulles’s personal involvement underscores how important the potential operation was, precisely because it “tied in” with another report by a CIA agent who claimed to be in a similar (if not the same) drug ring managed by the Chinese Communist Embassy in Bern.