The Strength of the Wolf

by Douglas Valentine

  Wherever the Mafia went, the CIA was ready and waiting: in New Orleans, home of Carlos Marcello, where Tony Varona – Trafficante’s partner in the CIA’s murder plots against Castro, and head of the Miami chapter of the terrorist Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC) – visited in June 1963, after conferring with Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, and acquiring funds for an anti-Castro paramilitary training camp in Louisiana.12 In Dallas, CIA officer Dave Phillips was establishing the state-sponsored, anti-Castro terrorist organization Alpha 66.13

  Everywhere they went, CIA agents rubbed shoulders with the lunatic fringe: racist Minutemen in cahoots with Carlos Marcello, mercenary and mob hit men, and crazed anti-Castro Cubans, all pledged to kill a Kennedy, any Kennedy, for Christ.

  MIAMI’S RED, WHITE, AND BLUES

  Richard J. “Rick” Dunagan joined the FBN in 1962 after a hitch in the Air Force and five years with the Border Patrol. A big rough-and-tumble agent, fluent in Spanish and familiar with all types of firearms, Dunagan was assigned to the four-man Miami office where, as he recalls, “Gene Marshall was the boss, Sal Vizzini was the assistant, and Jack Greene, a former Miami cop, was there too. Just the four of us, and deputy sheriff Anthony DeLeon, who later became a fugitive.

  “When I started working for the FBN, I was so green the cows could eat me,” Dunagan laughs. “Marshall gave me an informer, the brother of a guy he’d put away a few years before. The office had a nice ’58 Chevy, which we take for a drive. When we get where we’re going, the informer gives me a deck of cocaine and says, ‘I’ll be right back.’ I toss it under the seat. Meanwhile I’m a White guy hanging around a Black neighborhood looking suspicious, and a cop arrests me. I’m undercover, I’ve got no ID. He says, ‘Get out of the car.’ He searches the car, finds the coke, and tosses me in jail.

  “After that I stayed in the office, playing water boy to Marshall and Vizzini, until the day Sinbad arrived. Sinbad was a Moorish Muslim who saved my career. He came into the office wearing cut-offs, a beanie, and rubber thongs. He’d been put away before by Vizzini, done seven years, and was out and looking to become a professional informant. First he went to Marshall, then Vizzini, then Greene, and they all threw him out. Finally he sticks his head in my office and says, ‘Does you be a narcotic agent?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He asks, ‘Can you make me a helper?’ So I pretended to be a government agent and said, ‘Depends on what you have to offer.’

  “Sinbad rolls off names of people he can make cases on, all big-time traffickers. I hadn’t been to the Academy yet, and in the process of making cases on these people he taught me 95 percent of everything I know. He worked for me for years in Miami, through an awful lot. He wasn’t a junky, but he’d shoot up to make a case, and one time the bad guys tried to kill him with poison. The only thing that saved his life was that his Muslim brothers in his clan got him a medic.

  “Finally they sent me to the Technical Investigations Aide School, which was run by Agent Johnny Thompson, where they taught us how to pick locks, put on wiretaps, and take surreptitious photographs. When I got back to Miami, I was really in business. I had Sinbad, and I’d been trained, but I was still new. One day a big guy walks in the office wearing a planter’s hat, a Harry Truman floral shirt, Bermuda shorts, and thongs. He’s smoking a big Cuban cigar. ‘Is Gene Marshall in?’ he asks. ‘Depends,’ I say. ‘Who wants him?’

  “Real slow he says, ‘Harry J. Anslinger.’

  “Well, I burst out laughing. I stick my head into Marshall’s office and say, ‘Hey Gene, there’s a guy out here say’s he’s Harry J. Anslinger.’

  “ ‘What’s he look like?’ Marshall asks. I tell him.

  “ ‘Yep,’ he says. ‘That’s Mr. Anslinger.’

  “I soon found out that Anslinger loved Gene Marshall. He and Gene liked to go out fishing on Sal Vizzini’s boat, and I’d listen to the stories he’d tell about how he lost his hair from the stress of so many people shooting for his job before the war. Man, the things I heard.”

  When not entertaining Anslinger, the Miami agents conducted narcotics investigations, and one target was Tampa resident Santo Trafficante. As part of the on-again, off-again surveillance, Dunagan in 1963 monitored Trafficante’s daughter’s wedding. But that was as close as any FBN agent ever got to the million-dollar man. There were other CIA intrigues too. As Dunagan explains, “The CIA made weekly visits to our office, but they never helped us make cases. It was a one-way street. We helped them. For example, one time one of our Cuban informants said, ‘This weekend, some former Bay of Pigs people are going to steal some vessels and armaments and launch an invasion.’ So we told the CIA guy, and they stopped it. Another time a Cuban Army major, who had worked for Castro, and had been my informant since I was in the Border Patrol in Daytona, says to me, ‘Rick, you like weapons, right? Big weapons, like fifty-caliber and thirty-caliber machine guns?”

  “ ‘Yeah,’ I said. So he says, ‘Can I buy you a cup of coffee?’

  “We’re having some of that jazzy Cuban coffee, and he says, ‘How’d you like to make $5,000 for one night’s work?’

  “ ‘Is this a bribe?’ I ask. ‘No,’ he says, ‘it’s business. We’re making a run and we need someone on the bow of the boat to man the machine gun.’

  “It didn’t seem right, so I went back and asked Marshall, and he said, ‘You’re crazy! You’re a goddamned federal agent. How would it look if you got caught invading Cuba?’

  “And Marshall was right. They went out, got caught, and Castro had the major shot.”

  20

  THE FBN AND THE ASSASSINATION OF JFK

  “And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged.”

  Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd”

  In May 1963, director of Central Intelligence John McCone instructed his inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, to conduct a review of the MKULTRA Program. An OSS veteran and founding father of the CIA, Kirkpatrick had been serving as IG for almost ten years and, having covered up Frank Olson’s death in 1954 (see chapter 9), would certainly have kept the MKULTRA skeletons in the closet. But he was promoted to executive director in April and the responsibility for inquiring into the program passed to John S. Earman Jr. An erstwhile member of the Bloodstone Committee that smuggled Nazis out of Europe, Earman was a dedicated Cold Warrior; but unlike Kirkpatrick, he knew little about MKULTRA, and what he discovered disturbed him. On 14 August, he reported to McCone that MKULTRA was “unethical” and possibly illegal, that it put “the rights and interests of US citizens in jeopardy,” and that subjects often became “ill for hours or days, including hospitalization [a reference to Linda King] in at least one case.” But the nature and results of the experiments were buried under so much secrecy he couldn’t report comprehensively on what had been tested or what conclusions had been drawn. Only two people knew, and they hadn’t kept any records.1

  Sid Gottlieb and Richard Helms, the creators of MKULTRA, had tried to cover themselves by not keeping records, but to their dismay, the new inspector general had also stumbled across the existence of the FBN safehouses, and he reported what he found out. Earman stated that testing at the safehouses had been performed “on individuals at all social levels,” including “informants and members of suspected criminal elements from whom the [FBN] obtained results of operational value.” He didn’t say what results were obtained by sending hoods on trips to Never-Never Land, but he noted that arrangements were made with “police authorities … to protect the activity in critical situations,” as was the case when Linda King complained to hospital authorities about George White having dosed her with LSD in September 1953. To further ensure plausible denial, the CIA made sure that the responsibility for the handling of the test subjects rested “with the narcotics agent working alone.”

  Gottlieb and Helms had been sure to place responsibility on the few FBN agents involved in MKULTRA, but Earman preferred that they not be involved at all. He reported that “deep cover agents” were “more favorably suited” than FBN agents when
there was a need “to perform realistic testing.”

  “Realistic testing,” of course, was a euphemism for field operations, and Earman wanted to exclude FBN agents from that potentially compromising activity. But in his response to Earman, Deputy Director Richard Helms said, “We are virtually obliged to test on unwitting humans.” He recommended that the CIA make arrangements with America’s principal police departments and prison hospitals, as well as “foreign intelligence or security organizations … with this objective in mind.” Making his feelings perfectly clear, Helms said, “Our present arrangements with the Bureau of Narcotics appear to me to be the most practical and secure method available to implement this program.”2

  Helms felt that perfecting MKULTRA’s offensive capabilities was worth the risk of relying on FBN agents, knowing that “the chief of the Bureau would disclaim any knowledge of the activity.”3 He also trusted the complicit FBN agents to play along, assuming their proven ability to dissemble would make it impossible to determine exactly what happened in the safehouses. To some extent he was right. When asked about the activities at the safehouses, George Gaffney claimed that the CIA used the 13th Street pad “only once” while he managed it. At his CIA debriefing in 1977, Charlie Siragusa denied knowing anything about Ike Feldman’s safehouse at 212 East 18th Street – although he said that Feldman and Ray Treichler ran operations behind his back, and he implied that George Belk knew what they were doing. When called before Congress to testify on the subject in 1977, Belk said that Giordano had briefed him about the safehouses, but that he had no knowledge of what the CIA was doing there, that he had never heard of MKULTRA (which was probably true, as the term MKULTRA was used only by CIA agents), and that any documents linking him to it were false.4

  Despite the fact that Gaffney, Belk, and Siragusa complied with the nondisclosure statements they had signed with the CIA, it’s clear what the pads were used for. Al Habib managed the San Francisco safehouse after Feldman’s transfer to New York in 1961, and acknowledges that there were frequent visits from Sid Gottlieb through 1963. In chapter 15, John Marks described the types of tests that Gottlieb and his associates conducted at the safehouses starting in 1955. Gaffney has acknowledged that the 13th Street pad was made available to government officials whom the bosses wanted to impress. Agent John Tagley would pick them up at the airport, buy them tickets to a Broadway show, or provide some other form of entertainment, and clean up after they left. Anslinger and Sam Pryor stayed there, as did Gaffney’s relatives when they were in town. The pad was so widely used that Gaffney never suspected foul play – not until former District Supervisor Jim Ryan found a wiretap on the phone in the pad. Ryan’s shocking discovery made Gaffney wonder if the CIA was tape recording or filming Senators with their pants down. “If the place was bugged,” he muses, conjuring up the specter of political blackmail, “it could have been very embarrassing.”

  As noted earlier, Siragusa assumed that the safehouses were used to uncover “defectors” within the CIA. According to author Tom Mangold, Angleton bugged at least one Treasury official who entertained important foreign guests and diplomats.5 And if he did it on one occasion, it’s likely that Angleton used the FBN pads to monitor other government officials as well.

  Political blackmail was not MKULTRA’s sole purpose. Feldman, in a 1994 article for Spin Magazine, said that another purpose was “assassinations.” And indeed, a stated goal of the program was to find out “if an individual can be trained to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily.”6 In others words, the CIA was trying to develop mind-control techniques, including the use of LSD, that could be used to create a push-button assassin who would possess no memory of his deadly deeds.

  In summation, the FBN safehouses served as bases for counterintelligence operations, political blackmail schemes, training and recruiting of assassins, and, as will become apparent later on as way stations for CIA drug smugglers.

  THE GENIE OUT OF THE BOTTLE

  Earman did not mention assassins or drug smuggling, but he did say the CIA had perfected “an interrogation theory employing chemical substances.” Theory was practice by 1962, when an Army Special Purpose Team traveled to the Atsugi Naval Base in Japan to use LSD during interrogations of foreign nationals suspected of drug smuggling and spying.7 Tests were also conducted on prisoners in Vietnam, where the CIA was concerned about a regional drug smuggling operation managed by President Diem’s brother, Nhu, through his intelligence service. Clearly, this “Special Purpose Team” was a cover for CIA officers eager to learn if Nhu’s drug smuggling operation had been penetrated by the French – or worse, the KGB or Communist Chinese.

  Back in the States, the CIA hired “medical specialists” to test LSD on prisoners at the Atlanta Penitentiary and, through the National Institute of Mental Health, drug addicts at the Public Health Farm in Lexington. In doing this, Earman noted, the CIA “buys a piece” of the specialist. What he didn’t say was that some zealous specialists got carried away with their fiendish research. Dr. Harris Isbell, for example, kept seven male heroin addicts at Lexington addled on acid for seventy-seven days. A lawsuit was brought against the Army in a similar case, but the Supreme Court ruled against the plaintiff – a soldier named James Stanley – in effect granting the CIA a license to conduct Dachau-style experiments on unwitting American citizens under the aegis of national security.8

  LSD, meanwhile, had become a fad among the eccentric elite. Ambassador Clare Luce enjoyed it immensely, but felt it would lose its appeal once it fell into the hands of the hoi polloi.9 Scientists searching for a cure for alcoholism also looked into the potentially beneficial uses of LSD, and criminal psychologist Timothy Leary felt it might rehabilitate prison inmates – then realized it had far greater potential. Such was the paradox of the psychedelic: it could drive a scientist like Frank Olson to suicide, or make an offbeat hustler like Tim Leary soar angelically. So much depended on the subject’s state of mind and the motive of the person administering the drug.

  Regrettably, the CIA chose to develop LSD as a weapon of unconventional warfare; and once it was determined that the drug was dangerous, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) demanded tighter government control over unlicensed distributors. As FDA Investigator Frank Larkworthy recalls, “LSD became a violation of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, and my first LSD case began in 1963 when my supervisor in Los Angeles, Orin McMillan, gave me Al Hubbard as an informant.”

  Alfred Hubbard was in his sixties in 1963. Always dressed in a suit and tie, he was, according to Larkworthy, a conservative businessman bent on acquiring the sole distribution rights for LSD in America. He also had a checkered past. He’d been imprisoned for smuggling liquor to California during Prohibition, but his record was purged in return for his services as a Treasury Department informant, and undisclosed services for the OSS. After the war, the Kentucky-born conman became a Canadian citizen and a millionaire, through wise investments in airlines and uranium. However, a transcendental trip in England in 1951 inspired him to restructure his portfolio based on a vision of the world’s political leaders achieving enlightenment, with the aid of a little acid uplift.10 By 1955, Hubbard had become the self-appointed Johnny Appleseed of acid in America and, before the drug was outlawed in 1966, had turned on an estimated 6,000 people, including beat gurus Alan Watts, Gerald Heard, Keith Ditman, and Aldous Huxley, author of The Doors of Perception. Hubbard’s pretext for obtaining LSD was his search for a cure for alcoholism and, in 1958, the FDA granted him an Investigative New Drug Permit, allowing him to distribute the psychedelic in the US. This implies that Hubbard had powerful patrons, most likely in the CIA, who guaranteed him a steady source of supply, first from Sandoz, and then – after he got in trouble with the Swiss authorities for not paying export duty on a gram of pure LSD in a bank vault in Zurich – from Chemapol in Czechoslovakia.11

  FDA Investigator Frank Larkworthy was unaware of Hubbard’s CIA connections – or that he’d been an FBN employee, or that Geor
ge White was probably his case officer – when he acquired him as an informant.12 He only knew that Hubbard hated Tim Leary and was willing to lead raids on underground labs. “This was before Augustus Owsley Stanley found a cheap way to manufacture single doses,” Larkworthy explains. “An LSD session with a psychiatrist in those days could cost as much as $600, and Hubbard wanted to protect what for him was a lucrative business.”

  Hubbard began making cases for Larkworthy, as he had for his previous case officer, FDA Investigator Stuart “Stu” Nadler. A former FBN agent and protégé of George White in New York in the early 1950s, Nadler had transferred to Alaska in 1954, then Los Angeles in 1956, and was assigned as an administrative assistant to White in San Francisco in January 1960. “Stu was a nice guy,” Larkworthy recalls. “Then something happened between him and White, and he quit the FBN around 1961 and joined the FDA. Not long after that, Stu made the Bernard Roseman case using information provided by Hubbard. That’s the first big LSD case.”

  In his book, LSD: The Age Of Mind, Roseman describes the bust, which he thought was a robbery, as follows: “As Mr. Pilson (in reality, the F.D.A. agent) started counting out the money, the kitchen door flew open and a man raving something, holding an automatic rifle, burst in.”13

  Roseman, who had purchased his LSD in Israel, was charged with smuggling and selling an unlabeled drug without a license, and was sentenced on several interstate distribution misdemeanors. He went to prison, and Hubbard continued to sell acid trips at five hundred dollars a whack, while making cases on his competitors, until the drug was outlawed in 1966, at which point he surrendered thirteen grams of pure LSD to Larkworthy.