The Strength of the Wolf

by Douglas Valentine

  What this means is that for ten years the CIA’s Dr Frankensteins had secretly employed LSD, often in FBN safehouses, for nefarious purposes, but by 1963 it had escaped into the streets. No longer the exclusive property of the CIA, it was now judged to be a dangerous drug, and thus, ironically, a law enforcement issue of concern to the FBN.

  THE RETURN OF THE CUBANS

  Ever ready to try any innovation in unconventional warfare, the CIA in December 1962 enlarged its mercenary army by trading embargoed drugs for anti-Castro Cubans captured during the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Some members of the brigade were sent to secret training camps in Florida and Louisiana, to plot murder and mayhem against Castro; others were sent to fight Congolese rebels; and yet others to stamp out Cuban-inspired “brush fire” revolutions in Latin America. Wherever they landed, especially in Mexico, these CIA-trained Cuban Contras turned to drug smuggling to finance their operations, and their syndicate would soon join its Kuomintang, French, Italian, and American counterparts as one of the world’s premier drug trafficking operations.

  Manuel Artime is a perfect example of the CIA’s lackadaisical attitude toward the drug smuggling activities of anti-Castro Cubans.14 After his release from prison in December 1962, Artime’s case officer, E. Howard Hunt, placed him in a leadership role in the terrorist Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC) in Miami.15 Hunt certainly knew that Artime was using drug money to finance his operations in Miami, as did Hunt’s bosses, James Angleton, Richard Helms, and Tracy Barnes. As the CIA’s domestic operations chief, Barnes was especially well placed to protect Cuban drug distributors. He was in charge of domestic operations involving anti-Castro Cubans and the Mafia, he controlled sixty-four branch offices across America, and, in conjunction with Angleton’s counterintelligence staff, he worked with police forces to provide security for CIA safehouses across America, including any in Dallas, Texas.

  And indeed, drug-smuggling Cubans were involved in MKULTRA operations by 1963. CIA execution expert Bill Harvey met with Johnny Roselli in June, at the same time that Trafficante’s Cuban associate, assassin Tony Varona, visited Artime’s CRC offices in New Orleans and Miami. Harvey stayed in touch with Roselli after his exile to Rome, and thus had an open channel to Trafficante and Varona.16

  There was another Cuban angle as well. In January 1963, prior to his transfer, Harvey turned his MKULTRA operation (but not agent QJ/WIN) over to Des Fitzgerald, his replacement as chief of Task Force W. And Fitzgerald advanced the Castro assassination plot through a disgruntled Cuban military Attaché, Major Rolando Cubela Secades. The CIA had first asked Cubela to kill Castro in March 1961, at a meeting in Mexico arranged by Cubela’s drug trafficking associate, Santo Trafficante. Despite Trafficante’s exposure as a double agent later that year, Fitzgerald retained Cubela, probably because he enjoyed diplomatic immunity and could travel without his luggage being checked. Fitzgerald, as chief of the CIA’s Far East Asia Division, had long been aware of the Kuomintang’s narcotics activities, and during 1963 Cubela traveled between Spain, France, Mexico, Prague, and New York – all major transit points in the illicit drug trade. In August, Cubela returned to Havana, and in September he went to Paris to await instructions.17

  Cubela, notably, was a confederate of FBI informer Jose Aleman, the mob-connected financier who in September 1962 heard Santo Trafficante say that JFK was “going to be hit.” And that means that Fitzgerald, like Harvey, had an open channel to the patron saint of drug smugglers.

  THE MKULTRA SHUFFLE

  While the CIA’s Cuban and Mafia assets plotted bloody treason, a CIA public relations consultant using the name Cal Salerno opened a new safehouse in Chicago in July 1963, as part of MKULTRA Subproject 132. Salerno had recently moved his offices from New York, held a top secret Agency clearance and, as the CIA noted in an internal memorandum, “is completely witting of the aims and goals of the project. He possesses unique facilities and personal abilities which have made him invaluable in this kind of operation.”18

  Charlie Siragusa used the alias Cal Salerno throughout his FBN career, but when asked by Senator Edward Kennedy in 1977 if he had set up the Chicago safehouse, he said, “There has been some poetic license taken with the truth. I only just learned the name of Cal Salerno was adopted by others that succeeded me. I had nothing to do with the CIA during the period of time that I was in Chicago.”19

  Kennedy accepted Siragusa’s denial, even though Siragusa had traveled to Chicago in July 1963 to apply for the job of chief of the Illinois Crime Commission, and while there had socialized with his MKULTRA liaison, Ray Treichler, who had taken a job with a chemical manufacturing firm in Chicago after retiring from the CIA. So why didn’t Kennedy ask the obvious follow-up question and inquire who had impersonated the interviewee and why? Apparently, the Senator’s reticence had to do with the fact that Bobby Kennedy had, concurrently with the establishment of the Chicago safehouse in July 1963, entered into relations with Paulino Sierra Martinez, head of the anti-Castro Junta del Gobierno de Cuba en el Exilio (JGCE) in Chicago. Sierra, on behalf of Bobby Kennedy and with State Department support, funded anti-Castro terrorist groups outside of the US – perhaps through Siragusa or his impersonator at the new Chicago safehouse. He was allegedly tied to Trafficante and Marcello, and if he was, Sierra represented yet a third Cuban channel to CIA-protected drug smugglers and assassins.20

  Meanwhile, Chicago’s besieged Mafia boss, Sam Giancana, had revealed his MKULTRA connections as a way of warding off the FBI. On 16 August, the Chicago Sun-Times ran an article titled, “CIA Sought Giancana Help for Cuba Spying.” Justice Department sources denied the claim, but that very same day Richard Helms sent a memo to McCone regarding the 7 May 1962 briefing of Bobby Kennedy about the CIA’s use of Giancana and Trafficante in its hare-brained scheme to kill Castro. It was the first time McCone had heard “of any aspect of the scheme to assassinate Castro using members of the gambling syndicate.”21

  CIA murder plots abounded. In April 1963, the Agency assassinated Quinim Pholsena, the Laotian foreign minister, and in May it tried to kill China’s president Liu Shao-chi in Cambodia.22 In October, President Kennedy authorized the CIA to assist a cabal of Vietnamese generals in the overthrow of President Diem. The generals murdered Diem and his brother Nhu on 2 November 1963.

  In New York, the FBN’s Gambling Squad was closing in on various dignitaries, as well as Meyer Lansky and other Mafia members of “the gambling syndicate,” all of whom were linked to drug trafficking and CIA assassination plots. In Washington, Bobby Kennedy’s star witness in the war on crime, Joe Valachi, was revealing the Mafia’s top secrets, while in Miami members of the Mafia’s Commission were swearing sacred Italian oaths to murder the entire Kennedy family. The CIA and FBI were also concerned about the uppity AG, whose war on crime was about to expose the skeletons in their respective closets. Time was running out.

  On 21 November 1963, CIA assassin Rolando Cubela traveled from Brazil to Paris, where Des Fitzgerald handed him a MKULTRA pen loaded with a deadly poison. The pen had been tested in San Francisco by Ike Feldman and George White, and was rigged with a hypodermic needle designed specifically for assassinations.23 The CIA had gone to such extraordinary lengths to kill the annoying dictator of a tiny island and yet, according to the Warren Commission, a simple Italian bolt-action rifle was employed the next day to kill the president of the United States.

  “I’ll never forget that day,” Tully Acampora says. “Hank Manfredi turned to me and said, ‘They got him.’ ”

  “They,” in this case, meaning the right-wing ultras who hated Kennedy for, among other imagined offences, imposing racial desegregation on the sovereign slave state of Texas.

  THE EYES OF TEXAS

  Enter Lee Harvey Oswald, the misfit marine who’d served as a radio operator at the Atsugi Air Base in Japan, where the CIA used LSD to interrogate spies and drug dealers, and where, most likely, they recruited him to work as a double agent in the Soviet Union, and later, in a world of mystifying intrigue
s that ended in epic tragedy.

  But Oswald was not a drug smuggler or special employee of the FBN, and for the purposes of this book, his role in the assassination is not directly relevant, even if he were the Manchurian Candidate – a magic, push-button assassin – or a MKULTRA patsy, programmed to take the fall for the actual assassin. However, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) did say “there is solid evidence” that drug smugglers Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante, both CIA million-dollar men, were involved in the murder, and this is an issue that must be explored.24

  The other issue that will be raised in the remainder of this chapter is the utter absence of references to the FBN in any official investigation of the JFK assassination, despite the fact that Bureau informer Jack Ruby killed Oswald and that, as the HSCA concluded, Ruby had “direct contact” with associates of Marcello and Trafficante.25 Ruby’s stated motive in killing Oswald was to spare Jackie Kennedy the pain of a public trial, and perhaps that’s true. But if Ruby killed Oswald to protect the people who had conspired to kill JFK, were his FBN case agents wittingly involved in the cover-up?

  The Ruby family had a long history in the illicit drug trade. Jack’s older brother Hyman was convicted in 1939 of buying two ounces of heroin from Jacob Klein. As described in chapter 9, Klein slipped away from FBN agents in New York in October 1954, thanks to George White’s intervention on behalf of John Ormento, and he again avoided arrest by FBN agents in Chicago after Jim Attie’s informant was murdered in January 1960.

  Klein was luckier than Ruby’s next partner, Paul Roland Jones. In October 1947, Hyman betrayed Jones to FBN agents in Chicago. According to White’s diary, Hyman had been his informant since July 1946. Jack followed in big brother’s footsteps and served White in 1950, when he briefed the Kefauver Committee about organized crime in Chicago – although his attorney, Louis Kutner, agreed to allow him to testify only “on the condition that the Kefauver Committee stay away from Dallas.”26 That raises the question of whether Committee investigator George White, who undoubtedly brought Ruby to Kefauver’s attention, concurred with this request. If so, why would White want to keep the Committee out of Dallas? Was it to deflect attention from the Pawley–Cooke mission in Taiwan, which was funded by ultra Texas oilmen like H. L. Hunt, and which, in 1951, was facilitating the CIA-Kuomintang drug smuggling operation that entered the US by crossing the Mexican border at Laredo, Texas?

  There was certainly enough evidence for the Kefauver Committee to take a long look at the Lone Star State. In 1951, Lait and Mortimer had identified Hunt as a professional gambler who ran a private racing wire, which suggests Mafia ties. They had also claimed that the Mafia had “taken over the age-old racket of running guns across the border,” under the aegis of Carlos Marcello.27

  The FBN office in Dallas knew Jack Ruby. Murray A. Brown, the acting district supervisor on 22 November 1963, described him as “a sleazy opportunist who was always trying to get the Dallas cops to patronize his club.” But, Brown says, “Ruby was not an FBN informant.”

  George Gaffney, however, vividly recalls Secret Service chief James Rowley asking him on 25 November 1963 if the FBN had a file on Ruby. It did. “But there wasn’t much in it,” Gaffney recalls. “Just that he was a source on numerous occasions, on unimportant suspects.”

  Right after Ruby shot Oswald, Mort Benjamin checked the files in the New York office and found one that indicated that Ruby had been an FBN informer since the 1940s. But the next time Benjamin looked for it, the New York file had gone missing, and Secret Service chief Rowley never returned the FBN headquarters file to Gaffney – which strongly suggests that someone did not want anyone to know that Ruby had been an FBN informant.

  Not only do the FBN agents from Dallas disagree with the rest of the outfit about Ruby’s status as an informant, the stated focus of their operations is also at odds with Anslinger’s legendary obsession with the Mafia. Murray Brown, an agent in Dallas from 1955 until 1976, insists that the Mafia was not selling heroin there. Long-time Dallas agent Bowman Taylor agrees. “We weren’t after the Mafia,” he says. “That’s gambling more than dope. New Orleans had the Mafia.”

  The small FBN office in New Orleans, which reported to Dallas, had arrested Marcello on a marijuana rap in 1938, and in 1963 it had reasons to believe he was a major narcotics trafficker. He was cited, for example, in the International List as an associate of Frank Coppola’s. Furthermore, as the chief of the New Orleans Narcotics Unit, Clarence Giarusso, said (see chapter 4), it was the FBN’s job, not his, to investigate Mafia drug smugglers who imported drugs from overseas. But according to agents in New Orleans, they never had the manpower or resources to make a conspiracy case on Marcello, so instead they worked on Black addicts who traveled to New York and returned with heroin, leaving the million-dollar man left unhindered – perhaps to plot the murder of the president?

  IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES

  Taylor and Brown’s assertions are incredible, considering that Jack Cusack had informed the McClellan Committee in January 1958 that Mafioso Joseph Civello ran the heroin business in Dallas in conjunction with John Ormento and the Magaddino family in Buffalo. Cusack linked Civello with Marcello, Trafficante, and Jimmy Hoffa – the HSCA’s three prime suspects in the Kennedy assassination. Civello was Marcello’s “deputy in Dallas,” had attended the Apalachin convention, and is listed in the 1964 Senate Hearings as receiving heroin from Rocco Pellegrino in New York.28 Pellegrino, notably, was Saro Mogavero’s godfather.

  Considering the information available on Civello, how could the Dallas office not know of his narcotics activities, or that Jack Ruby was part of his organization? How could the FBN be unaware that the FBI, in 1956, had identified Ruby as a central figure in John Ormento’s operation between Texas, Mexico, and New York?29 Or that the Mafia’s courier from New York, Benjamin Indiviglio, was convicted of heroin trafficking in Houston in 1956?30 Or that Indiviglio, amazingly, while awaiting his appeal, shared a prison cell with Joe Orsini?31 And that when Orsini was released from prison in 1958, he and Indiviglio, who was acquitted by the US Supreme Court in the 1956 case, immediately went into business?32

  It isn’t impossible that the police were able to keep the Dallas agents in the dark. The Kefauver Committee concluded that big-city vice squads could limit the ability of federal agents to make cases. Civello was a police informant on narcotics cases: perhaps the racist Dallas judicial system was content to protect his narcotics operation in exchange for information on his Black customers, and perhaps the Dallas FBN agents chose to look the other way. That would be in accordance with a formula that is still uniformly applied across America. Or perhaps Civello and Ruby had more powerful patrons. Civello was convicted in 1931 on a federal narcotics charge, but obtained early parole on the recommendation of Dallas Sheriff Bill Decker, a former bootlegger into whose custody Oswald was being transferred when he was shot by Ruby.33 Civello was also linked through his protected gambling racket with Hoover’s patron, Clint Murchison. That relationship may explain why, in 1962, the FBI found no evidence of illegal activity by Civello, despite the fact that he’d been convicted in 1960 and sentenced to five years for obstructing justice.34 This may also account for why the Warren Commission, whose conclusions were based largely on the FBI’s investigation, was not able to turn up any evidence to establish “a significant link between Ruby and organized crime.”35

  Consider also that Ruby met with the FBI eight times in 1959, the same year he visited his friend Lewis McWillie in Cuba.36 Then managing Lansky’s Tropicana club in Havana, McWillie took Ruby to visit Trafficante at Trescornia prison, shortly before Trafficante was released and hired by the CIA, along with Johnny Roselli, to assassinate Castro using MKULTRA technology in part developed by FBN agents. Add to that the fact that Roselli and Ruby had known each other since the 1930s, and the fact that they both knew George White. As Ike Feldman noted in chapter 15, White often sent him to the airport to pick up Roselli and bring him to the office. />
  The fact that White had long-standing relations with Ruby and Roselli, and the allegation that Ruby and Roselli (then working for Harvey in the ZR/RIFLE assassination project) met twice in Miami in October 1963, is not enough to indict White in a conspiracy to kill JFK.37 His diaries offer no clues. There are no entries from mid-1962 through 1963, while he was seriously ill with cirrhosis of the liver, and then they resume in 1964 – which is very strange. Remember, White was linked through MKULTRA to the sex and drugs blackmail schemes Hoover and the CIA used to keep Jack and Bobby under wraps. And there was a lot of mud waiting to be slung: the Kennedy–Campbell–Giancana intrigue; Jack’s affairs with Mariella Novotny (of the Christine Keeler sex-ring scandal, which forced Great Britain’s defense minister to resign), and with Ellen Rometsch, known to have bedded Soviet agents; and the affairs Jack and Bobby had with Marilyn Monroe, who died from a drug overdose in August 1962.38

  THE COVER-UP

  Besides having a blind spot for Mafia drug dealers in Dallas and New Orleans – and Jack Ruby’s relationship with them – the FBN incriminated itself further by becoming involved in James Angleton’s effort to blame Castro for the Kennedy assassination. According to George Gaffney, Mexican officials intercepted a call to Havana from the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City. The Cubans were claiming credit for the assassination; but instead of telling the FBI or the CIA, the Mexicans told the FBN agent in charge in Mexico City, William Durkin, and on Sunday Durkin called Gaffney in Washington. Gaffney rushed the message to Secret Service chief James Rowley, at which point Angleton’s theory that Castro arranged the assassination emerged as an alternative to the Lone Nut theory promulgated by Hoover, and later embraced by the Warren Commission.