The Strength of the Wolf

by Douglas Valentine

  Despite the military’s obstructionism, the Nebbia case produced another significant piece of information as well. A search of Nebbia’s belongings led to Albert Dion, president of a Corsican association in New York, and to Blaise Gherardi, a restaurateur and friend of Philippe de Vosjoli, SDECE’s liaison officer to James Angleton until 1963.11 De Vosjoli and James Angleton had often dined together at Gherardi’s Rive Gauche restaurant in Washington!12

  In addition, FBN agents found the number of Nebbia’s Swiss bank account and traced it to Sami Khoury’s financial manager, Hersh Gross. Tough Joseph Luccarotti remained silent, but the investigation exposed his contacts in Sao Paulo and Jamaica. Assigned to an engineer battalion at Fort Benning when he was busted, Herman Conder became the government’s chief witness and received a mere suspended sentence. Sam Desist and Frank Dioguardia were convicted in July 1966. Dioguardia’s links to Frank Dasti in Montreal were revealed, as were his receivers in New York – Armand Casoria and Joseph Mangano.13

  Further investigation revealed that Casoria supplied Gennardo Zanfardino, as well as Frank and Joseph Malizia (aka the Pontiac brothers). Zanfardino would soon become an object of Frankie Waters’s attention, and, according to Tom Tripodi, so would the Malizias.

  As noted, the intelligence angle of the Nebbia case would return to haunt the FBN. Achille Cecchini was arrested in the case but released, and resumed his position as heroin supplier to the Mertz SDECE operation, which continued to smuggle an estimated quarter ton of heroin annually to America through 1968. When Mertz was finally arrested in November 1969, he served only six months in jail and, as reported by the Newsday staff in The Heroin Trail, then retired to his 1,400-acre estate in Loiret, France, under the protection of his patron, SDECE Colonel Nicholas Fourcaud.14

  The CIA had known about Mertz all along, but chose to look away. This fact became evident in October 1972, when Newsday reporters asked Paul Knight for information about Mertz. Then a CIA agent, as well as the federal narcotic agent in charge of European operations, Knight, who’d been in the business for twenty years by then, said he never heard of him.

  THE BEN BARKA AFFAIR

  Two months prior to the Nebbia case, another political espionage-charged French Connection case had climaxed in October 1965 with the murder of the exiled Moroccan leader Mehdi Ben Barka. As nothing is what it appears to be in this affair, a little background is helpful in understanding why Barka became a drug trafficking suspect, and how the FBN played a central role in his murder.

  Several years before Barka’s exile in July 1963, the CIA struck a deal with Morocco’s King Hassan II and the top managers of his security forces. It was agreed that Hassan would allow the CIA to use Morocco’s Kenitra Air Base to launch covert operations in Africa and the Middle East, and in exchange the CIA would provide technical assistance in identifying and eliminating his domestic opponents, including Ben Barka. But Hassan was considering a pardon for Barka in the summer of 1965 and, having agreed to chair the January 1966 Tri-Continental Congress in Havana, Barka’s real enemy was the CIA, which considered his visits to Moscow and his potential return to Moroccan politics as direct threats to US security interests in the region.15 Barka, who was a socialist and not a communist, may also have known about CIA and SDECE involvement in the hash traffic between Morocco and France – very likely out of the aforementioned Kenitra Air Base – and that dirty little secret may have been the real reason both parties wanted him dead.16

  Moroccan intelligence officers and French gangsters killed Ben Barka, but the CIA and FBN paved the way. Members of de Gaulle’s administration were afraid that Barka would return to Morocco and reform its government and were thus susceptible to manipulation. Knowing this, the CIA, through its chief asset in the Moroccan security service, General Mohammed Oufkir, had Barka’s name entered into the Paris vice squad’s narcotics watch list, as a pretext for arresting him while he was in Paris. The French swallowed the CIA plan hook, line and sinker, thus providing the CIA with a patsy, as well as a plausibly deniable means of eliminating Barka, while achieving its goal of weakening Charles de Gaulle and strengthening his chief rival, Prime Minister Georges Pompidou. The CIA wanted to see Pompidou succeed de Gaulle, and the former was apparently aware of the CIA’s plan to frame Ben Barka on the phony narcotics charge, and then murder him.

  During this period, FBN Agent Vic Maria was working closely with Paris narcotic agents Roger Voitot and Louis Souchon. “We copied their reports,” Maria notes, “and Cusack made regular trips to Paris to check their index files.”

  Sadly for Barka, his name was entered into a report linking him to narcotics smuggling. Maria copied the report and sent it to Cusack, and from Cusack it went to the CIA. But, Maria stresses, “Barka was not a criminal. He was investigated simply to satisfy those who were controlling the budget. It was to their advantage to make the problem bigger, as their accomplishment would grow in stature as a result.”

  Barka, meanwhile, was lured from his residence in Geneva to Paris by the prospect of starring in a propaganda film. He fell into the trap, and on 29 October 1965, Paris stupes Souchon and Voitot, at the direction of SDECE Agent Antoine Lopez, arrested Barka outside the world-famous Brasserie Lipp on suspicion of drug trafficking. Lopez at the time was working for the CIA-infiltrated SDECE faction loyal to Pompidou. According to investigative reporter Henrik Kruger, Pompidou personally arranged for Lopez’s assignment as Air France security chief at Orly airport (where he bugged the VIP waiting room), as a cover for his narcotics-related activities as a double agent.

  Following the arrest, Lopez and the Paris stupes took Barka to a villa owned by Georges Boucheseiche, a lieutenant in the Jo Attia Gang who operated a string of brothels in Morocco. From Boucheseiche’s villa Barka was taken to the Château d’Aunoy and put under guard by the Bande de la Tour, a shadowy organization (the remnants, perhaps, of a unit formed by General Boyer de La Tour to provide security for Morocco’s prison system during French Protectorate days), described by Vic Maria’s informant, Dick Jepson, as “Southern people from the Compagnies Republicans de Sécurité.” As Jepson explains, “The château had a moat and high walls and was surrounded by barbed wire. It was a secluded place where political people could be held. Algeria’s first president, Ben Bella was locked up there too, along with seven or eight others.”

  According to Jepson, the Moroccans slowly tortured Barka to death at the Château d’Aunoy. However, a 10 January 1966 article in L’Express alleged that General Oufkir had killed Barka at another location. The article, which was delivered to the magazine by Lyon Gang member Joseph Zurita, and which was undoubtedly CIA disinformation, was widely believed and cast blame where it did not belong. That in itself is very interesting, but what is important for the subject of this book is that, immediately after delivering the article, Joseph Zurita applied for a US visa. Zurita listed his address as 10 rue de Dobropol. When arrested, Jean Nebbia had the same address among his papers, which directly ties their drug rings together. Upon arriving in New York, Zurita met daily with Maurice Castellani from 20 to 26 April 1966, thus bringing him as well into direct association with Nebbia, Mertz, Mondoloni and Francisci.17

  These impressive facts confirm that the CIA, through Castellani and other drug traffickers, manipulated political developments in France to its advantage. And decent FBN agents felt the sickening effects. As Vic Maria ruefully recalls, “I had a Corsican informer in the Attia Gang who said that Attia was definitely not into drugs. But the CIA said to pursue it, even if he wasn’t. That’s how they operated. They’d front you, then tell you to fade the heat, which in this case meant that cooperation with the French authorities ended for quite some time after the Barka affair.”

  On the other hand, the successful elimination of Ben Barka helped certain FBN agents grow in the CIA’s esteem, and it widened the gap between SDECE’s warring factions, which were still reeling from Angleton’s allegations that they were penetrated by the Russians. Convinced that the CIA had arranged
Barka’s murder through double agents within SDECE, de Gaulle fired SDECE chief Paul Jacquier. What he didn’t know was that the CIA plot “went beyond certain French Intelligence units to … the men closest to de Gaulle.”18 In this way the Ben Barka affair assured de Gaulle’s demise, and Pompidou’s ascent, thanks in part to the CIA’s successful exploitation of a self-serving faction in the FBN.

  One other important development began with the Ben Barka affair. Joseph Zurita, the man who fed the phony CIA article to L’Express, established narcotics connections in New York in April 1966 through Maurice Castellani. He did this on behalf of the emerging Lyon Gang, which was chiefly involved in armed robbery, but in 1965 switched to the more profitable and less dangerous activity of narcotics smuggling. Within a few years, as the new French connection, it would rival the Corsican gangs for supremacy in this arena.19

  THE NEW FACE OF THE FRENCH CONNECTION

  The changing face of French politics was reflected in the movement of Corsican smugglers to Latin America and the emergence of the Lyon Gang in Paris. Composed primarily of French nationals, the gang’s involvement in drug trafficking was uncovered by François Le Mouel and the Paris Brigade of Intelligence and Intervention. Formed in 1964 to disrupt an armed robbery ring, Le Mouel’s Brigade learned in 1965 that Lyon Gang members were smuggling heroin on biweekly flights to New York. When the Brigade learned that seven false passports had been obtained in Belgium, surveillance of the seven suspects was initiated at Orly Airport. The first arrests were made within ten days, in late November 1965, and the Lyon Gang’s contacts were identified in New York, Montevideo, Spain, and Montreal. New York buyer Oswaldo Alfonso was identified, and leads were initiated into parallel rings managed by Domingo Orsini and Jack Grosby. What the Brigade had uncovered, without the aid of the FBN, was an entirely new French narcotics network. It also represented a new determination on the part of certain French officials to combat narcotics trafficking in France.20

  After Pompidou’s election as president of France, François Le Mouel would assume national responsibility for narcotics investigations and, between 1972 and 1974, with the assistance of Paul Knight, would smash, once and for all, the criminal element of the French connection, without implicating either country’s intelligence services. But that development was years away, and in the mid-1960s, the French connection was still flourishing, primarily as a function of unconventional political warfare waged by SDECE and the CIA.

  In the Ben Barka case, the CIA used Vic Maria and Jack Cusack to frame and murder a political enemy. Having undermined the FBN’s investigation of Maurice Castellani and Irving Brown, the CIA also enabled Joseph Zurita to meet with Castellani and establish contacts for this new French connection on behalf of the Lyon Gang. For its part, SDECE had protected Michel Mertz since March 1961, when he first delivered 100 kilograms of heroin, concealed in a Citroen, to New York. Mertz made another delivery in October 1961, which, ironically, may have been the source in the 1962 French Connection case.21 This makes it likely that either Mertz, his courier Jean Mounet, or Maurice Castellani was mystery man J. Mouren.

  Consider also that SDECE had wiretaps on its own agent, Achille Cecchini, and these generated the Nebbia case. This action was taken in November 1965, on the heels of the assassination of the Ben Barka scandal; and that sequence of events raises the distinct possibility that Mertz and the pro-de Gaulle faction within SDECE sacrificed Nebbia as a way of focusing public attention on the role of the CIA and US Army – which had already been exposed by the arrest of Major Hobbs in Saigon – in Southeast Asia’s narcotics trade. This tit-for-tat explanation is not mere speculation. As Frank Selvaggi says, “The French let a hundred shipments go through, then they give us Conder. But we weren’t supposed to make that case, and a lot of people were mad as a result.”

  A temporary end to good relations with the French was not the only price US drug law enforcement paid for its role in the Barka affair: Customs officer Jacques Changeux, an undercover CIA agent, was forced out of his position, and his replacement refused to cooperate with Vic Maria. Maria was further isolated when George White’s partner in the Luciano Project, John Hanly, arrived in Paris as the new Secret Service officer. Hanly, probably at the insistence of the CIA, refused to allow Dick Jepson to assist the FBN, forcing Maria to look for a new informant. Fortunately he found one. A Greek photojournalist living in Belgium, Constantine Fondoukian was fluent in seven languages. And through Fondoukian’s courage and initiative – and the assistance of SDECE Agent Lopez – Maria would develop significant leads into the Lyon Gang and Ricord’s Group France in South America.

  Meanwhile, the king of Corsican drug traffickers, soft-spoken Paul Mondoloni, would continue to represent Marcel Francisci in their mutual dealings with the Orsini–Spirito organization. Of all the Corsican clans, the Franciscis alone maintained protection in France after 1965. Most of the drug smuggling Corsicans were betrayed by de Gaulle, and in 1964, former SAC veteran Armand Charpentier – a member of Ricord’s Group France – tried to assassinate the French president in Argentina.22

  Knowing that the shadow war against the CIA, along with his former Corsican allies, had spread to South America, de Gaulle in 1965 assigned Dominic Ponchardier (the former chief of his private security corps) as ambassador to Bolivia, and he posted Colonel Roger Barberot (former chief of the Corsican-staffed, anti-OAS Black Commandos in Algeria) as ambassador in Uruguay.23 The CIA, then cuddling up with every dictator in South America, did not welcome the intrusion. On 12 July 1966, a cocaine lab in Montevideo exploded, killing Ricord’s chief chemist, Luis Gomez Aguilera.24 The explosion signaled a new sale guerre in South America, and after June 1966, every Corsican with SDECE or SAC credentials seemed to arrive at the Club Ex Combatants in Buenos Aires, ready to rumble. The most prominent of the new arrivals was Christian David. A former SAC agent, David had killed Robert Blemant’s assassin in the fall of 1965, at the same time that Blemant’s successor as head of Les Trois Canards, Maurice Castellani, was under FBN surveillance at Attica Prison. Once thought to be a member of the Guérini gang, David was actually a double agent working against Guérini on behalf of the Francisci clan, with the approbation of de Gaulle’s closest advisor on such dubious affairs of state, Pierre Lemarchand.25

  Then in a development that ties Blemant’s assassination to the CIA sponsored assassination of Mehdi Ben Barka, David shot and killed police inspector Maurice Galibert on 2 February 1966. The circumstances are revealing. While investigating the murder of Ben Barka, Galibert was told that a suspect could be found at the Saint Clair restaurant in Paris. When Galibert arrived, he found David playing cards with Belkacem Mechere, “the deputy prefect of the interior ministry police.” According to Henrik Kruger, “When Galibert invited David to police headquarters for questioning, Mechere protested. David flashed his SAC ID card, but Galibert stood his ground.”26 At which point David shot and killed the policeman and fled to Uruguay where, on behalf of Barberot, he infiltrated the Tupimaros revolutionary group, while engaging in extensive extortion and drug smuggling ventures with Ricord’s Group France.

  The CIA was ready and waiting for the influx of exiled Corsican murderers and drug smugglers. Its station chief in Uruguay, John Horton, had served in Hong Kong for the previous three years, and understood the central role that self-financing drug smugglers played in the sale guerre. Within weeks of Horton’s arrival in Uruguay, the CIA-advised Uruguayan secret police force was also working diligently to suppress the Tupimaros and its foreign links, and had chased the Continental Congress for Solidarity with Cuba to Chile, where Che Guevara was rumored to be setting up cocaine labs for the Communist Chinese.27

  THE MONEY TRAIL

  None of the politically related drug trafficking incidents and developments described above would have been possible without underworld financing. The US Treasury Department was aware of the shift in drug money to South America, and that in July 1966, Meyer Lansky’s broker, John Pullman, was in Bogotá, Colombia,
negotiating a lucrative mine deal. Lansky’s Bolivian venture was, according to Professor Alan Block, “one part of an elaborate organized crime network of businesses” that “permitted organized crime enormous flexibility in moving and laundering funds as subsidiaries were placed in the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean.”28

  Following the Mafia’s drug money trail was essential to smashing the French connection, and the money trail inevitably led to Meyer Lansky, the Mafia’s banker since the 1930s. It was known that he invested $10 million in Italian real estate through the Banque de Crédit International (BCI) in Geneva. The problem was that Tibor Rosenbaum, a Mossad agent, owned the bank. Rosenbaum was close to the Italian royal family and James Angleton, and his institution laundered money for the Latin American clients of Investors Overseas Services (IOS).29 Founded by flamboyant Bernard Cornfeld, and very likely a CIA front company, IOS was an international mutual fund for anonymous investors in, among other things, Vietnamese and Israeli bonds. IOS employees funded the company through a clever “equity participation” scheme that freed them from Security and Exchange Commission oversight. Cornfeld’s chief advisor was Rosenbaum, “one of organized crime’s Swiss bankers.”30