The Bluegrass Conspiracy

by Sally Denton

  The forty-three-year-old former regional head of the DEA was lying in a pool of dried blood—dead of a single gunshot wound to the head. The entire episode had gotten off to a bizarre start. Brown’s estranged wife told police she and Brown were quarreling on the telephone when a shot rang out. For some unexplained reason, she first called C. Fred Partin—a former federal prosecutor and close friend of both Brown and Drew Thornton—rather than the police. Partin, instead of summoning the police, proceeded directly to Brown’s condominium where he claimed to find the doors and windows locked from the inside.

  Partin later told reporters the death was not suspicious-it was indisputably a suicide. Brown left three suicide notes, Partin said, and had been despondent about his marital strife. But Captain James Black, commander of the county’s special investigations and narcotics unit, didn’t believe it. He thought Brown had been murdered. Black questioned Partin’s objectivity in the matter, citing Partin’s friendship with Harold Brown, Drew Thornton, Bill Canan, and Henry Vance, which dated back to the early 1970s when Partin was an assistant U.S. attorney and the others were narcs.

  Captain Black had also been in law enforcement in those days, and, like Ralph Ross, had come to suspect Harold Brown of dealing drugs. It had seemed to Black that Brown had only busted smuggling groups that competed with the Company. In the days leading up to his death, Brown publicly and frequently blamed Sergeant Ross and Captain Black for his forced resignation from the DEA, both having testified to Brown’s cover-ups.

  Ralph learned of Brown’s death shortly after it occurred. Making inquiries from his remote mountain hideaway, Ralph learned that at the time of his death Brown was on the verge of arrest for the manufacture and distribution of exotic poisons. Through a company he called Aardvark Industries, aptly named for the weird, burrowing animal, Brown was selling ricin—a poisonous protein extracted from the castor bean. Advertising in mercenary magazines such as Soldier of Fortune and Shotgun News, he sold the poison to assassins. Police in Oklahoma and Florida had implicated Brown in at least one death.

  When Black’s narcotics unit gained access to a cabin owned by Brown located in Dead Horse Hollow—a canyon outside of Louisville—they found Partin had again beaten them to the scene. Under the cloak of attorney-client privilege, Partin confiscated guns and files that Black considered germane to the investigation.

  A battle began on the pages of the local newspapers, in which Black and Partin shot barbs, each accusing the other of overstepping boundaries. Partin contended the police had no right to Brown’s personal belongings as long as the death was a suicide; Black countered that as a subject of criminal investigations, the circumstances surrounding Brown’s death warranted closer scrutiny. Still intact when Black had arrived at the cabin was an intricate drug laboratory. Having begun his career as a chemist with the Food and Drug Administration before joining the DEA, Brown had apparently reverted to his earlier calling. Found in the search were ether, nicotine, sodium, ammonium nitrate, tear gas, and explosives.

  In addition to ricin, the police found a supply of curare-type drugs. The presence of curare raised Ralph’s eyebrows, for the substance had also been listed in a pamphlet entitled Ten Lethal or Incapacitating Drugs Stored by the CIA that had been found three years earlier in Bradley Bryant’s possession. The strange drug is most commonly used by African hunters on poison-tipped arrows.

  Brown’s laboratory produced a poison called P-2-P—a substance sold on the streets as cocaine, and which can be obtained legally only by individuals possessing a DEA registration number. Providing a “rush” similar to that of cocaine, the poison is deadly to unsuspecting users. Items found at the cabin led police to suspect Brown was also distributing mescaline—a hallucinogenic derivative of a Mexican cactus for which there was a flourishing market among urban high school kids.

  Brown had also founded Dead Horse Hollow Publications, police learned. Booklets in the cabin instructed drug smugglers how to operate without detection by the DEA, and advised them to “deal big” because the DEA is only after the “little guys.” Clandestine Laboratory Seizures in the U.S. told readers how to synthesize drug labs using common solvents, while also evading investigation by the DEA. The Underground Chemist published confidential information from internal DEA documents, provided a “DEA Watchlist,” and gave detailed instructions for the manufacture of P-2-P and methamphetamines. Pricey, the publications were marked at twenty-five dollars each.

  Brown’s personal diary reflected regular and frequent meetings with Drew Thornton in the weeks prior to Brown’s death. Most of their rendezvous occurred at the Sportsman in Louisville—a gun club where police officers and weapons enthusiasts went for “social shooting.” Entries also reflected several trips “to West Point.” Personal notes seized by police suggested a desire, if not intention, to carry out the murders of Ralph Ross, Don Powers, Jim Black, and an FBI agent named Mike Griffin.

  Shortly before Brown’s death an infamous marijuana smuggler, deep-sea diver, treasure hunter, and soldier-for-hire who had participated—along with some ex-Green Berets and Ku Klux Klansmen—in the unsuccessful takeover of the Caribbean island of Dominica, had approached one of Black’s undercover narcs. Evidently unaware of the narc’s true identity, the smuggler claimed that Brown was attempting to steal a marijuana field under his cultivation. Hoping to net Brown in the act, Black had assigned his undercover team to surveil the smuggler’s Hardin County marijuana farm, and had found the allegation to be true. For years, Harold Brown had been to Jim Black what Drew Thornton had been to Ralph Ross—a crooked cop too slippery to catch. With Brown’s implication in this marijuana scandal, Black thought he would finally be able to ensnare his nemesis.

  But Brown had used death to slide out of yet another encounter with Black.

  Despite Partin’s claims that Brown died at his own hands, the coroner decided there was enough mystery surrounding the death to warrant an inquest. Six jurors considered a number of bewildering occurrences that coincided with the death—an unidentified individual had driven off in Brown’s car several hours after the body was found, and then returned the vehicle to its parking spot the following morning; a “substantial sum of money” had been removed from Brown’s apartment sometime after the shooting death; and someone had stolen tape recordings from Brown’s apartment that contained conversations incriminating Brown in illegal drug transactions. But the death was ultimately ruled a suicide, and the unanswered questions remained just that.

  By far, the most fascinating pieces of information uncovered in the investigation of Harold Brown’s death were hints that Brown’s illegal activities had in fact been sanctioned by the DEA. Internal DEA documents and statements found at Brown’s cabin alluded to a secret CIA team housed within the DEA, and hinted that Brown had been a part of that elite cadre. The elaborate scenario depicted in the documents allowed the CIA, through the use of DEA overt and covert agents, to infiltrate narcotics organizations with a secret purpose of gathering military intelligence vital to U.S. national security interests.

  Ralph Ross was reluctant to give credence to the farfetched scheme.

  On the heels of Harold Brown’s death, Ralph received a manila envelope full of what purported to be DEA documents. Sent to him by an anonymous source, the documents were accompanied by a handwritten note that read: “Could Harold Brown and Andrew Thornton have been part of this scenario?’’

  Marked Classified, the hundred pages detailed the existence of a quid-pro-quo arrangement between the CIA and DEA that allowed large-scale narcotics activities in return for intelligence information on Latin American countries. Such a system was an outgrowth of the CIA’s participation a decade earlier in a clandestine narcotics network hidden within the DEA. Since the early 1970s, the documents suggested, the CIA had used the DEA for cover, and had employed known drug smugglers and mercenaries, called “assets,” who were allowed to continue their illegal activitie
s in return for information on groups and individuals of interest to the United States.

  Because of the CIA’s relationship with the defendants, prosecution of several major drug dealers and soldiers of fortune had been jeopardized or thwarted.

  The original unit housed within the DEA was apparently code-named Operation Buncin, an acronym for the Bureau of Narcotics Clandestine Intelligence Network. That pilot project, which provided cover for CIA covert operations at home and abroad, was the forerunner of Operation Deacon—Drug Enforcement Administration Covert Operations Network. Because many Latin and South American governments and economies were integrally tied to cocaine and marijuana production and export, the secret operation’s stated purpose was to infiltrate the international drug organizations under the auspices of fighting drugs, while really monitoring political activities of those governments.

  The details of the operation were painstakingly outlined in the documents. Through a mind-boggling design, Buncin would utilize covert operatives, overt operatives, and assets. The “overt operative would be the DEA agent who presented his face in the community.” The covert operative was the “deep cover person” who reported to the overt operative. The “asset” was the individual who obtained the intelligence information from foreign governments, and provided it to the “covert operative.”

  Ralph plugged the players into the formula: Was Harold Brown the “overt operative” who “presented his face in the community” as head of the Kentucky DEA office? Was Drew Thornton the “covert operative” who reported to Harold Brown? Were Bradley Bryant and Drew’s sundry smuggling conspirators the “assets” who reported to Drew? Was Colombia, where the Company purchased cocaine and sold weapons, the foreign government being infiltrated?

  According to the plot, only the “covert agent” was allowed to know the identity of both the “overt operative” and the various “assets,” thereby insulating the DEA agent who “presented his face in the community” from the actual smugglers. The Office of Security of the CIA monitored the project, and all information originating from the unit was considered top secret. The intelligence information was hand-delivered to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, flown on classified Defense Department courier planes to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, and retrieved personally by DEA agent Lucien Conein— the super-spook renowned for his expertise with an intelligence device known as the “Moscow cell structure.”

  Ralph had never heard of Conein—the former Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and CIA agent credited by some with orchestrating the

  1963 overthrow of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem—so the significance of Conein’s involvement escaped Ralph.

  One of the documents, entitled CIA Narcotic Intelligence Collection, referred to twenty-seven U.S. drug prosecutions that had to be halted because of the CIA’s involvement.

  A confidential Justice Department memorandum attached to the documents stated a policy of falsely blaming other American agencies, or even foreign governments, if the operations were exposed.

  Ralph contemplated the questions raised. Would such an arrangement explain why Drew Thornton had possession of DEA codes, coding devices, and body transmitters? Would it explain why Bradley Bryant contended he was a participant in a “classified CIA operation”? Why Harold Brown busted most drug-smuggling organizations, while protecting Drew’s group? Why the DEA never pursued charges against Bradley Bryant or Drew Thornton in 1979 even though Harold Brown seized the DC-4 belonging to Bradley Bryant that had been used to smuggle ten tons of dope into Kentucky? Why Bradley Bryant told Lance Alworth and others that the CIA allowed him to smuggle drugs? Why Drew had nonpublished, home telephone numbers for DEA agents in his possession? Why the name the Company was selected? Was it a euphemism for the CIA? Why Drew and Bradley had CIA phone numbers in their wallets and CIA publications in their homes? Why Drew and Bradley were well versed in spy tradecraft, using telephone scramblers, state-of-the-art electronic surveillance and countersurveillance techniques, silencers, daggers, exotic poisons, explosives, disguises, assassination kits, electronic dart guns, survivalist rations, and false identification? Would it explain how the group was able to embezzle weapons and radar equipment from top-secret military installations such as China Lake? Would it explain how a Kentucky boy such as Drew Thornton had cultivated high-level intelligence and military contacts in Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Colombia, Equador, Haiti, Mexico, Paraquay,

  Peru, and Panama? Would it explain why Bradley vehemently claimed “we’re good guys, not bad guys”? Would it explain why such seasoned spies as Colonel James Atwood, Ed Wilson, and Frank Terpil would befriend such a motley crew? Would it explain why Triad operated unabated? Was it a training ground for Third World police forces who were secretly supported by the CIA? Would it explain why the Company had escaped detection and apprehension for so long?

  Were Drew and Harold and Bradley not only drug smugglers, but also members of an elite cabal of contract assassins who performed their services for the highest bidder—government and private industry alike? Documents retrieved from Harold Brown’s apartment at the time of his death pointed to such a possibility, as did the apparent obsession with exotic weapons and poisons.

  To believe that the Buncin-Deacon scenario applied to the Kentucky crew would ascribe lofty motives to a bunch of criminals— something Ralph thought attributed undue beneficence.

  Admittedly, Ralph was more naive than was justified by his training and experience, but he found it hard to believe that his own government would rely upon men the caliber of Drew Thornton and Harold Brown. Then again, Ralph thought, maybe he just didn’t want to believe it.

  Ralph had done his own share of work for the Agency and knew that an effective intelligence-gathering apparatus must sometimes resort to unorthodox methods. But, as a matter of policy, did the government really engage in drug smuggling and assassinations?

  Ralph liked to believe it did not.

  Perhaps it was true, Ralph decided, that Brown used members of the Company as “assets.” Perhaps it was also true that Drew Thornton engaged in acts that benefited the CIA, such as flying a planeload of weapons to the Nicaraguan contras. And perhaps the

  CIA turned its cheek when Drew flew the same airplane back to the U.S. loaded with drugs. Why waste cargo space on a return trip?

  Ultimately, Ralph decided that Drew Thornton and his wayward accomplices had to be independent contractors whose actions rarely, if ever, fell under the protective cloak of the U.S. Government.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “Drew Thornton is dead,” the male voice said to Ralph Ross, awakening him at the crack of dawn on September 11, 1985.

  Ralph thanked his source for the information and dialed the number of a friend in the FBI. After relating details of his phone conversation to the federal agent, Ralph dressed in a pair of Levis and a flannel shirt. He started the engine of his used Lincoln Continental and waited briefly for the car to warm up in the brisk autumn morning. As he drove the five miles to an old-fashioned Southern diner located on Main Street in the county seat of Lawrenceburg, Ralph listened to the radio for reports of Drew’s death. Nothing.

  Outside the café, he bought a Lexington Herald-Leader and a Louisville Courier-Journal. Again, no mention of the bizarre free-fall. He wondered momentarily if perhaps his source had been wrong. Then he realized that the incident must have occurred after the newspapers had been put to bed.

  Seating himself at the counter, Ralph ordered a cup of coffee and biscuits ‘n’ gravy—the common Kentucky breakfast of patty-sized buttermilk biscuits swimming in a creamy pork-laced gravy. Awaiting the meal that would sit like a lead balloon in the pit of his stomach for the rest of the day, Ralph decided to call Don Powers.

  “Come on down to the Anderson Grill,” he said to his longtime buddy. “I’ve got some interesting news for you.”

  By the following day,
Ralph’s “news” was splashed across the front pages of every newspaper in Lexington, Louisville, Knoxville, Nashville, and Atlanta. Stories and sidebars probed Drew Thornton’s wild life and crashing death. The national newsfeed from CBS, NBC, and ABC broadcast accounts of the tragicomic fate of the millionaire, racehorse breeder, lawyer, pilot, jumper, and cop-turned-drug-smuggler.

  “I sure don’t want to wake up to that every morning,” eighty-fiveyear-old Fred Myers told the Knoxville Journal, referring to finding a broken Drew Thornton lying stacked on his paraphernalia near Myers’ strawberry patch.

  The heavily armed cocaine commando was wearing Army-issue night-vision goggles, a money belt with forty-five hundred dollars, and a bulletproof vest when he hit the gravel driveway. In his wallet was a membership card for the Lexington Fraternal Order of Police, identification in the names of Andrew Thornton and Andrew Bourbon, fifty telephone numbers—most of which were listed in code—and a personal address book containing fewer than a dozen names. Tied around the neck of the 82nd Airborne veteran were ten bandanas of different colors.

  Lying on his back, Drew’s arms were stretched over his head. A trickle of blood from his nose had dried on each cheek. Four of his teeth had been knocked out, and he clutched the ripcord to his partially deployed reserve chute in his right hand. Under his knees, which were elevated by the bulk, lay a three-and-a-half-foot-long duffel bag containing seventy-five pounds of pure, unprocessed cocaine. The thirty-four football-sized parcels of cocaine were wrapped in brown paper, and were labeled USA 10—the logo that had become the trademark of the Medellín Cartel. Another duffel bag tied to his waist contained his weapons and survival materials.

  When police responded to the old man’s reported sighting, they were struck by the seeming incongruity of Drew’s apparel: Gucci shoes with combat fatigues. But to those, like Ralph Ross, who had known and studied Drew for many years, for Drew to be fully outfitted for battle, and yet wearing lightweight Italian shoes, only underscored the enigma of Andrew Carter Thornton II.