Charles B. Towns’ cure, officially endorsed by the AMA, was famous throughout the country in the teens and twenties. It almost certainly would make anyone stop taking anything. It consisted of huge simultaneous doses of foxglove, belladonna, prickly ash bark and strong purgatives, coupled with constant prayer. Foxglove and belladonna are two of the most famous witchcraft herbs of Europe. Foxglove contains the cardiac stimulant digitalis, and belladonna contains the powerfully psychoactive scopolamine and hyoscyamine.
Towns claimed his cure was effective for opium, cocaine or alcohol addiction. His New York sanitarium charged between $200-$350 for a private room for the five-day course, and $75 for a double occupancy, big money in those days. Towns’ theoretical and commercial partner was Dr. Alexander Lambert, chief of the AMA’s Medicolegal Bureau during the fight to pass Harrison, later head of the AMA. Together they profitably administered the Towns-Lambert method. 1
Lambert’s entry on cocaine addiction in Osler’s prestigious 1925 medical textbook, Modern Medicine, solemnly pronounced that “The most effective treatment is the Towns treatment and the method is the same as in dealing with an alcoholic, except that the cocaine should be cut off immediately. Strychnine, with or without some form of digitalis should be given from the beginning. The belladonna mixture and from 3 to 5 cathartic pills and 5 gr. of blue mass should be given simultaneously as the first dose. The belladonna mixture is continued every hour of the day and night, and twelve hours after the initial dose the patients are again given from 3 to 5 cathartic pills followed six hours later by a saline, and at the twenty-fourth hour after the initial dose they are again given cathartics and again at the thirty-sixth hour. After these last cathartics the bilious stool appears, and by the forty-fifth to forty-eighth hour castor oil is given.”
That is, they pharmacologically kicked the shit out of their patients; they “puked and purged” ‘em. They divined their success ratio by counting as cured all those who didn’t return for further punishment.
Between 1893 and 1895 the British Opium Royal Commission produced three twelve hundred page volumes of expert notarized testimony concerning the use of opium in India. It made no attempt to exclude negative witnesses. Its only requirement was verifiable expertise on some aspect of the subject. One English missionary, who knew of no “hardier, thriftier or more careful people than the Punjabis,”insisted regular opium use “seems to interfere neither with their longevity nor with their health.” That was the overwhelming majority opinion of the hundreds of physicians, civil servants, merchants, missionaries and working people recorded by the Commission.
Small amounts of opium produce a pleasant and energetic bodily lightness conducive to work and mental activity. Opium was used as a pre-battle stimulant by the Punjabis, and no British soldier wanted to face them. Larger amounts produce a dreamy reverie, “an aid to music composers” as one 1912 New York Times article had it.
An opium smoker’s tools; Scientific American, 11/1921
Smoking opium sap is not analogous to injecting morphine or heroin. Dr. Brecher in Licit & Illicit Drugs: “Only about 10% of the morphine [5-15% of commercial opium by weight]...enters the vapor, and only a portion of the morphine in the vapor enters the human bloodstream when inhaled; there are no ‘tars’ or other carcinogens to cause cancer. The so-called ‘opium-smoker’ is actually a vapor inhaler. At a very rough estimate, a smoker would have to smoke 300 or 400 grains of opium to get a dose equivalent to the intravenous injection of one grain of heroin [diacetylmorphine].” 2
Smoked, all 39 of opium’s alkaloids are delivered in concert, slowly and in minuscule doses, CNS exciters right along with the depressants. The most harm an opium smoker can do to himself is put himself to sleep. Morphine, on the other hand, opium’s major alkaloid, is a powerful CNS depressant, especially in conjunction with alcohol, and hypodermic injection makes absorption immediate and irreversible. But that, again, reduces to a question of dosage, expertise and public policy, not toxicity. As Jonathan Ott, the great entheobotanist and chemist, wrote to me: “So-called opiate overdose [overwhelmingly caused by anaphylaxis or toxicity of adulterants, as opposed to true overdose] results from respiratory, not cardiac, arrest, via a relaxant effect on the respiratory muscles, there’s virtually no other toxicity at these dose-levels...morphine is one of the least-toxic drugs in the pharmacopoeia, and deaths from medicinal administration, also of heroin in Britain, even if from intravenous administration, are almost unknown, since known dosage and purity are givens.”
That is, you can get into trouble with morphine if it is a) adulterated, b) mixed with alcohol, or c) given in overdose. You can’t overdose on the smoked sap. Artificial concentrates are more dangerous than whole herbs when criminalized, because: a) they are easier to adulterate; b) amateurs are untrained in concentrate dosage and administration; and c) concentration and toxicity of unlabeled street alkaloids is unknown.
But the 1909-1914 criminalization of the safe sap automatically popularized the refined alkaloid, since it’s far more profitable to smuggle. This was the conclusion of the official USPHS study conducted by Kolb and Du Mez in 1924. Prior to 1914 gum opium was favored by regular users, after 1914 the gum had been almost totally replaced by heroin and morphine. As Professor Trebach pointed out, this substitution process repeated itself after WW II when American drug law was foisted on a supine world. Hong Kong, North Europe, Japan, Germany, Singapore, Thailand, Borneo and Turkey all found their opium smokers using the only available substitute - lightweight heroin, much more profitable to smuggle. Professor McCoy repeatedly makes the same point. 3 4
NYT, 11/7/1926
Is regular morphine or opium use ’addiction’ simply because it is regular? All genuine addiction experts agree that opiates do no physiological damage to the user at all - they do not damage liver, central nervous system, stomach, muscles, kidneys, glands, heart or brain. The most famous example of this is Dr. William Stewart Halsted, a clinical founder, chief of surgery, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Halsted injected morphine, or a combination of morphine and cocaine, every day for the last thirty years of his life and, simultaneously, was renowned as the greatest technical surgeon alive, “the father of modern surgery.” He died at seventy, still operating. 5
How then does one define ‘addiction?’ Is the word just an epithet? Halsted was a productive genius who used drugs. And the major ‘drug’ he was using was the isolated botanical version of a naturally-occurring human neurochemical. He was practicing psychopharmacology, to be sure, but to great advantage. The same can be said of a very long list of wildly productive contemporary geniuses, including some of our greatest novelists, filmmakers, songwriters, astronomers, physicists and entrepreneurs. Jonathan Ott, the entheobotanist taught at universities worldwide, publishes fluently in Spanish, German and English. He tells me that my use of the word “pharmacoshamanism” is a “pleonasm,” a redundancy.
NYT, 1/21/1912
Prohibition, then, has very little to do with scientific pharmacology and its related disciplines, and much to do with the politicization of pharmacology. As Professor Alfred Lindesmith put it in the introduction to his 1947 classic Addiction and Opiates: “alcohol is addicting in approximately the same sense that heroin is...the fact that marijuana, cocaine, and heroin and other opiate-type drugs are covered in the same anti-narcotics legislation is a fertile source of confused thinking because it obscures the facts that the use of marijuana is totally unlike heroin or morphine addiction and that alcoholism...actually has very much in common with opiate addiction.”
Alcohol, heroin and cocaine all show approximately the same ratio of addicts or abusers to users, 10% or less, hardly a proportion requiring mass hysteria. Cigarettes produce a rate of addiction higher than 50% in occasional users. 6
Coca leaf and opium sap would be preferred by many to cocaine and heroin, were they available, but their legend is so terrifying, like Dracula’s fangs, the mere mention of their phantasm brings shudders of fear, as if Dracula were real. In fact, neither opium sap nor coca leaf are a problem in their native cultures, where they’re both religious sacraments and social inebriants.
Throughout southern Neolithic Europe, in the lakeshore villages of north Italy and Switzerland, for instance, opium was a major crop, and its association with Cretan and Greek ecstatic rites is certain. Demeter’s name is often used as a synonym for “poppy fields” in the Cretan palace records of 1600 BC, and she is often represented as “Opium Mother,” either holding or wearing bulging poppy capsules. Inscribed Mycenaean Greek jars, full of an edible opium-containing “unguent,” have been found in the earliest levels at Eleusis, c. 1300 BC. Opium was a sacred symbol carved into the temple walls at Eleusis, a probable ingredient of the entheogenic “mixture” (kykeon) that was the central sacrament of Classical Greece. Opium continued to be a symbol of fecundity well into Roman times. 7 8
Demeter Holding Opium Poppies beneath the sacred Double Axe, Gold Signet Seal, Crete, c. 1500 BC; Greek Sacramental Vase, c.350 BC
Opium was cultivated by the Sumerians of 3500 BC, who called it “the Joy Plant.” They had a thriving Asia trade. The Hindu surgeon Sushruta wrote of it in 300 BC. It seems likely that the Han dynasty scholars who compiled the pharmacopeia of Shen Nung around the time of Christ knew of opium, but the references are only suggestive. By the eighth century CE opium was a regular item in the Chinese herbals. 10
In 970 CE Su Che, in his poem “The Cultivation of the Medicinal Plant Poppy,” sang that opium’s “seeds are like autumn millet; when ground they yield a sap like cow’s milk; when boiled they become a drink fit for Buddha.” In 1057, Su Sung noted that the opium “poppy is found everywhere.” Throughout China, for more than a millennium, honored guests were greeted with drinks or pipes full of opium. 11
Chinese Opium Dens, c. 1900
Of course, slaves under the lash in the turn-of-the-century colonial slave states could be expected to use opium, especially when it was substituted for their wages. It was literally the only escape they had. “Insufficient food, harsh work schedules, and beatings made most of the plantations slave labor camps with annual death rates higher than 20 percent.” 12
But whether slave opium use was a function of pain or the need to escape, or whether there was, in fact, a high rate of opium use at all in the labor camps is open to question. As Ott points out, “when people are in intense pain, they are much less likely to fall under the thrall of opiates administered even in exorbitant doses to ameliorate it. This is simply because allaying the pain in some way detracts from the euphoria [which, in any case, only a minority of people perceive - for the majority, opiates are nauseating and so aversive, not reinforcing, which is why opiates have never been and never will be majority inebriants]...” For a minority of users, then, opiates are euphoriants, and euphoria is, in a certain sense, analgesic. But one should not simplify the reasons people seek euphoria. 12
Opium, that is, is euphoriant enough for enough people to turn it into a demanded agricultural commodity worldwide. The European colonialists, and the Chinese Imperial slave states, then caricatured this large-scale use as “addiction,” justifying their politically selective enforcement - and their need to monopolize the trade.
A British opium inspector in India, 1905. Scoring the seed capsules in Yunnan, Asia, 1/1931
The Chinese Opium Wars were about control of that trade, that is, control of China. Opium smoking was demonized as low-rent treason, ‘addiction,’ by the Chinese monarchy, and its American ally, only after the British cornered the global trade by conquering opium-producing India and taking control of major Chinese ports. Until that time, Chinese poets sang opium’s praises. Under conditions of foreign monopoly, however, to smoke imported opium was to finance the British rape of China. It is finance and the attendant geopolitical power that Chinese Emperors worried about, not the health of their subjects.
British Opium Factory in India
This hypocrisy was epitomized by China’s leading mandarin, Li Hung-chang, at the 1877 Shanghai Missionary Conference. Li declared that “China views the question from a moral standpoint; England from a fiscal.” But Li forgot to mention that he himself was a large opium producer. Since Li’s Chinese opium contributed to the Emperor’s exchequer, his was moral opium, not that evil British stuff. 13
The raw sap drying in the Persian sun, 1925. Opium and sweet tea, Shiraz, Persia, 1925; Asia
Before the European attack on China’s sovereignty, opium was a commonly accepted social inebriant and aid to meditation with a very long history as the most important painkiller, soporific, antispasmodic and febrifuge known. This medical respect for opium was accepted worldwide. As the 1918 U.S. Dispensatory put it: “It is at present more frequently prescribed than perhaps any other article of the materia medica.” 14
Nearly all the empirical research supports the conclusions of Dr. Marie Nyswander, the popularizer of the politically acceptable ‘methadone maintenance:’ “There is a pattern of self-limitation or restraint in opium smoking in countries where it is socially acceptable. It is common for natives in these countries to indulge in opium smoking one night a week much as Americans may indulge in alcoholic beverages at a Saturday night party.... families who accept opium smoking as part of their culture are mindful of its dangers much as we are mindful of the dangers of overindulgence in alcohol.” 15
Describing the high rate of opium or heroin ‘addiction’ in Hong Kong in 1970, Professor McCoy stresses that “Most of the addicts were poor wage laborers who lived in cramped tenements and sprawling slums, which many social workers considered ideal breeding grounds for addiction.” 16
That is, it is the poverty that fosters the escapism, not the escapism the poverty. But of course, to acknowledge that politically would mean that public funds would start to flow out of police programs and into social programs.
Sociologists at the City College of New York in the early 1940s were astonished by the alcohol admission statistics of New York City’s public hospitals, which then kept records by ethnicity. 25% of all admissions for alcohol-related problems were of Irish background, but only ½ of 1% were of Jewish background. On examination of other measures, they found that the same ratios held true. Alcoholism among Jewish Americans was one-fiftieth the rate of alcoholism among Irish Americans. 17
Since no biological or psychological differences could be found, the answer seemed to lie in the attitude of the cultures toward alcohol itself. Jewish culture, like many Mediterranean cultures, teaches the sane use of alcohol to its young rather than simply prohibiting it. That is, as Dr. Nyswander says, acculturation is everything. Proscription fails, prescription succeeds.
New York’s Lower East Side, 1887, Jacob Riis; Shanghai Opium Den, 1890s
This same pattern repeats itself worldwide and can be found in completely unconnected cultures. The Vicosinos of Peru, who enjoy ritual and social inebriation as often as the Jews, and who also share sanctioned ritual inebriation with the children, likewise have virtually no alcoholism. The Irish Catholic pattern is prohibition; even the sacramental wine is forbidden to all but the priest, producing a strong, alienated reaction in the pub. At Jewish celebrations, such as Passover, even the children get a cup of wine. Those cultures that prescribe rather than proscribe don’t have a drug problem. 18
Professor Charles Snyder: “Where drinking is an integral part of the socialization process, where it is interrelated with the central moral symbolism and is repeatedly practiced in the rites of a group, the phenomenon of alcoholism is conspicuous by its absence. Norms of sobriety can be effectively sustained under these circumstances even though the drinking is extensive. Where institutional conflicts disrupt traditional patterns in which drinking is integrated, where drinking is dissociated from the normal process of socialization, where drinking is relegated to social contexts which are disconnected from or in opposition to the core moral values and where it is used for individual purposes, pathologies such as alcoholism may be expected to increase.” 19
That is the general conclusion of empirical experts on drug abuse regardless of the inebriant. Polynesia has no problem with kava, Peru none with coca leaf, the Mbuti of the Congo none with marijuana, Yemen none with khat, Afghanistan none with opium sap, France none with wine. Prescribing cultures, in which teaching and familial love and acceptance replaces proscription and ostracism, don’t produce the stressful conditions in which inebriation become the focus of neurotic behavior. The ‘drug problem,’ then, is not one of pharmacology, but of public policy. Stress, alienation, pain, promotes the use of euphoriants and pain killers. Stress is the number one ‘gateway’ to ‘abuse.’
Dr. Solomon Snyder, director of the Department of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins from 1980 to 2006, explains that “while each drug acts on different receptors, ‘all seem to funnel through one common reward pathway in the brain,’ ...neural circuitry leading from lower brain regions to the nucleus accumbens in the forebrain. It seems to play a role in normal satisfaction-seeking behaviors involving food and sex but gets exaggerated in addiction...” That is, inebriative behavior is an instinctive oral behavior, physiologically, evolutionarily, related to eating and sex.
The ‘satisfaction’ is achieved largely through the release of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. Dopamine is an endogenous precursor of the cerebrospinal neurotransmitter norepinephrine. Peyote’s major alkaloid, mescaline, also a phenylethylamine derivative, is very closely related to norepinephrine. Pure dopamine, chemically identical to the human catecholamine, is produced in large quantities by the saguaro cactus Carnegiea gigantea, used by the Seri Indians of Sonora to treat rheumatic pain. That is, just as the Seri say, the plant world is literally our biological mother. 20
The JAMA: “...scientific evidence supports the view of addiction as a chronic disease, says [NIDA Director Alan] Leshner [this country’s official top drug expert]. Addicts have a disability and therefore are ‘entitled to treatment,’ the same as patients with any other disease.”
The JAMA: “...scientific evidence supports the view of addiction as a chronic disease, says [NIDA Director Alan] Leshner [this country’s official top drug expert]. Addicts have a disability and therefore are ‘entitled to treatment,’ the same as patients with any other disease.”
That is, the “exaggeration” or neurotic abuse of heroin is defined by Dr. Leshner as a “disease,” which is an odd description for a volitional behavior. Dr. Leshner does acknowledge that much heroin use is not “addiction.” As Dr. Snyder pointed out, much heroin use, like most eating and sex, is rooted in “normal satisfaction-seeking behaviors” – “use,” not “abuse.” Dr. Leshner, of course, would argue that “abuse,” “addiction,” is a “disease” because it is not volitional, but his own research actually brings him to the assertion that most drug “abuse” is a “symptom,” not a “cause.”
Dr. Leshner: “Discerning when drug abuse is in fact an attempt to self-medicate for other disorders may also improve treatment efficacy. Some studies suggest that more than two thirds of patients with drug disorders also have mental disorder, and that almost a third of those with a mental disorder also have a drug problem.” 21
That is, absent the condescending medical jargon, people in pain turn to pain killers or euphoriants. The influential Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal, head of Phoenix House, a leading “substance abuse professional,” turns this on its head, insisting that it’s the drug-taking that causes the pain, not the pain the neurotic drug-taking. That is, Rosenthal is engaging in a classic inquisitorial trick, insisting that the medicine is causing the disease. 22
There is a political dimension to this: fascism, the militarization of culture, feeds on the artificial production of stress, Trump’s major political technique. The exacerbation of stress, that is, is a traditional form of witchcraft: Dr. Jeanne Achterberg: “We have a thirty-year research effort from scientists such as Walter Cannon, Hans Selye, and many others, showing the potential for stress to hamper the immune function. There are series after series of animal trials from the most respected laboratories in the world showing that under stressed conditions, the compromised immune system can result in disease or even death. We even have growing acceptance for the notion that stress exacerbates the growth of cancer in humans, triggers flare-ups in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, and sends asthmatics off to the emergency room for oxygen. Stress is implicated as a factor in both onset and exacerbation of all the autoimmune diseases - those conditions where the immune system can no longer discriminate self from nonself, friend from foe.” 23
Stress is debilitating, confusing and painful, causing people, instinctively, to reach for whatever painkiller or euphoriant is available. Stress is the number one “gateway” to drug abuse, and there is no empirical doubt about that among the mainstream of addiction scientists, even those who have trouble distinguishing “use” from “abuse.”
Rural India; Asia, c.1927; Jidda, Saudi Arabia, 1927; Edward A. Salisbury, Asia
Biofeedback stress reduction has been shown to be medically effective in reducing hypertension, heart disease, speech disorders, arthritis, diabetes and many other maladies, and is one of the few ancient ecstatic techniques, mechanized, reimbursed by medical insurance companies. 24
The proprioceptive, self-sensing, state induced by many herbal inebriants is an ancient form of biofeedback, since most traditional herbal inebriants employ or trigger the human body’s own neurotransmitters. These traditional herbal sacraments are therefore a direct threat to the production of stress and hysteria in the culture.
In India marijuana has been famous as a relaxant and aid to meditation from time immemorial, and has always been considered a religious sacrament. The rebellious Rastas, stiff-necked Ethiopians, also meditate with ganja, refusing to forget their ancient sacrament - and the musical genius that goes with it. Musical ecstasy, admittedly, is useless in Babylon, on the assembly line, but it does help to hold an African tribe together. That’s why slavers hate ganja. Creative geniuses make lousy, and dangerous, beasts of burden. They’re “addicts” - a word originally used in Roman law as a synonym for “belongs to,” “Spartacus is addicted to Crassus.” The Ethiopians of Jamaica found powerful allies in the East Indian Hindu sadhus brought to Jamaica in great numbers by the British during the nineteenth century.
There is no doubt that hysteria and depression are major reasons why people turn to inebriants for relief, just as there’s no doubt that stress is a major precursor to illness. Euphoria, recreational pharmakon use, can be profoundly healthful, in that mood improvement wards off stress. This is intuitive knowledge, rooted in oral instinct. 25
The millions who go to the local bar on Friday night to socialize and drink beer, this culture’s most popular herbal inebriant, are practicing instinctive social shamanism. Obviously, if the traditional herbs were legal, the concentrated alkaloids, with which it’s easier to get into trouble, would be a lot less popular. Prohibition promotes the use of alkaloids, as the difference in the alkaloid use rates between prescribing and proscribing cultures so easily proves. Holland has less than 20% of our per capita opioid use rate.
Hundreds of millions of people know from regular personal experience the feeling of relaxation, balance and creativity given by the occasional use of a beloved herb. “The principal function of the shaman in Central and North Asia is magical healing. Several conceptions of the cause of illness are found in the area, but that of the ‘rape of the soul’ is by far the most widespread... If shamanic cure involves ecstasy, it is precisely because illness is regarded as a corruption or alienation of the soul.” 26
I, however, have no legal right to the traditional tribal sacraments. I can’t even go to my “personal physician,” apparently my Daddy or Mommy, and ask for some traditional herbal euphoriant because I’m feeling musically uncreative; the request will be deemed “nonmedical.” I’ll be told to wait until I’m good and sick, and then will be given Prozac, which ain’t what I asked for. The jive term “habit-forming” will be applied to my “nonmedical” request, as if garlic, salt, oregano and coffee weren’t equally “habit-forming.”
JAMA:6/1/94: The AMA “discourages and condemns illegal drug use and encourages physicians to do all in their power to discourage the use of illegal drugs in their communities and to refuse to assist anyone in obtaining drugs for nonmedical use.” 27
Dr. James Todd, the Executive Vice President of the AMA, is no Doc Simmons. This is not corruption. Today’s Journal of the AMA is a relatively open public health forum. This is genuine unconscious culture-centric bigotry, with just a touch of commercial self-interest. The good doctor automatically assumes Papal authority to decide for me what is and is not healthful. The AMA, apparently my legal guardian, tells me that my personal herbal curanderismo is “self-medication” and will not be tolerated. That is, organized medicine literally, legally, owns the lilies of the field.
The symbol of the AMA is the Caduceus, the healing snakes entwined on the living tree. ‘Caduceus’ is Latin for Kerykeion, the magical staff of the Snake Nymph Korykia, the ancient ‘bulb-mother’ of ‘underground’ herbal ecstasy (from krokus, ‘bulb’).
Korykia, also known as Persephone, is the archetypal Greek midwife. Ancient Greek midwives carried the Kerykeion as their power symbol (see my book Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda). Hippokrates of Kos, fl. 400 BC, the canonical ‘first physician’ who carried the Kerykeion, learned to induce his healing dream-state, known as incubation, at the feet of Korykia, as he himself readily acknowledged.
That pharmacologically-induced dream state, which was conceived as a return to the womb, was also called ekstasis, ecstasy. Dr. Todd, claiming to have taken the ‘Hippocratic Oath,’ will tell you that ekstasis is “nonmedical,” because it is “recreational.” Hippokrates would have thought that was as stupid as saying that, since eating a good meal is recreational, it is, for that reason, “non-nutritive.” You’re on the Assembly Line whether you like it or not. You can remember your Bulb-Mother, your connection to the Earth, your birthright, when you’re dead.
Dr. Christine Hartel, associate director for neuroscience in the Division of Clinical Research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), expresses the pharmacological sophistry very well: “It’s a plant. We don’t hand out opium pipes to test morphine, and we don’t think about using marijuana in testing. We isolate the active compound and test that.” That is the precise logical equivalent of saying that “we don’t hand out spinach for eating, we isolate the vitamins and hand them out.” 28
An ecstatic Greek snake nymph holding the sacred herb carrier, the thyrsos, and the jaguar, symbol of her ferocity. She wears the magical snake in her hair - not a bringer of evil fruit, but symbol of her vegetal power to heal and enlighten. These symbols combined to form the Caduceus. The Brygos painter, c.490 BC; .Good Egyptians and Bad Egyptians, caught with their ancient sacrament, hashish; Asia, 6/1930
Hartel’s sophistry, by far the mainstream attitude, is designed to render my pharmakon unavailable to me by analogizing it with refined isolates, which can be controlled commercially. Dr. Hartel is actually saying that whole plants, which cannot be patented, have no place in the commercial synthetic compound distribution system she helps to manage.
Herbal curanderismo is sometimes self-medication, not that it’s anyone’s business, but more often it is simply the ingestion of soul-food. Ecstasy is nutritious, and, like eating, and sex, it’s fun. Is eating a good meal “non-nutritious” because it’s fun? Was Marvin Gaye wrong, is good sex not healing?
Pharmacological fun was outlawed in 1962, when Congress passed regulations requiring “drugs,” meaning most sacramental herbs as well as natural isolates or artificial compounds, to be disease-specific. If their efficacy for a certain illness couldn’t be demonstrated, they couldn’t be sold or prescribed. Most people who take traditional herbs aren’t sick and don’t want to be.
The Controlled Substances Act, a targeted political concoction of the Nixon administration, blithely insists, on pain of agonizing legal penalties, that Heroin (diacetylmorphine), LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide), Marijuana (cannabis, THC), Mescaline (Peyote, San Pedro), MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine or ‘ecstasy’), GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyric acid), Psilocybin, Methaqualone (Quaalude), Khat (Cathinone) have “no currently accepted medical use.” It is no coincidence that these are some of the most historically important tribal sacraments and medicines, or their isolates. All, in fact, have volumes dedicated to their medical usefulness. This pharmacological BS is legally protected by the inquisitorial legal precedent, first written into American law in 1906 by Harvey Wiley’s Pure Food and Drug Act, that pharmacological evidence is inadmissible in drug cases.
Schedule II of The Controlled Substances Act, which allows unrefillable prescription but criminalizes unauthorized possession just as severely as Schedule I, defines opium sap and coca leaves as identical to “any salt, compound, derivative or preparation thereof” - just like Wiley wrote it. Possession of whole coca leaf is the legal equivalent of possession of cocaine, despite the fact that coca leaf tea, in Peru, is traditional baby medicine and morning tea. Possession of coca leaves, probably the best and safest tonic leaf on earth, would subject me to more severe penalties than possession of a bazooka. And I can’t go into court, evidence in hand, and prove that a coca leaf is not a bazooka; if the DEA says it’s a bazooka, it’s a bazooka. Senator Phil Gramm’s grandstanding amendment to the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act actually mandated twice the maximum penalty for bringing drugs into prison, 20 years, than for bringing in a bazooka.
As the California State Supreme Court told Yun Quong in 1911: “The validity of legislation which would be necessary or proper under a given state of facts does not depend on the actual existence of the supposed facts. It is enough if the lawmaking body may rationally believe such facts to be established.” 29
That is, it is sufficient if the California legislature, or the DEA, can imagine opium harming the health of Yun Quong; whether it actually does so is not legally relevant. Nor is Yun Quong’s own opinion of his private behavior, nor that of his physician. That is the ancient Roman prohibitio; it shouldn’t be current law.
It is absurd to insist that if opium and coca were legalized we’d all turn into junkies. Before 1914 opium, coca and their alkaloids were completely legal and widely available. The Kolb and DuMez study of 1924, which covered the years immediately preceding Prohibition, shows approximately ¼ of 1% of the population of 110 million regularly using opiates, as opposed to eighty times as many today. 30
Between 1895 and 1904, before the propaganda campaign began, The New York Times had no call to run a single story about cocaine abuse, despite the fact that it was freely available over the counter. That lack of publicity, of course, is part of the reason there was so little “abuse.” The other part of the reason is that Vin Mariani and the original Coca Cola were also freely available, and, given the choice, most people prefer the herbal-strength dilution to the refined concentrate. The only practical effect of the criminalization of Vin Mariani has been the popularization of refined cocaine, the covert trade in which is controlled by our secret services and client armies, producing a very, very dangerous legal inertia in favor of Nixon’s Controlled Substances Act, that is, imprisonment for profit. 31
Propaganda
Prohibition is about economic and military power, not health or science. It was the geopolitical utility of medical monopoly that saw it come to pass. The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 was conceived in China, at the 1909 Shanghai Opium Commission, the idea being that America should pass a model ‘no license’ law it could then ask other nations to adopt. President Roosevelt had arbitrated the end of the Russo-Japanese War only to observe Russia and Japan dividing Manchuria, Mongolia and Korea between them. With China beginning to industrialize on a massive scale, all the imperial powers were delighted to have a ‘pro-Chinese’ issue they could sell while competing for China.
America, with never more than 2500 troops in China, had the weakest military position, and so led the fight for an “open door” and an end to the opium trade. The Chinese leadership had grown to hate opium because the British controlled the nationwide trade, and had used it as a lever to control China.
Industrialization, however, with its mills, mines and railroads, had created different stakes. For America, Chinese cooperation in the industrial competition was essential. The weaker the British position, the stronger the U.S. The Chinese government encouraged groups like the Foochow Anti-Opium Society to express their politically correct feelings for the foreign press.
Secretary of State Root rammed through the 1909 Opium Exclusion Act “in time to save our face at Shanghai,” even though the USDA’s Wiley said he didn’t need it to exclude opium. The State Department then asked Dr. Hamilton Wright, a member of the Shanghai delegation, to draft a more general, model no-license law it could then ask other nations to adopt. This uniform international effort would force the British to give up an important element of their power, their near monopoly on the global opium trade. The Chinese staged opium burnings.
Asia, March, 1931; Current History, October, 1924
Wright criminalized unlicensed distribution of “opium or coca leaves or any compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, or preparation thereof,” thereby solidifying organized medicine’s monopoly. Lobbying Congress in 1910 for his new bill, Wright fretted about cocaine’s “encouragement among the humbler ranks of the Negro population in the South.... it has been authoritatively stated that cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the Negroes of the South and other sections of the country.” That was straight out of The Nigger. Here you have the geopolitical, the economic utility of racism. Wright wrote the editor of the Louisville Journal Courier that “a strong editorial from you on the abuse of cocaine in the South would do a great deal of good - do not quote me or the Department of State.” 1 2 3
Tobacco is the number one killer “drug” in the world, by far, and U.S. companies are among the world’s premier purveyors. In fact, the U.S. moves against any country that tries to restrict tobacco imports. Wrote Peter Bourne, Carter’s Director of Drug Abuse Policy, to Colombian president Virgilio Barco: “Perhaps nothing so reflects on Washington’s fundamental hypocrisy on the issue as the fact that while it rails against the adverse effects of cocaine in the United States, the number of Colombians dying each year from subsidized North American tobacco products is significantly larger than the number of North Americans felled by Colombian cocaine.” 5
The Philip Morris Company, Brown & Williamson, Lorillard and the other great tobacco companies sponsor the flag-waving Partnership for a Drug-Free America, prime producer of anti-marijuana TV ads. Other sponsors include the alcohol and pharmaceutical giants, and the ad industry dependent on their advertising. You won’t find The Partnership for a Drug-Free America worrying about the world’s number one killer drug, or about number two either.
Hamilton Wright explained the situation. He wrote Bishop Brent, his fellow delegate to the Shanghai Opium Commission, that the new Secretary of State Knox was “only now grasping the fact that in this opium business he has the oil to smooth any troubled waters he may meet with at Peking in his aggressive business enterprises there.” The other delegate, future President William Howard Taft, the inventor of “dollar diplomacy,” likewise worried about “one of the greatest commercial prizes in the world.... the trade with the 400,000,000 Chinese.” 6 7
America’s “aggressive business enterprises” were challenged head-on by anti-prohibitionist Eugene Debs, leader of the powerful American Railway Union. Debs’ moderate, libertarian Socialist Party was the electoral umbrella for scores of left-wing groups, including the industrial workers in the Northeast; German and Scandinavian enclaves in the upper Midwest; the radical populists of the Great Plains; Big Bill Haywood’s tough miners and lumberjacks in the Western Federation of Miners - core group of the IWW; Margaret D. Robins’ National Women’s Trade Union League, and Alice Paul’s direct action National Woman’s Party - the radical spearhead that actually forced through woman suffrage.
Debs’ constituency included the awesome scholar and cofounder of the NAACP, W.E.B. DuBois; the seminal young genius of the civil rights movement, A. Philip Randolph; Margaret Sanger and her mentor, the pioneering psychologist Havelock Ellis; muckraking novelists Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser; the intrepid revolutionary reporter John Reed; the firebrand stump speaker Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; the great writer Howard Fast - author of Spartacus; radical publishers Carlo Tresca and Max Eastman; historian Will Durant; populist painter George Bellows; socialite Mabel Dodge; theatricians John Sloan and Robert Edmond Jones; utopian socialist Emma Goldman; pioneering sociologist Thorstein Veblen and muckraking journalist Walter Lippmann. 8
Obviously, no tightly-held ideology bound this diverse group, but they all shared a libertarian fear of bureaucratic collectivism, finding William James and John Dewey more useful than Karl Marx. They also shared a respect for working folks, a disdain for racism and sexism, and a hatred of manipulative prohibitionism, which enshrined the values of the assembly line. Big Bill Haywood, the most radical of the lot, dreamed of a time when “experts will come together for the purpose of discussing the means by which machinery can be made the slave of the people instead of part of the people being made the slave of machinery.” It was their ideas of the minimum wage, social security and unemployment insurance that helped stabilize capitalism during the Great Depression. 9
Bernays Learned Crowd Psychology from his Uncle, Sigmund Freud
And it was Lippmann who warned in his seminal 1922 book Public Opinion that “the manufacture of consent” by the corporate owners of the media was a deadly threat to real democracy. As corporate hit-man Edward Bernays, “the father of public relations” put it, in 1928, in Propaganda: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… it is the intelligent minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously and systematically.” 10
Propaganda during these years meant William Randolph Hearst, who owned the most powerful chain of yellow journals in the country. Hearst built its core circulation, the Chicago Examiner, using Moe Annenberg’s gunsels to hijack delivery trucks, bomb newsstands and attack newsboys. Hearst literally fought for circulation city by city. 11
In 1910 Annenberg branched out for himself in Milwaukee, although the connection to Hearst remained. By the mid-twenties Annenberg owned Racing Form and American Racing Record, the basic betting sheets, and the General News Bureau, the wire service that provided up-to-the-minute race results. Without Annenberg’s wire, bookies were an easy target for those who did have the latest results. Annenberg’s full partner was Al Capone.
It was the national implications of Annenberg’s racing wire that caused Capone to invite him to the first great modern Syndicate confab, the 1929 Atlantic City Conference, necessitated by the lucrative interstate alcohol trade, now a hood monopoly, created by Prohibition.
The New York turf war between Joe the Boss Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano was then going at fever pitch, and the bloodshed was bad for business. The ‘Castellammarese War’ was finally settled by two very dangerous young Turks, Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano. Below, with their early financier, the legendary gambler Arnold Rothstein. Lansky and Siegel’s Jewish hitters, able to pose as G-men, walked right into Maranzano’s well-guarded Helmsley Building office near Grand Central Station and blew him away. Luciano’s button men had taken care of Joe the Boss six months earlier - April, 1931. Capone had been one of Luciano’s New York hitters before he was sent to Chicago.
Luciano, Lansky, Siegel from NYC police files; Rothstein in his office
As the official mob wire, Annenberg’s Nationwide News Service, by the mid-30s, enrolled more than 15,000 clients in 223 cities in 39 states. Hearst tagged along, always able to count on mob goons for ‘circulation.’ Hearst, in turn, always peddled the mob’s ‘anticommunist’ political line. 12
American Hemp Farmers
Hearst also owned Kimberly Clark-St.Regis, the paper and lumber conglomerate that is still busy gobbling up the competition. A major Kimberly Clark-St. Regis customer was DuPont, which converted Kimberly’s wood pulp into explosives and synthetic fiber. Hearst was very progressive. The progressive thrust was the orderly organization of industrial monopoly, that is, industrial fascism.
The economics of marijuana prohibition, brilliantly summarized by Jack Frazier in The Marijuana Farmers and Jack Herer in The Emperor Wears No Clothes, illustrate this fascism perfectly. Marijuana, hemp, was one of America’s most valuable crops in 1900. Much of the country’s textiles, canvas, sails, rope, paper, paints, industrial solvents, lighting oil, machine oil, food oil and medicine was made from it. Marijuana was the raw material for fire hoses, ships rigging, fine linen, work clothes, good paper, candy, bread, bird seed and cheap energy.
The products of a Michigan hemp mill; Scientific American, 6/4/1921
The first American pot law, passed by the Virginia Assembly in 1619, actually required every farmer to grow it, since hemp rigging and caulking were deemed a strategic necessity. The Declaration of Independence and most of America’s pre-Civil War books were printed on combination hemp/flax paper. Tens of thousands of acres were in regular production.
Scientific American, 6/4/1921
In the 1930s, the iconoclastic industrial genius Henry Ford had terrified his fellow industrialists by demonstrating that methanol from easy-to-grow hemp could replace gasoline. An acre of hemp yields 1000 gallons of clean-burning methanol, and it’s far cheaper to make. 13
In Popular Mechanics, Dec. 1941, Ford’s test car body itself was made from the tough hemp fiber, wheat straw, sisal and resin binder. The gasoline, sheet metal, synthetic fiber and plastics industries were not amused by the car Henry Ford “grew from the soil.” They knew Ford was dangerous enough to invent them out of business. 14
Hemp, through ordinary pyrolysis, controlled burning, “cracking,” yields charcoal, fuel oil, methanol and BTU gas, all without toxic emissions. The growing hemp consumes three times as much carbon dioxide as it emits during burning. This cheap, nonpolluting biomass is literally capable, now, of economically replacing most fossil fuels and eliminating much industrial pollution. As Herer puts it, “The plant is an annual that grows in all 50 states. It is the fastest growing sustainable biomass on the planet. It can produce paper, fiber, food and fuel.” 15
Ford with his Hemp Car; Popular Mechanics, 12/1941
Not only could much coal and gasoline pollution be eliminated, so could the massive clearcutting of Alaska’s forests for sale to Japanese paper mills. According to Department of Agriculture Bulletin #404, 1916, “Every tract of 10,000 acres which is devoted to hemp raising year by year is equivalent to a sustained pulp-producing capacity of 40,500 acres of average woodland.” Hemp paper costs half of what tree-pulp paper costs to produce, and the production process is 80% less polluting. 16
Hemp cellulose was DuPont’s original raw material for rayon, the first synthetic fiber. An extrapolation of the same process of nitrating cellulose was used by DuPont to produce its dynamite and TNT. DuPont supplied 30% of the explosives for the Allies during WW I, and is today’s leading synthetic fiber manufacturer. Synthetic fibers, despite all the schmaltz DuPont puts on TV, are expensive, non-biodegradable, produced with polluting petrochemicals, patented, and capable of monopolistic control.
Hemp fibers and cellulose could economically, and ecologically, replace many synthetic fibers, building materials, insulations and plastic foams. As Henry Ford tried to make clear, there is no rational reason to be pumping millions of tons of toxic chemicals into the air each year. Biomass is here, now, and the statewide legalization movement has kicked open the door, throwing the petrochemical and synthetic materials industry open to small-scale competition, since high tech isn’t needed to process hemp for many applications. The bipartisan Hemp Farming Act of 2018 removed hemp, defined as cannabis with less than 0.3% THC, from Schedule I controlled substances and made it an ordinary agricultural commodity. It will take a few years, but some of the hemp industry will soon return to its former place in American agriculture. But ‘reefer madness’ has now become ‘opioid madness’ and the mass imprisonment and institutionalization of organized crime continues apace.
“The Transfer”; Ireland in Columbus Dispatch
DuPont’s financier, Hoover’s Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, engineered the legal destruction of the hemp industry for DuPont, clearing the way for rayon to replace hemp fiber. The first DEA, the Narcotics Division of the Prohibition Unit of the Treasury Department, was founded and funded by the Volstead Act of 1919, the enabling act of the 18th Amendment, Prohibition. The charter of the Narcotics Division, of course, was the Harrison Act of 1914, an original part of Prohibition’s political package. The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was originally the responsibility of Treasury’s Alcohol Tax Division, but went largely unenforced until the Volstead Act of 1919 funded the Prohibition Unit and its subdivision, the Narcotics Division.
Levi Nutt, First Chief of the Narcotics Division; Arnold Rothstein Wanted Poster
The first chief of the Narcotics Division, Levi Nutt, held that job for eleven years. But in 1930, Treasury Secretary Mellon appointed an Assistant Commissioner of Prohibition specializing in diplomacy, Harry Anslinger, to head Treasury’s reorganized Bureau of Narcotics. Treasury’s hopelessly corrupt Prohibition Unit was transferred to Justice.
One of the straws that forced this reorganization reveals the actual dynamics of the situation: the indictment of Narcotics Chief Levi Nutt and most of his New York division by a New York Grand Jury, for being on the Rothstein/Lansky/Luciano payroll. Nutt took over when the Narcotics Bureau became the Narcotics Division in 1919 under exactly the same circumstances: “Indict 3,” below. 17
NYT, 2/1/1920; NYT, 11/8/1928
When the legendary gambler Arnold Rothstein was murdered by one of Dutch Schultz’ hitters named McManus in 1928, his dying body was found with a small fortune in opium, morphine, heroin and cocaine - and all his carefully kept legal books, including the history of his relationship with Nutt. The rabid prohibitionist Nutt started his tenure as head of the Narcotics Division in 1919 with his son Rolland Nutt listed as Rothstein’s attorney of record for tax matters with the Treasury Department, and his son-in-law L. P. Mattingly operating as Rothstein’s New York accountant and attorney. 18
It was Nutt’s boss, Mellon, to the great benefit of his clients Dupont, Hearst and their Syndicate allies, who ordered Anslinger to engineer the “Reefer Madness” campaign that criminalized marijuana. Mellon, through his bank, the Mellon Bank of Pittsburgh, was the major financial backer of DuPont and Hearst.
Mellon, Time, 7/2/1923 (Wikipedia Commons)
DuPont’s 1937 Annual Report to its stockholders looked forward to “radical changes” due to “the revenue raising power of the government ...converted into an instrument for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization.” From DuPont’s perspective, that meant the replacement of the hemp industry with the synthetic fiber industry, the patents for which it owned. The “no-license” Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, enforced by Secretary Mellon’s underling Anslinger, criminalized the entire hemp industry, proving that the authors of DuPont’s Annual Report knew precisely what they were talking about. Henry Ford’s “car grown from the soil” had become virtually illegal. 19
The criminal-governmental symbiosis is a two-way street. If gambling were legal, who’d need Annenberg’s gambling wire? If drugs were legalized or decriminalized, the hood monopoly would be broken and most popular street drugs would lose most of their value. The great hoods, geniuses at organizing street muscle, were for Prohibition, and Assistant Commissioner of Prohibition Anslinger, the Mellon-Dupont operative, was one of their major allies, operating the side of the street they couldn’t independently run.
The American Magazine, 7/1937; 1936 film
Alcohol and Drug Prohibitionist Anslinger, like his soul-mate J. Edgar Hoover, was in bed with the Mellon-Hearst-Annenberg-Syndicate hoods from the beginning. Anslinger always regarded Drug Prohibition as a tool for “social reorganization,” fearing “communist” unions far more than Syndicate heroin gangs, who were, after all, Mellon’s, DuPont’s, Hearst’s and Annenberg’s patriotic strike breakers. They were also J. Edgar Hoover’s most dangerous COINTELPRO operatives - right from the murderous Palmer raids of 1919-1920, which Hoover organized.
Labor was treated to the Espionage Act of 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918 and a revitalized Immigration Act permitting the deportation of naturalized citizens. These were almost word-for-word repeats of the Federalist Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. It became illegal to “utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government in the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy.” “False reports or false statements” which brought the government or military “into contempt, scorn, contumely or disrepute” became punishable crimes. 25
In 1918, for his criticism of the war, Debs was thrown into prison for ten years. Prohibition’s bitter enemy, the great libertarian lawyer Clarence Darrow, helped win a pardon from Harding in 1921. Legally elected Socialists were refused their seats in Congress and the New York Legislature. The IWW was destroyed through imprisonment and assassination. Big Bill Haywood was sent to prison for twenty years, as were most of his surviving lieutenants. “America,” said prohibitionist preacher Billy Sunday, “is not a country for a dissenter to live in.” 26 27
Playing to the politics of the red scare, ignoring the law, Hoover, throughout December 1919 and January of 1920, using deputized local police departments, arrested between six and ten thousand people across the country, not for their actions, but for their political opinions. 591 were deported, and 178 were convicted under the new sedition laws – for their opinion. All the rest had to be freed for lack of evidence of any criminality. The arrests themselves reminded many, on the right as well as on the left, of the worst abuses of the Russian Bolsheviks. President Coolidge, a right-wing straight arrow, reacted by naming Harlan Fiske Stone, dean of the Columbia Law School, as his new attorney general.
On May 9, 1924, Attorney General Stone fired William J. Burns, Hoover’s boss, as director of the Bureau of Investigation, saying this: “A secret police system may become a menace to free government and free institutions because it carries with it the possibility of abuses of power which are not always quickly comprehended or understood. The enormous expansion of Federal legislation, both civil and criminal, has made the Bureau of Investigation a necessary instrument of law enforcement. But it is important that its activities be strictly limited to the performance of those functions for which it was created and that its agents themselves be not above the law or beyond its reach. The Bureau of Investigation is not concerned with political or other opinions of individuals. It is only concerned with their conduct and then only with such conduct as is forbidden by the laws of the United States. When a police system passes beyond these limits, it is dangerous to the proper administration of justice and to human liberty, which should be our first concern to cherish. Within them it should rightly be a terror to the wrongdoer.” 18a
Stone read the riot act to Hoover, but didn’t replace him as acting director. Stone remained as AG for only another 9 months before he ascended to the Supreme Court. Hoover ran the FBI for the next 48 years. And Hoover’s Red Scare training turned him into, as his bestselling book would later put it, one of the great Masters of Deceit. A few years later, prompted by Roosevelt’s new Attorney General, Homer S. Cummings, a former Connecticut state prosecutor, J. Edgar Hoover pioneered the well-publicized destruction of “public enemies,” brilliantly throwing a blanket of PR over his ineffectiveness and corruption. Hoover used the same ghost writer as Harry Anslinger, former circus press agent Courtney Ryley Cooper, the man who coined the phrase “Reefer Madness.” Cooper wrote flashy magazine stories dramatizing J. Edgar’s fictitious personal encounters with “America’s most wanted.” 20
In 1939 Hoover decided that Lepke Buchalter was “the most dangerous man in America.” This momentous decision was forced on J. Edgar when Lepke got himself indicted in 1937 for importing huge amounts of Japanese-KMT heroin from Tientsin. Although the FBI had nothing to do with the investigation or the indictment, it asked Lepke’s partners, Lansky and Luciano, to hand him over to Hoover personally, in the presence of Walter Winchell, no less, in exchange for anonymity and protection. Lansky and Luciano wisely complied - it was good for business, and they were wise guys. 21
Lansky, Trafficante, Marcello, Giancana, Roselli, Costello, Dalitz, Licavoli, Dragna, even the flamboyant Luciano never became FBI ‘Public Enemies’ like John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde, redneck pistoleros who never actually owned a Banana Republic. Of course, if Hoover’s objective wasn’t the suppression of organized crime but the suppression of political dissent, then he was, by his lights, acting correctly. Lansky was a dedicated “anticommunist.” Look how he helped Lepke “decommunize” the New York clothing industry. Look what he and Trafficante did for Cuba. Look how Luciano and Adonis helped clean the Reds out of Sicily. Look what Roselli, Cohen and Siegel did for Hollywood’s production unions. Look how Roselli, a famous CIA contractor, cleaned up Guatemala. So far from going after the Syndicate or narcotics, Hoover’s FBI consistently used hood dope dealers as red-baiting finks and antilabor street muscle. 22
Hooover in his office, 4/5/1940 (Wkimedia Commons); The American Magazine, 1936
The Red Menace wasn’t just industrialist propaganda, it was Syndicate propaganda, as committed unionists knew all too well. One of the most menacing of the Reds, of course, was anti-prohibitionist Eugene Debs, who got 402,000 votes in the 1904 presidential election, coming in third to Roosevelt’s 7,600,000. In 1912 he got 900,000, compared to 206,000 for the Prohibition Party, which started out as a post-bellum Northern organization but ended up in bed with the KKK, strong vigilante enforcers of Prohibition during the 20s. By 1914 the Socialist Party had thirty members in twelve state legislatures, more than 300 city officials and one member of Congress, Victor Berger of Wisconsin.
The popular Debs stumped the country in opposition to the war, insisting that if industry supported the war it was only because it was to its tactical advantage to do so. This happens to have been the case. Corporate profits shot up 300% between 1914 and 1919, and leveled off at a spectacular 30% after the war. Inflation, on the other hand, doubled between 1913 and 1920, completely wiping out the modest wartime wage increases. In 1919 a bushel of corn bought five gallons of gas; two years later it bought a half gallon. Family farms went up for sale all across the country, gobbled up by gas companies. Eugene Debs, a farm boy, understood this. 23 24
Debs Campaigning, 1912
The war created an administrative alliance between business and government that became institutionalized. Industry ran the War Industries Board, the Railroad Administration, the Food Administration, the Fuel Administration, the War Labor Board, the Committee on Public Information and the rest, setting national monetary, production, labor and propaganda policy. As Wilson said in 1917, “War means autocracy. The people we have unhorsed will eventually come into control of the country for we shall be dependent upon the steel, ore and financial magnates. They will run the nation.”
In 1919 there were 3600 strikes in the U.S. involving more than four million workers, and the strikers lost nearly every one. The army and state police were used as strike breakers so often they became specialists in the job. Wilson, citing “Bolshevism,” used the U.S. Army as strike breakers 25 times between 1919 and 1920. In 1923 thousands of viciously abused coal miners in West Virginia staged the largest armed uprising in the U.S. since the Civil War. It took two divisions of the regular army to put it down. The great film Matewan accurately depicts the buildup to this short but bitterly fought guerrilla war. “You load sixteen tons and whatd’ya get, another day older and deeper in debt.” In 1920, Socialist Debs, from his jail cell, got nearly a million votes for president. His constituents considered Syndicate goons to be considerably more of a threat to society than coal miners on a Friday night binge. The syndicate’s dope business had become protected and institutionalized. 28
NYT, 11/3/1918; NYT, 2/22/1919 and 2/27/1921
The wartime head of the Committee on Public Information, America’s first official Propaganda Minister, was Harper’s answer to Good Housekeeping’s Harvey Wiley, George Creel, just before the war the most famous anti-patent medicine screamer in the country. Creel’s 1913-15 series in Harper’s is full of dragons, snakes and dead babies boiled in soothing syrup.
“Vin Mariani,” wrote Creel dismissively, “ordinary Bordeaux red wine, strengthened by an alcohol preparation of coca leaves and sweetened with sugar.” In other words, after testing by its enemies, it proved to be exactly what Mariani said it was. The technique was to list the good with the bad, the invaluable herbal tonics right alongside the chemical shams, as if a high quality alcohol infusion of Mariani’s selected coca leaves was as worthless as colored water. 29
LHJ, 4/1908
The Ladies’ Home Journal’s answer to Wiley’s commercial success was Edward Bok; Collier’s was Samuel Hopkins Adams. In the early days of the propaganda campaign Bok and Adams would meet in Wiley’s office to plan coordinated articles. Subscription ads emphasized the importance of joining the anti-patent-medicine Crusade. 30
During the war Creel’s Committee on Public Information launched the largest government-sponsored propaganda campaign in history, coordinating press and broadcast on both sides of the Atlantic, consistently portraying dissent as treason.
Incredibly, on Germany’s surrender in 1918, Wilson and the Allies immediately rushed massive amounts of armaments to the Prussian militarists they had just defeated. The Spartacists had risen in Germany, taking Berlin, Munich, Dresden, Essen, Bremen and Dusseldorf, and the Allies knew they couldn’t negotiate a reliable contract of reparations with them, so they backed the Prussians.
The revolt took the Prussians months to crush, and it is open to question whether they could have done it without Allied arms. Margaret Sanger’s inspiration, Rosa Luxemburg, the birth strike advocate, died leading this revolt. Had we heeded the socialists and taken the opportunity to crush the Prussians once and for all, we would have saved ourselves the last great battle of World War I, World War II, as predicted in writing by Rosa Luxemburg on the eve of her execution.
Chortled The New York Times, á la George Creel, December 12, 1918: “...in a few years more Germany would have been irresistible in war, for she would have made drug fiends of all the other nations of the world. Into well-known German brands of tooth paste and patent medicines - naturally for export only - habit-forming drugs were to be introduced; at first a little, then more, as the habit grew on the non-German victim and his system craved ever greater quantities.”
Harper’s Weekly, 2/1915; Ladies Home Journal, 1/1912
“Already the test had been made on the natives of Africa, who responded readily; if the General Staff had not been in such a hurry German scientists would have made their task an easy one; for in a few years Germany would have fallen upon a world which cried for its German tooth paste and soothing syrup - a world of ‘cokeys’ and ‘hop fiends’ which would have been absolutely helpless when a German embargo shut off the supply of its pet poison.”
NYT, 1/16/1919, and 8/20/1918
“But although the tale of this Teuton-all-too-Teuton scheme is probably a mere invention, Germany did concoct and spread through the world a habit-forming drug, and her leaders in this war have made good use of its ravages in other countries. More than half a century ago socialism was invented in Germany; and the rulers of the empire, foreseeing its vast possibilities in breaking down national morale, fostered its propagation abroad while they did their best to stamp out the habit at home.... Just as workmen in the tooth paste factories might have surreptitiously sampled the brands made for export only and found attractions not present in the products for the home market, so the Germans took to socialism and neosocialism. It is a rare poison that will not act on the system of its own inventor.”
That is almost exactly what Harry Anslinger told a Senate committee and the United Nations Narcotics Commission in 1951 about the Chinese Reds, holding up a bag of Lions Globe heroin he said they were shipping to our boys in Korea. This assertion was the basis of a major propaganda campaign that lasted for years. Anslinger handled the press with the finesse of Creel himself. Lions Globe was actually the brand manufactured by our own Kuomintang allies, Chiang’s boys, and the more entrepreneurial of the natives, also our allies, in Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle, as our boys in Nam discovered, and as our own Bureau of Narcotics confirmed in 1972. 31 32
In a famous 1959 case, Anslinger’s top international agent, George White, an OSS/CIA operative, made a major heroin bust. It was Burmese Kuomintang heroin funneled through Hong Kong, bound for distribution by the American Syndicate. But by allowing the ringleader, a well-known member of San Francisco’s KMT-organized Chinese Anti-Communist League, to escape, White was enabled to claim that it was Red Chinese dope, “most of it from a vast poppy field near Chungking.” 33
The Kuomintang was for Prohibition. Today we still arm the various military intelligence dope dealers around the world, Mexican, Colombian, Afghan or Pakistani, or finance their drug gangs through the artificial value our Prohibition gives these commodities, and the Lions Globe just keeps on comin’, like toothpaste out of a tube.
And what was the rationale for our support of Asia’s fascist dope peddlers? Communism and Heroin - successful, meaningless, scary, institutionalized propaganda: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses,” to quote the father of public relations.
In 1920 the army’s former chief neuropsychiatrist, Pearce Bailey, revealed in April’s Mental Hygiene that “It is in them [heroin users] that mental contagion which leads up to hysterical mass movements, spreads with the greatest rapidity, and in their minds sedition finds an easier route than realism.... Suggestible, they easily become the tools of designing propagandists in spreading seditious doctrines, or in the commission of acts in defiance of law and order.”
Dr. Alexander Lambert, of the Towns-Lambert method, President of the AMA and head of their “Committee on the Narcotic Drug Situation in the United States,” amplified Dr. Bailey’s insights in the Journal of the AMA, May 8, 1920: “We know that the misfit can no longer be ignored. He is too numerous; he has learned the lesson of organization; and he had learned through association means of cheap satisfaction that deaden for a time his elemental cravings, even though they return him to society more of a menace and a care than before.”
“If he had ‘nerves,’ someday he will get a nightmare vision of himself as a piece of social wastage, a victim of conditions far more far-reaching than his individual life. When he becomes organized and vocal, society may awaken to the fact that he is an I.W.W., a bolshevik, or what not. He is not wholly to blame.”
“If he finds his environment impossible to manipulate through lack of training, he will seek forgetfulness in some form of self-gratification. And some form is usually found in the unwholesome environment of the ordinary city street. If he comes in contact with those using narcotic drugs, they will find him responsive to imitation-suggestion./The correctional cases should be committed to institutions with no age limit - from the cradle to senility, if necessary.”
Here we have the basic elements of today’s propaganda barrage: political treason associated with drug addiction, peer pressure, street gangs, and three strikes and you’re out. This inquisitorial equation of all ecstatic pharmakon use with illness and subversive mania isn’t just camp; this quack wrote today’s drug laws, now administered by an army of careerist quacks with a vested interest in having “a clientage furnished through governmental coercion.”
In 1930, The Literary Digest reported that the fluid from blisters raised on the heroin user and injected was a promising new treatment of interest to the AMA. In 1931 Scientific American reported that the standard rabies treatment worked well on these mad dogs. In 1932 two Cornell researchers reported that “washing the brain” with sodium rhodanate would help “thin the thickened blood cells of the addict.” In 1933, the year of repeal, three anesthetists reported that intravenous injection of grain alcohol was useful. In 1935 Drs. Klingmann and Everts revived the Towns-Lambert method, with an emphasis on the scopolamine. In 1940 two geniuses reported “curing” addiction with “frozen sleep.” In 1957 the Naval Medical Field Research Laboratory at Camp Lejeune spared an addict “the distressing symptoms of withdrawal” by severing his frontal lobes from the rest of his brain. 34 35 3637 38 39 40
Today’s Quack Commander in Chief, Emeritus, promulgating today’s update of this same propaganda, is the ‘progressive’ Joseph Califano, a key CIA operative both before and after Kennedy’s assassination, Carter’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, and now founder and chairman of Columbia University’s Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA), renamed the Partnership to End Addiction. Califano helps to channel a torrent of public money into 1930s-style politicized research, and coercive, Lambert-style ‘treatment.’ Califano’s CASA was one of McCaffrey’s major tools for coordinating national propaganda during the Clinton administration, and has served as a policy model for the DEA ever since.
For Califano all drug use is a “disease,” an “epidemic,” to use his words, which, not so coincidentally, are the same as those used by the Pope in 1487in The Malleus Maleficarum about “witches’ medicines.” Like so many Roman lawyers before him, the man is a genuine anthropological ignoramus. Not once in the psuedo-scientific Radical Surgery (1994) does he mention the origins of human inebriative behavior, tribal culture, or a single significant pharmacologist, anthropologist, ethnobotanist or psychoanalyst, although he insists that “substance abuse and addiction...is - the most devastating health pandemic threatening our people.” Apparently it’s uniquely contemporary, like computer fraud. There’s not a single scholarly annotation in the whole book, which is committee written on a tenth-grade sound-bite level. In fact, he quotes prosecuting attorneys as anecdotal medical authorities. 41
According to Califano, the absurd artificial value Prohibition gives inebriants, and the criminalization of people for simply trying to medicate themselves, in the absence of any sympathetic curanderismo, isn’t the cause of today’s street war. It’s the act of self-medication per se, despite the fact that the leading sociologists insist, and can prove, that safe herbal inebriants, in cultures which teach their traditional uses, cause no social problems whatever. Califano will wring his hands about collegiate “binge drinking” and never once mention an empirical expert on alcoholism. His idea of an expert is “the [unnamed] president of one of the nation’s top Jesuit colleges.” 42
His discussion of “The Rodney King Story” never once mentions the ruthless police beating of a helpless man to within an inch of his life. It was their acquittal, of course, despite that incredible videotape of six cops beating King to within an inch of his life, that set off the 1992 Los Angeles riots. But Califano never mentions the beating, which so many felt symbolized their own experience. Instead, he focuses on King’s drinking, concluding that “Months later, after the policemen’s acquittal, the riots began - not at the courthouse or at city hall - but at Pay-less Liquor and Deli in South Central L.A. There, around 4 P.M., five angry gang members stole some bottles of malt liquor, yelling ‘This is for Rodney King!’ Around 6 P.M., an angry mob, pelting passing motorists, chose its first target for looting: Tom’s Liquor store, from which the mob took more than a hundred cases of forty-ounce malt liquor bottles and ninety cases of sixteen-ounce malt liquor cans.”
“The focus of the crowd should not be a surprise. As U.S. News & World Report noted, 728 licensed liquor outlets smothered South Central L.A.’s crumbling landscape - an opportunity to buy booze around just about every corner.” 43
That is straight out of The Nigger: “Why, day befo’ yeste’day I had a count made an’ theah were three thousand four hundred an’ sixty-seven idle niggahs in the fifty-nine saloons o’ the levee district! That was the end, Clif, an’ the long an’ the sho’t of it is - we’re goin’ dry!”
Califano prescribes legal coercion to force all users trapped by the law, about 5% per year of the total of about 30 million, into a huge brainwashing bureaucracy, attached to the court system, that will pummel them until they submit. He plausibly advocates treatment over incarceration, accurately pointing out that “$1 invested in treatment saves $7 in crime, health and welfare costs.” But his “progressive compassion” is just as vicious as Lambert’s. 44 45
He says he knows that “Addiction is a chronic disease, more like diabetes and high blood pressure than like a broken arm or pneumonia, which can be fixed or cured in a single round of therapy.” But he then suggests that “Instead of across-the-board mandatory sentences, keep inmates with drug and alcohol problems in jails, boot camps or halfway houses until they experience a year of sobriety after treatment.” He adopts Dr. Leshner’s mainstream disease model, as he must to be plausible, but then advocates precisely the opposite therapy advocated by Dr. Leshner. Do we keep diabetics in boot camps until the diabetes goes away? Cigarette addicts? White man speak with forked tongue. This nasty hypocrite tells us that addiction is a chronic condition, and then proposes punishment for its sufferers, as the mainstream of drug abuse experts most certainly do not. 46 47
For Califano, addiction is really a “turpitude” to be corrected, not a symptom of a real medical condition requiring continuing pharmacotherapy. His medical compassion is simply a necessary pose. He repeats, as if it were a medical prescription, the Bush-Bennett National Drug Control Strategy: “That doesn’t mean we should soften up the toughness required to get them to quit, such as threat of dismissal from a job or incarceration upon repeated relapse or violation of drug laws.” Just what an addictive personality needs - the stress of unemployment and the threat of incarceration. That’s sure to promote sobriety. However one defines ‘addiction,’ I know of no physician who thinks denial of pain killers to those in pain, or imprisoning diabetics and denying them insulin, is medically indicated. 48
“The grim reality, shrouded for too long in our self-denial, is that any effort to provide all Americans health care at affordable cost is doomed to fail unless we mount an all-fronts attack on abuse and addiction involving all substances - cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, crack, heroin, PCP, hallucinogens, sedatives, tranquilizers, stimulants, analgesics, inhalants, and steroids.” 49
So far as I can tell from his book, that’s his idea of all substances. Califano neither distinguishes herbs from concentrates nor use from abuse, even in the vast majority of cases that involve no abuse. A positive test automatically means “addiction to witchcraft.” It is precisely this indiscriminate idiocy that popularizes the street alkaloids and cigarettes. The Secretary tells us that his personal model for all drug use is his compulsive, 28-year tobacco addiction, up to 4 packs a day when he was busy telling Lyndon Johnson victory is just around the corner in Vietnam. Why wasn’t he thrown into a halfway house? 50
Califano is apparently, or conveniently, unaware that the average marijuana user smokes one cigarette for every pack consumed by a tobacco addict, and that addiction to marijuana is medically unknown. Dr. John Morgan: “Of course, a ‘heavy’ smoker of marijuana consumes 3 or 4 cigarettes per day, while a heavy tobacco smoker may consume 40 or more cigarettes per day. This probably explains the rarity of reported carcinoma in marijuana smokers.” Califano sophistically equates pot with tobacco, and then insists, lying through his teeth, that pot escalates cancer costs. That is a professional propagandist at work, not a scientist. 51
He dreamily insists that all traditional inebriative herbs are equally dangerous, and that all herbs are, magically, so to speak, as dangerous as the most dangerous refined concentrates. All inebriants, therefore, deserve no policy distinctions. This is also the official position of the U.S. State Department. Califano makes no connection between the unavailability of safe traditional herbs like marijuana, coca leaf and opium sap, which he never once mentions, and the wild popularity of relatively dangerous, but profitable to smuggle, street alkaloids like cocaine and heroin. Nor does he associate the unavailability of safe herbs with the popularity of poisonous crap like glue and PCP. On the contrary, he equates the herbs with the poisons.
Califano therefore advocates making crack worth an artificial fortune, and is then outraged when poor ghetto kids gang up to make it. Prohibition has created a multi-billion-dollar street trade run by kids cutting concentrated, amateurishly-produced alkaloids with sugars, procaine, baking soda, quinine, even poisons, forcing Uncle Joe to conclude that health problems from this garbage are ultimately caused by marijuana leaves. Califano informs us that teenagers who smoke pot are “85 times more likely to use cocaine.” 52
The intentional sophistry of this “stepping stone” statistic is disgusting. The National Institute on Drug Abuse, the outfit he founded as Carter’s Secretary of HEW, derived the “85 times more likely” snow-statistic in 1991 by dividing the proportion of U.S. marijuana users who ever used cocaine, 17%, by the proportion of cocaine users who never used marijuana, almost none, 0.2%. That is a sociological, not a pharmacological measurement. By that measure, tobacco, beer or steak could be shown to be causative cocaine-use factors. 53
83% of regular pot smokers never used cocaine, but that’s something Califano won’t advertise, since that would demonstrate that marijuana is a “terminus” rather than a ”gateway” drug. NIDA’s own 1991 survey concluded that 68 million Americans had tried marijuana, but that there were only about 6 million drug addicts or abusers in the whole country, most abusing inebriants other than marijuana. In other words, according to NIDA’s own stats, marijuana leads to very little abuse.
NIDA says that 17% of U.S. marijuana users have used cocaine at least once. The Dutch figure is less than one-tenth that; it’s so small it can’t even be accurately measured, which proves, obviously, that the supposed pharmacological connection between pot and coke is pure fiction. The connection is sociological - related to public policy, and proves the exact opposite of what the sloppy-thinking Califano is so hysterically trying to prove.
Here is part of the official end-of-year report from the Dutch Ministry of Welfare, Health and Cultural Affairs, 1995, signed by the Ministers of Health, Justice and Interior: “Dutch policy on the use of cannabis is based on the assumption that people are more likely to make the transition from soft to hard drugs as a result of social factors than because of physiological ones. If young adults wish to use soft drugs - and experience has shown that many do - the Netherlands believes that it is better that they should do so in a setting in which they are not exposed to the criminal subculture surrounding hard drugs. Tolerating relatively easy access to quantities of soft drugs for personal use is intended to keep the consumer markets for soft and hard drugs separate, thus creating a social barrier to the transition from soft to hard drugs…. The decriminalization which took place in the 1970s did not lead to an increase in the use of soft drugs then either.”
“The view held by some that the use of cannabis products alone causes a physiological or psychological need to use hard drugs as well - what is known as the stepping stone theory - has been belied by actual developments in the Netherlands. Dutch young people who use soft drugs are perfectly well aware of the greater dangers of using hard drugs such as heroin and have no desire to experiment with them. In the Netherlands the percentage of soft drugs users who also go on to use hard drugs is relatively low. In light of these findings the stepping stone theory should be regarded as one of the many myths in circulation about the use of drugs, though one which under certain circumstances could become a self-fulfilling prophesy: by treating the use of cannabis products and hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine in the same way may in fact make it more likely that cannabis-smokers will come into contact with hard drugs. Moreover, equating the one with the other undermines the credibility of the information provided about drugs to young people.”
The average age of Dutch heroin addicts is over thirty, that is, this policy, which has been in place for more than forty years, has succeeded in radically reducing the use of heroin among the young. Holland now has less than one-seventh our rate of hard drug use, and crime. “The fact that there are virtually no young people under 20 using heroin or cocaine in the Netherlands is extremely gratifying…” By refusing to distinguish whole herbs from either natural or artificial concentrates, Califano is actually engineering widespread concentrate use. And that, like it or not, is an historical function of military intelligence, which has always been financed by the Yakuza, the Mafia.
CIA agent Califano, in the early 60s, was the chief military liaison to Santos Trafficante’s Cuban dope dealers, the remnants of Batista’s secret police. It was Califano’s job to protect Trafficante’s huge heroin and cocaine operation, which supported our anti-Castro Batistiano guerrilla army. Califano’s job, then as now, was to keep the price of the ‘prohibited susbstances’ up. Medicalization of the refined concentrates, and legalization of the whole herbs, would collapse the price, putting organized crime out of the drug business.
Remember Califano’s other domino theory, the one about Vietnam? We could have bought the Viet Minh for a tenth of the price we paid to lose to them. Do we really want to take national policy cues from one of the engineers of two of the worst strategic disasters in American history, the Vietnam War and the Drug War?
Times-Picayune, 6/5/1930; American Newspapers, Inc.,1938
Califano is peddling his “devil-drug” for all it’s worth, wringing his hands, crying in his beer for all those “crack babies.” This talented propagandist, a master at hyping “new studies” designed to induce artificial hysteria, constantly repeats the phrase “pediatric pandemic,” a great alliteration. Fascism is always maudlin. 55
Califano: “Put the children of drug- or alcohol-addicted welfare mothers who refuse treatment into foster care or orphanages.... Subject inmates, parolees and welfare recipients with a history of substance abuse to random drugs tests, and fund the treatment they need. Liberals must recognize that getting off drugs is the only chance these individuals (and their babies) have to enjoy their civil rights.” 56
JAMA: “Media-generated hysteria over ‘crack babies’ has led to the imprisonment of women who use cocaine during pregnancy. Many health care workers believe that the fear of prosecution and imprisonment discourages many of the women who most need prenatal care from seeking it. Ironically, properly controlled scientific studies suggest maternal cocaine use may pose less danger to a fetus than maternal cigarette smoking.” 57
While cigarette-addict Califano does include some boilerplate about cigarettes and alcohol, he doesn’t advocate criminalizing them, despite the fact that while only 2.5% of U.S. newborns may have some prenatal exposure to cocaine, 73% have some prenatal exposure to alcohol and 38% to cigarettes. And while there’s no medical doubt about the devastating effects alcohol has on a developing fetus, there’s considerable doubt that cocaine is anywhere near as harmful. When the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta put pregnant rhesus monkeys on an intravenous cocaine drip for the entire duration of their pregnancies, all their babies were born perfectly normal. The worst effect of prenatal cocaine use may be that users tend to smoke more cigarettes and drink more booze. 58 59
Califano: “Legalizing drug use would write off millions of minority Americans, especially children and drug-exposed babies, whose communities are most under siege by drugs.” That’s funny, I thought they were under siege by the police. I can’t remember the last time time I saw a pot plant smash a kid in the face with a nightstick, or shoot one in the back. Is that like Pope Gregory’s “it’s better to burn in this world than to burn in the next”? 60
All urban police departments, even if they won’t mention the tension they bring to the situation, stress that it’s the economics of Prohibition, the artificial underground economy, combined with the lack of opportunity, that is responsible for the gang warfare, not pharmacology per se.
Former Baltimore Mayor Schmoke, a former police officer: “Drug traffickers kill to protect or seize drug turf, and addicts commit crimes to get money for drugs. Almost half the murders in Baltimore in 1992 were drug related.” “When we say drug-related,” explains Deputy Commissioner Raymond Kelly of the New York City Police Department, “we’re essentially talking about territorial disputes or disputes over possession.... We’re not talking about where somebody is deranged because they’re on a drug.” 61 62
Califano, and his clones McCaffrey and succeeding DEA chiefs, are careful to invert this, insisting, in classic reefer madness style, that by some demonic magic pharmacology is the reason kids are shooting each other over dealing territory. Collapse the price with legalization, and the violence will collapse instantly. By creating an underground economy and then demonizing the normal money-seeking and ecstatic behavior of the young, we instigate their murder. As Eddy Engelsman, the former Dutch Minister of Health, puts it, “The effects of heroin and cocaine use are too often confused with the effects of their illegality.”
When I was 17, in 1962, a classmate of mine went down to north Harlem with a buddy to buy five dollars worth of pot and go to the movies. When they got busted, Steve’s buddy panicked and made for the subway, where it’s easy to hop one of the many trains flowing through the dense crowd. Just before the kid got to the subway stairwell the cop shot him in the back - dead. That is an absolutely typical drug war story.
On February 21, 1995, the cops set up 16 year-old Lawrence Meyers at his Patterson, New Jersey housing project. The enraged kid panicked and ran, at which rookie housing cop Ronald Cohen shot him through the back of the head. According to Califano, Lawrence Meyers was more of “the debris of drug use on city streets.”
That is, we have made no Drug War progress at all since the 1960s – the fascist horror stories are identical. Cops are still being taught that the people they are policing are military enemies, or legitimate targets for ‘ticketing’ extortion: “10/17/2018: Video shows Chicago cop shooting unarmed black autistic teen,” “3/2/2019: 2 Sacramento cops who shot unarmed black man in backyard won't face charges,” “9/14/2018: A Dallas Police Officer Shot Her Neighbor, and a City Is Full of Questions.” I could fill the rest of this book with these stories. 63
Michael Slager calmly takes aim and pumps 5 shots into Walter Scott’s back, for a broken brake light, April 4, 2015 (Wikimedia Commons)
Country roads are also seeing their share of debris. In the middle of the night of April 28, 1995, in Wisconsin, four Dodge County troopers burst into Scott Bryant’s trailer with no warning and shot him dead: “They rushed the door but they didn’t holler anything. As soon as they kicked the door in, we heard the shot.” Bryant had offered no resistance, no firearms were found, and he was in possession of barely enough pot to make three joints. The idiots had simply worked themselves into a frenzy for the midnight raid and shot the terrified victim to death as he flinched. His stricken seven year old boy watched his Daddy die on the living room floor. “Liberals must recognize that getting off drugs is the only chance these individuals (and their babies) have to enjoy their civil rights,” says the seminally important Drug War fascist Califano, a leading member of the team that put this brutality in place. 64
If coca leaf preparations were legal, the mild, healthful coca leaf high, about as potent as coffee but far more delightful, would largely replace cocaine on the street. Until Decree 22095 of 1978 prohibited the possession and sale of coca leaves at altitudes below 1500 meters, cocaine use was virtually unknown in Lima. Coca is the basic sacrament and medicine of Andean culture. It is given to babies as a tonic and is used as a specific for altitude sickness, dysentery and various other complaints. When unavailable, it is not missed; there’s no such thing as ‘addiction’ to coca leaves. Califano handles this logical problem of his anti-legalization argument the same way NIDA chemists often do, by sophistically equating coca leaves with polluted street cocaine. He absolutely never mentions the leaves at all, despite, or perhaps because of, their preeminent place in Native American culture.
Like coffee, coca leaves are a work and concentration stimulant. They increase the efficiency with which the muscles use oxygen, as Freud demonstrated in 1884. The Incas, working in the oxygen-thin high Andes, named their Goddess Mama Coca. Coca leaves are the premier sacrament of Andean culture - and that’s why they’re illegal. Isolated cocaine has absolutely nothing to do with it. Coca leaves were immediately demonized by the Spanish slavers on conquest, hundreds of years before the isolation of cocaine. The drug war is motivated by the inquisitorial neurosis, reflexive, unconscious slaver hostility to tribal culture.
Country roads are also seeing their share of debris. In the middle of the night of April 28, 1995, in Wisconsin, four Dodge County troopers burst into Scott Bryant’s trailer with no warning and shot him dead: “They rushed the door but they didn’t holler anything. As soon as they kicked the door in, we heard the shot.” Bryant had offered no resistance, no firearms were found, and he was in possession of barely enough pot to make three joints. The idiots had simply worked themselves into a frenzy for the midnight raid and shot the terrified victim to death as he flinched. His stricken seven year old boy watched his Daddy die on the living room floor. “Liberals must recognize that getting off drugs is the only chance these individuals (and their babies) have to enjoy their civil rights,” says the seminally important Drug War fascist Califano, a leading member of the team that put this brutality in place. 64
If coca leaf preparations were legal, the mild, healthful coca leaf high, about as potent as coffee but far more delightful, would largely replace cocaine on the street. Until Decree 22095 of 1978 prohibited the possession and sale of coca leaves at altitudes below 1500 meters, cocaine use was virtually unknown in Lima. Coca is the basic sacrament and medicine of Andean culture. It is given to babies as a tonic and is used as a specific for altitude sickness, dysentery and various other complaints. When unavailable, it is not missed; there’s no such thing as ‘addiction’ to coca leaves. Califano handles this logical problem of his anti-legalization argument the same way NIDA chemists often do, by sophistically equating coca leaves with polluted street cocaine. He absolutely never mentions the leaves at all, despite, or perhaps because of, their preeminent place in Native American culture.
Like coffee, coca leaves are a work and concentration stimulant. They increase the efficiency with which the muscles use oxygen, as Freud demonstrated in 1884. The Incas, working in the oxygen-thin high Andes, named their Goddess Mama Coca. Coca leaves are the premier sacrament of Andean culture - and that’s why they’re illegal. Isolated cocaine has absolutely nothing to do with it. Coca leaves were immediately demonized by the Spanish slavers on conquest, hundreds of years before the isolation of cocaine in 1860. The drug war is motivated by the inquisitorial neurosis, reflexive, unconscious slaver hostility to tribal culture.
Felipe Caceres, Bolivia's Vice Minister of Social Defense: "We protest strongly against the recommendations of the report of INCB about the prohibition of coca. The coca leaf as a plant is part of nature. Thanks to Mother Earth, the Pachamama, it can be used in medicine and as nutrition. It is not cocaine but the cultural heritage of the Bolivians." It takes 2000 lbs. of coca leaf to make 20 lbs. of cocaine, using successive washes of toxic chemicals. Coca leaf is used whole, with no processing.
Tribal herbalism is matriarchal, non-industrial, shamanic and experiential, not theological. Cultural genocide is a necessary part of the industrial enslavement process. Mandatory religion is a slaver invention designed to institutionalize enslavement and land theft. When Constantine adopted Paul's Christianity he was the greatest slaver on the face of the planet. The Roman slavers inverted the message of the anti-slavery Israeli rebel Joshua to a theological endorsement of human enslavement, which Bishop Augustine affirmed. Hostility to matriarchal shamanism can be seen in the way the Constantinian church treated the herbal sacramentalists at Nag Hammadi, and in Rome at that time. Witness the linguistic rift between Paul (Roman) and Saul (Israeli), Mary (Roman) and Miriam (Israeli). The Dead Sea scrolls from Jesus' actual synagogue celebrate 'the plants of truth' at length. Jesus' Greek shaman name was Iasius, the Healer, which is cognate with 'iatros,' Greek for 'physician.' The Romans allowed Paul, one of their reservation police, who spoke no Hebrew, who left us only Greek, to develop his Roman syncretism of Israeli religion, precisely to split the antislavery Israelis, then at war with Rome. They also executed Jesus, another anti-slavery Israeli nationalist. The Romans then proceeded to burn every non-conforming book in their empire that they could find, along with the readers of those books. See my book Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda. 65 66
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines neurosis as “individual or group behavior that is characterized by rigid adherence to an idealized concept of the personal or social organism especially when that concept is significantly at variance with reality and that results in interpersonal, cultural or political conflict… (the atmosphere of conformity, introduced by our present neurosis).” (Parenthesis theirs.)
A good short definition of neurosis is “an unrealistic reaction to a present situation based on a past memory or emotion.” Califano has no more reason to demonize Mama Coca than his coreligionist Pizzaro had, or, rather, he has the same reasons. The enslavement process inherently entails the forcible replacement of the matriarchal experiential shamanism with the patriarchal theocratic substitute, replacing spontaneous shamanic creativity with theologically mandated “submission.”
The powerful Confederación Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, the Indian union, insists on the distinction between “the sacred leaf,” quite literally the Sacred Eucharist to them, and refined cocaine, as does the influential Central Obrera Boliviana, the largest trade union confederation. Native America is the majority down there, Euro-fascism or no. Has Joseph Califano ever sat down over a cup of coca leaf tea with an Incan shaman? Has he ever chewed a quid? He probably doesn’t even think it’s worth the effort; thinks he’s got nothing to learn, or too much to lose.
Cocaine’s or heroin’s availability through physicians or licensed distributors, at 5% of street prices, would a) bankrupt all the smuggling organizations and therefore render concentrates unavailable on the street - and that is the only way to do that; b) economically force all concentrate users into the hands of medical professionals; c) leave those professionals free to prescribe as they saw fit; d) remove the milieu and incentive for armed robbery and turf war instigated by the cost of illegal inebriants.
Herb legalization and controlled concentrate dispensation would also give the campesinos a legal market for, and partially collapse the price of, their most valuable crops. Crop substitution would then make some economic sense. End of drug war. But does military intelligence really want the war to end?
Califano, a major military intelligence operative of the Vietnam War years, reveals his rank dishonesty when he asserts, in his 1994 book, that “Arguments for legalization are notoriously short on details. Would we legalize all drugs or only some? Could they be marketed like alcohol and tobacco? How old would you have to be to get legal drugs? Old enough to drive a car? Would you have to prove you are already addicted? Could drugs be sold in pharmacies? In every neighborhood?” 67
Do you have to prove you’re addicted to buy beer? Does any sane person advocate drunk driving? Selling whiskey to eight-year-olds? Califano goes on with more inane staccato questions, prosecuting attorney style, always confusing traditional herbs with isolates and poisons, as if he were completely unaware of the large body of specific work, long on details, produced by so many.
Definitive indexes of this work can be found on the National Drug Strategy Network (ndsn.org), the Drug Policy Alliance (drugpolicy.org), the Drug Reform Coordination Network (stopthedrugwar.org), and NORML (norml.org).
Professor Steven Duke and Albert Gross are the authors of America’s Longest War: Rethinking Our Tragic Crusade Against Drugs. These two brilliant lawyers and sociological thinkers presented their own detailed legalization plan in fifty pages of text. Am I to believe Califano never heard of this seminal best-seller on his subject, published the year before his own, or the work of so many others, long on details? This is intellectual dishonesty, overt lying.
Concludes Califano: “In his epic, A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee concluded that great civilizations are destroyed by self-inflicted wounds - not by enemies from outside, but from within. The threat from substance abuse is not the only internal threat our nation faces, but it is certainly as pernicious and costly as any other. Nowhere is this more evident than in the hospitals, emergency rooms, and doctors’ offices crowded with its victims and in the trail of shattered lives and families in every part of our nation.” 69
Rep. Richmond P. Hobson of Alabama, 1911: “History is a record of a sad procession of world tragedies. Nations and empires in turn have risen to greatness only to fall. Before the death blow was struck from without the evidence shows in every case the ravages of a titanic destroyer within, under whose operations the vitality and strength of the nation were submerged in a general degeneracy.”
“For centuries the world’s philosophers and historians have looked on appalled, overwhelmed. Only in the last few years has science taken up the question. Following her patient, rigid methods, under which nature and life have slowly yielded up their secrets, science has at last cleared up the mystery and identified the great destroyer as alcoholic poisoning.”
In 1925, Hobson, echoing virtually all of officialdom, including Califano and today’s DEA, insisted that “Heroin changes a misdemeanant into a desperado of the most vicious type…. Narcotic addicts lose their soul-life. They sink to the level of the brute.” Hobson, like Califano, violently opposed maintenance clinics that simply prescribed the desired inebriant under medical supervision, that is, that were allowed to practice harm reduction or limited legalization. 70
Dr. S. Dana Hubbard, one of the chief clinicians at the New York City Heroin Clinic in 1920, pointed out that the huge numbers of addicts imagined by the alarmists “are mythical and untrue and...therefore the fear of a panic of these miserable unfortunates was negative.”
Even the AMA’s Lambert had to agree that strict enforcement turned up only about 7000 addicts in all of greater New York. Almost all of them were completely nonviolent, and, given a cheap supply of morphine or opium, law abiding. Despite the constant political hysteria, this has been the conclusion of every serious study of addiction and crime ever since. As innumerable highly productive opiate users have demonstrated, given a cheap supply of opiates and a good work-study program, there is no heroin problem. Just as Vietnam, and we, would have been better off if we simply ignored it, so too would the “drug problem.” 72
Dr. Arnold Trebach, after a learned consideration of historical policy and pharmacology, concluded that, ideally, a major part of The Heroin Solution would be precisely what Dr. Lester Volk said it was on the floor of Congress in 1922: the family physician and smoking opium - and an end to the artificial hysteria. Dr. Volk, the only physician in Congress, pointed out, on January 4, 1922, that the AMA’s Lambert was a corrupt fraud, a co-proprietor of Towns’ hospitals, studying “the different shades and colors, consistency, and solidity of the products of elimination by which the learned gentlemen administering the medication determine the exact status of the will power of the patient.” 73
Volk noted that the two most famous American experts on addiction, Dr. George Pettey, who wrote Narcotic Drug Disease and Allied Ailments and Dr. Ernest Bishop, author of The Narcotic Drug Problem, were either completely ignored or under indictment by the USDA.
“As a substitute for open discussion of known medical facts there has been set up a propaganda for the incarceration of all drug users, their treatment by routine methods, and complete elimination of the family doctor. An undeniable effort is now being made whereby physicians are to be denied any discretion and power in the prescribing of narcotic drugs and to force all those addicted to the use of these drugs into hospitals exploiting questionable ‘cures.’” 74
In The Medical Record, Dec. 1921, Dr. Volk added: “For over two years the lay press has been pretty constantly portraying various spectacular, criminal, or morbid angles...of what is popularly called the ‘drug evil.’... The whole situation presents a picture of...strife, of influence, of power and of propaganda and publicity.... About the only undisputed fact...is the rapid extension of criminal and illicit ‘underworld’ smuggling and peddling, and the increase of addiction through its commercial extension...”
Chicago Herald and Examiner,1926; Sharing the Sacramental Kava, Samoa, c. 1920
The price of heroin skyrocketed from $6.50 an ounce in 1913 to $100 an ounce in 1920, as Harrison enforcement began in earnest, according to police. By forcing the physicians out, the USDA was enforcing an ironclad monopoly in favor of the hoods and their fascist military allies, handing them a completely artificial multimillion dollar trade they had every incentive to expand as rapidly as possible.
Before the 1923 closing, on Narcotics Chief Levi Nutt’s orders, of the prescribing Shreveport Clinic, the Shreveport Journal reported that the street trade in drugs was unknown, but that on the closing of the clinic, a lively underground trade had developed. This gave Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, the Marcello brothers, Huey and Earl Long and their banana-republic allies one more game to run in Louisiana. Do you think Levi Nutt, who had a direct business relationship with Rothstein, didn’t know that? 75 76
The amount of California acreage devoted to wine grapes went from 97,000 in 1919 to 681,000 in 1926, at the height of Prohibition, because Prohibition made grapes worth an artificial fortune. In 1931 the presidential Wickersham Commission concluded that Prohibition had caused an increase in the consumption of alcohol. 77 78
Marijuana, as everyone knows, is now medically or completely legal in dozens of states. And the states that have completely legalized it are in public policy heaven, with crime down and revenue up. States that have legalized medical marijuana, according to Medicare, have seen a distinct drop in prescriptions for opioid and other painkillers. The Hemp Farming Act of 2018 legalized cannabis with less than 0.3% THC, making it an ordinary agricultural commodity nationwide. But the ‘opioid epidemic’ and the ‘crack epidemic’ have replaced ‘reefer madness’ in the drug propaganda, even though coca leaf and opium sap are as harmless as pot, thus ensuring the continuing profitability of the imprisonment-for-profit, policing and drugs-for arms industries.
Neocolonialism
Coffee prices multiply approximately 3-fold from producer’s wholesale to retail. Heroin multiplies approximately 200-fold from its Prohibition-inflated wholesale price to retail. Heroin now retails, by weight, for 10 times the price of gold. That, of course, makes it the basis of military power in Mexico, Colombia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ghana – you name it. 12
Military power is built on money, and, thanks to global Prohibition, drug trafficking is the most profitable business on the planet. As the State Department itself puts it, in its end-of-year 1996 Enforcement Affairs report, “In terms of weight and availability, there is currently no commodity more lucrative than drugs. They are relatively cheap to produce and offer enormous profit margins that allow the drug trade to generate criminal revenues on a scale without historical precedent.”
The U.N estimates the global drug trade in the early 1990s to be worth 400 billion untaxed dollars a year. In 1994 Apolinar Biaz-Callejas of the Andean Commission of Jurists put it at $460 billion. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2012, estimated $435 billion per year. On March 27, 2017, Global Financial Integrity (GFI) published a report, Transnational Crime and the Developing World, that estimated upwards of $500 billion. 3
The Guardian Weekly, 7/14/99: “The world’s organised criminals have a greater economic output than Britain, according to a United Nations report. Their turnover is now greater than all but three of the world’s economies.”
“The UN’s 1999 Human Development Report estimates that organised crime syndicates gross more than $1,500bn [1.5 trillion] a year. The UK’s economic output is just over $1,200bn. The report says the syndicates’ economic power rivals that of multinational corporations.”
Solely because of our Prohibition, “The biggest growth area is drugs, which is now a bigger global industry than motor manufacturing. Over the past 10 years, the production of opium has more than tripled and the production of coca leaves has doubled. The illegal drug trade - supplying 200m customers - is worth around $400bn, or 8% of world trade.”
According to the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, “drug traffickers launder an estimated $100 billion per year in the United States.” Biaz-Callejas estimated “$260 billion, which is circulated through its [the U.S.] financial system, in contraband, and through other ways.” 4 5
Since military power is built on money, and since governments, or at least relations between governments, are built on military power, the structural effect of the artificial value created by our Prohibition has been to create, over the decades, an unbreakable symbiosis between drug-dealing and covert military intelligence. Each is the greatest strategic ally of the other. The political effect has been the institutionalization of Prohibitionism, global industrial fascism, death-squad genocide, wherever campesinos threaten to take control of their own land. I speak of Nicaragua, Burma, Guatemala, the Philippines, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Indonesia, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uruguay, Sudan, Congo, Liberia, Nigeria - the list is endless. If they’re lucky, these police states will evolve into propaganda-managed neofascist “democracies” that “reeducate” rather than assassinate. That’s the preferred American model, like El Salvador after the U.S.-induced unnecessary war.
Thanks to the peace accord signed on 12/29/96 by Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzu and leftist rebel leaders, Guatemala is now also a “democracy.” The drug-dealing army that conducted the genocide is still in control of state machinery, but with a spruced-up image that will allow continued massive U.S. military assistance. That is, the peace accord will guarantee that the flow of cocaine from the Guatemalan military will remain uninterrupted.
Thanks to the pure physics of supply and demand, that pattern repeats over and over throughout Latin America. The U.S. maintains its drug price support with spotty enforcement aimed at political scapegoats, and the drug dealing structure in military intelligence remains unimpaired.
As the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, 2015 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report puts it: “In 2012, President Perez Molina attracted international attention by proposing drug decriminalization as a way to limit the violence associated with narcotics trafficking and to reduce the burden on transit country governments. Although the administration has stated that Guatemala will not unilaterally move to legalize narcotics, it has spearheaded efforts to review drug policies in the hemisphere, including hosting the 43rd meeting of the General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) in June, 2013. This was followed by a Special Session of the OAS General Assembly dedicated to this issue in Guatemala City during September 2014. In January, President Perez Molina appointed members of his cabinet and several prominent civil society leaders to a high-level commission to study alternative drug policies....”
“Among the most pressing issues facing Guatemala are the high levels of violence fueled by drug trafficking and other organized criminal activities…. As much as 40 percent of this violence, according to Guatemalan government estimates, is generated by the drug trade.”
“The major obstacle to achieving lasting reductions in the country’s high levels of violence are Guatemala’s weak law enforcement institutions, including a corrupt and ineffective police force, an overburdened and inefficient judiciary, and an inadequate corrections system.”
The New York Times, March 5, 2012: “Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. delivered a blunt message on Monday to leaders in Latin America who are contemplating opening the door to the legalization of illicit drugs: The United States will not budge in its opposition.”
Reuters, Feb. 24, 2017 “The United States will request the extradition of former Guatemalan Vice President Roxana Baldetti and a former cabinet minister on drug trafficking charges, the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala said on Friday. Baldetti has been imprisoned in Guatemala since 2015 on charges of leading a network that defrauded the government of the Central American country along with former president Otto Pérez Molina, who has also been arrested and is awaiting trial.”
That is, they nailed the one Guatemalan leader who pressed for decriminalization, which would have collapsed the price, destroying the economic foundation of the whole ‘drug interdiction’ system, including military and police funding. All the other Guatemalan officials escaped due to “a corrupt and ineffective police force.”
Advocacy for Human Rights in the Americas (wola.org) reports, April 15, 2016: “In 2016, Central American military and police forces will receive more U.S. assistance than they have in over a decade. This increase comes as the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador are ramping up drug interdiction and border security efforts, and deploying security forces—often trained in military combat tactics—onto the streets to respond to high murder and crime rates.”
The Guardian, July 17, 2015: “Just two months from a presidential ballot, the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a United Nations-backed independent group working with prosecutors to root out corruption, said that political contributor anonymity is facilitating links to organised crime. ‘Corruption is the principal source of financing for political parties,’ Ivan Velasquez, commissioner at the CICIG, told a news conference. The group’s investigations have rocked the government and led to the arrest of some high-ranking officials, including the central bank chief. The report said that drug trafficking had infiltrated local politics by financing campaigns, putting its own members up as candidates and creating construction companies that later won government contracts.”
From the 1930s to today, 2019, thanks to the artificial value our Prohibition gives drug crops, the same pattern repeats itself, over and over. Any reformer that tries to collapse the value with legalization, from Árbenz to Pérez Molina, is put out of action, one way or another, as the media soup is thickened with one more sacrificial lamb.
The image of the “democracies” will be reinforced through massive propaganda, legal coercion, imprisonment and selective assassination, rather than the clumsy, counterproductive genocide the Guatemalan or Salvadoran military had previously preferred. As in the U.S., the propaganda barrage, backed by the threat of imprisonment, property confiscation and “reeducation,” is said to reduce “demand.” And, as in the U.S., “demand” is reduced selectively, politically, using a “profile,” going after the center-left progressives who actually would collapse the artificial value created by Prohibition.
According to the U.N. Drug Control Program, the biggest heroin and cocaine trading institutions in the world are the Burmese, Pakistani, Mexican, Peruvian, Guatemalan and Colombian militaries - all armed and trained by U.S. military intelligence - in the name of the antidrug effort, of course. Funny how all that effort never has any strategic effect. OK, so they nailed some Guatemalan banker – a hundred more are in line.
The centers of power controlling the trade in these demanded global commodities are the same centers of power disseminating the artificial hysteria necessary for their continued criminalization. That keeps the retail price a hundred times higher than the legal value and the trade exclusively in the hands of the muscle.
Another name for the muscle is military intelligence. The $500 billion dollar drug trade is run by allies we train and arm. The CIA, in its operational guidelines, actually emphasizes that its interest in the drug business is confined to the effect that business has on geopolitical power. Operationally, that has meant that the CIA’s dope-dealing Batista was no more an aberration than Somoza, or Diem, or Ne Win, or Chiang, or the Shah, or Marcos, or Salazar, or Papadopoulos, or Stroessner, or Mobutu, or Amin, or Videla, or Noriega, or Cedras, or Samper, or Salinas, or Suharto, or Fujimori or Karzai.
In Afghanistan, as everywhere else, all sides deal opium because its artificial value makes it the only crop that can be traded for weapons. The Taliban are quite correct when they insist that they are protecting the traditional crop of their farmers, and that protection is the source of their political credibility in Afghanistan. It is our Prohibition that financed their resurgence, as Gretchen Peters shows in Seeds of Terror (see Vol II).
The Civil Police Administration (CPA), created in 1955, was headed by the CIA’s Byron Engle. Engle had helped to bring the Japanese police up to snuff under MacArthur and thereafter trained numerous police and intelligence agencies. In Japan, Engle worked with Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s G-2 chief, using the dope-peddling Yakuza gangs as goons against leftist unions, the elements of Japanese society that actually opposed the fascists who started WWII. This meant, of course, that, to that extent, the Yakuza were licensed to operate. In the 1950s Engle coordinated CPA training at the Inter-American Police Academy in the Canal Zone with the International Association of Chiefs of Police. 6
Under Kennedy, in 1962, Engle’s outfit turned into the Office of Public Safety (OPS) within the Agency for International Development (AID), spending hundreds of millions training and supplying police in at least 50 countries. Engle’s grad school was the International Police Academy in Georgetown, Washington DC. The great democrats of South Vietnam, Panama, Guatemala, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile, El Salvador, Haiti, Uruguay, Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua, Greece, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Liberia, Uganda, Zaire, etc. graduated from Engle’s “school for torture.” 7
It was protested, as assistant secretary of state Elliot Abrams did in 1984 before a Congressional subcommittee investigating police torture, regularly practiced by all the above, that “if they learned a little bit more about modern professional police tactics, they would be more effective and more compassionate.”
It is perfectly true that our military intelligence understands that structural fascism, with a velvet glove, is far more long lasting than dirty-war-style bloodletting. Computerization can save a lot of interrogational sweat. But two academic experts on the evolution of the OPS, Cottam and Marenin, reveal the intentions of the training: “State Department officials and OPS advisers tended to argue for a civil police force subject to law, public demands, and legally instituted political authority. Civil, democratic police forces are visible, dispersed, and accessible; their members live among the people and conduct their work in the open. They use arms and force sparingly and concentrate on maintaining order, controlling crime, and providing services.”
“In contrast, U.S. officials working for secret and military agencies tended to argue for a paramilitary, intelligence-oriented counterinsurgency police force. Such forces tend to be concentrated for easy command: they are armed, secretly or openly repressive, concerned with gathering intelligence, and subject to direct political control.” 8
Professor Nadelmann adds, “Despite efforts to reconcile these two models, Cottam and Marenin observed, the paramilitary one ultimately prevailed.... Although often scorned by CIA agents abroad as just police trainers, OPS advisers in many countries developed close relationships with the CIA, provided occasional cover for intelligence operations, and pursued similar goals.” 9
Since ‘insurgency’ usually meant the reluctant rebellion of tortured campesinos who had no other option, ‘counterinsurgency’ meant the repression of tortured campesinos. That was the OPS paramilitary curriculum. The U.S. Army coordinated its counterinsurgency training with the OPS at its School of the Americas (now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) at Fort Benning, Georgia, founded in 1946 in Panama and moved to Georgia in 1984. Among its 100,000 Latin graduates it numbers Anastazio Somoza of Nicaragua, Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, Hugo Banzer Suárez of Bolivia, Michel Francois of Haiti, Roberto D’Aubuisson of El Salvador and Julio Roberto Alpirez of Guatemala.
The politic Clinton administration, on June 28, 1996, released the report of its Intelligence Oversight Board: “The Army School of the Americas . . . used improper instruction materials . . . certain passages appeared to condone practices such as executions of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion, and false imprisonment.” As Clinton’s continued support for the military fascists in Indonesia, Peru, Colombia, etc. proves, that understatement was just a ‘partial hangout,’ intelligence damage control, not a basic policy shift.
Guatemala is the archetypal CIA-OPS operation, a real pattern-setter. John Foster Dulles, acting as senior partner for his law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, had negotiated a deal with dictator General Jorge Ubico in 1936 that gave United Fruit legal control of one-seventh of the arable land in Guatemala for 99 years, not including all the other land it owned in Guatemala, the fertile Pacific plain at Tiquisate. The deal also guaranteed tax exemption and sole control of Guatemala’s only port, Puerto Barrios on the Atlantic coast. 11a
In October of 1944 a popular coup led by liberal young army officers finished the brutal 14-year dictatorship of General Ubico. In March of 1945, Dr. Juan Arévalo, an idealistic scholar, was elected president with 85% of the (literate male) vote. Arévalo’s political hero was Franklin Roosevelt, whose “four freedoms” - freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear - became the basis of his political program, “because order based on injustice and humiliation is good for nothing.” 9a10
Arévalo aimed at land reform, unionization, education and permanent political democracy. Arévalo’s National Assembly created Guatemala’s first social security system, protected trade unions, established the forty-eight-hour work week, and taxed large landholders a small fee to finance the social programs. In the 1951 elections Arévalo was replaced by his Defense Minister, 41 year old Jacobo Árbenz, one of the engineers of the 1944 October Revolution that brought electoral democracy to Guatemala. Árbenz was elected with the votes of 63% of an electorate that now included literate women. The problem with the brilliantly competent Árbenz was that he proceeded to do everything Arévalo had so eloquently promised. 11
The leaders of the 1944 coup, L to R: Jorge Toriello, Juan José Arévalo, Francisco Arana, and Jacobo Árbenz. (Foto- Hemeroteca PL); Árbenz seated next to his wife Maria Cristina Vilanova in 1944 (Wikimedia Commons)
Following the plan outlined for him by no less a radical organization than the World Bank (The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development), Árbenz began the construction of a publicly-owned port on the Atlantic coast to compete with United Fruit’s Puerto Barrios, until then the only Atlantic port in Guatemala. Likewise Árbenz began the construction of a national Pacific-to-Atlantic highway to compete with United Fruit’s railroad monopoly, the International Railways of Central America, IRCA. He also challenged United Fruit’s monopoly on the telephone system and the airport.
Árbenz nationalized nothing except some unused rural land. He left all businesses in place, but set out to break the most destructive monopolies, what he called “feudalism,” by competing with them, creating “a national and independent capitalism.”
He began the construction of a government-run hydroelectric facility to compete with General Electric’s Electric Bond and Share Company, represented by Dulles at Sullivan and Cromwell. Árbenz also initiated rural electrification and telephone service. These were, of course, the same infrastructure techniques that had been used to build the United States. Private enterprise built almost none of our highways, public schools or ports, and almost all of our seminal railroads and hydroelectric facilities were also publicly financed.
Árbenz then challenged United Fruit’s rural slave-labor system, which dominated 90% of the country’s 3 million people, 60% of them Indians, and most of the rest mestizos, known as ladinos, who made 50 cents per day. The 1952 Agrarian Reform Law aimed mostly at plantations larger than 672 acres, although fincas of over 223 acres were vulnerable if more than a third of the land was unused. Árbenz confiscated only unused arable land, distributing 1.5 million acres to thousands of landless families, in 42 acre plots. Árbenz himself, his extraordinary Salvadoran wife and his Foreign Minister, lost thousands of acres. 12 13
The key term here is ‘landless,’ since 1934 a Guatemalan legal definition that required ‘landless’ peasants to work 150 days a year for private growers or the state whether they wanted to or not. This was a cosmetic ‘reform’ urged on Ubico by the Rockefeller Foundation, which found the medieval debt bondage then in place too transparent. Ubico had come to power in 1931 with the help of the State Department and the Rockefeller Foundation, which preferred him to the nationalists that threatened to take over. 14
Thus, by law under Ubico, landless peasants were forced to accept whatever wages were offered, such as room and board for the harvest season, which left them nothing to show for their work and nowhere to live afterwards. The Labor Department was part of Ubico’s National Police, so that those breaking the ‘labor laws’ found themselves facing Ubico’s Nazi-loving killers. Ubico did considerable business with Hitler’s Germany. 15
Árbenz, age 37, at his March 1951 inauguration (Wikimedia Commons)
At his inauguration, Árbenz declared his goal was “to convert Guatemala from a backward country with a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state.” Árbenz used Arévalo’s 1947 Labor Code, which was based on Roosevelt’s Wagner Act. It insisted on the right of plantation workers to unionize, strike and bargain collectively. It set minimum wages and limited the work week to 48 hours. For the first time in Guatemalan history, the campesinos had military protection. Árbenz established rural farm cooperatives, public schools, public clinics, public buses and local cultural institutions. Everything Árbenz did, in fact, conformed to John Kennedy’s 1961 Alliance for Progress model. 16
One of the designers of the Alliance for Progress, Kennedy’s Special Assistant, OSS veteran Arthur Schlesinger, wrote in 1946: “All across Latin America the ancient oligarchies - landholders, Church, and Army - are losing their grip. There is a ground swell of inarticulate mass dissatisfaction on the part of peons, Indians, miners, plantation workers, factory hands, classes held down past all endurance and now approaching a state of revolt.” 17
Like Árbenz, Schlesinger understood that the key to political stability was economic, so he looked to the inclusive social democratic parties, which built from the ground up. Kennedy would have given Árbenz all the help he could, in order, as Schlesinger put it, “to check Peronismo and Communism.” The Dulles brothers, running Eisenhower’s government, chose the pragmatic Juan Peron’s allies, Latin America’s military fascists. At the 1950 Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom, meeting in Havana, Arthur Schlesinger met Ròmulo Betancourt of Venezuela, Juan Bosch of the Dominican Republic and Salvador Allende of Chile.
Eisenhower with his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles at the White House, 8/14/1956
(Wkimedia Commons)
Practicing sweat-equity free-enterprise, Árbenz immediately put the confiscated land into production by providing government-run support systems, as Roosevelt had done. He instituted no political repression of any kind in a mixed economy that was, for the first time, beginning to grow by leaps and bounds. United Fruit, Ike and the Dulles brothers insisted that this constituted “Communism in the Caribbean” and “a Russian toehold” in the hemisphere. 18
Guatemala, of course, had virtually no relations at all with Russia. The Communist Party, in fact, had been the only party that remained illegal under the idealistic libertarian Arévalo, who insisted that communism was “contrary to human nature.” Árbenz’ Revolutionary Action Party legalized the Communist Party (PGT) in 1951, and it held 4 of 61 seats in the National Assembly.
Since Árbenz was serious about land reform, he put committed Marxists, whom he trusted not to sell out, in charge of administering the 1952 Agrarian Reform program. But they were bound by the strictures of the law, and the basis of that law was sweat-equity free-enterprise. The market that the campesinos were encouraged to enter was just that, a free market. Árbenz’ Agrarian Reform Program was his idea of a rural Small Business Administration. He was succeeding in rendering thousands of campesinos economically independent, creating a genuinely nationalist, capitalist alternative to corporate colonialism. What the U.S. proceeded to do, however, convinced the 25 year-old Argentine doctor Ché Guevara, who was part of this, and quite a few others, that militaristic communism was indeed the only alternative to United Fruit-style fascism.
United Fruit, with 550,000 acres the country’s largest landowner, and with 40,000 workers the largest employer, had become the leader of the old Spanish aristocracy, which owned most of the rest of the country, including the Church. The Papal Nuncio, Monsignor Gennaro Verolino, became a key anti-Árbenz activist, as did the Archbishop, Mariano Rossell y Arellano. The Archbishop had been a key supporter of the genocidal General Jorge Ubico, the dictator overthrown by Arévalo and Árbenz in 1944, he who signed over much of Guatemala to United Fruit.
Coordinating with the CIA’s Howard Hunt and New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman, the Archbishop had a Pastoral Letter read in all Guatemalan churches on April 9, 1954, warning Guatemalans of the “anti-Christian Communism” that was in the offing through Árbenz. The Pastoral Letter was reprinted in newspapers throughout profoundly Catholic Guatemala. New York’s Cardinal Spellman was a fascist supporter of Franco, Mussolini, Batista, Trujillo and Somoza, who would prove useful to the CIA in Vietnam as well, since Diem was his protégé. As Howard Hunt put it, we “were writing scripts or leaflets for the Guatemalan clergy, the Catholic clergy, and this information was going out [in pastoral letters] across the country and in radio broadcasts.” 19
Archbishop Rossell y Arellano, 1940; Contemporary United Fruit photos
(Wikimedia Commons)
After Árbenz was toppled, the Archbishop made sure to retain the church's right to own property and to run Guatemala’s schools. Archbishop Rossell y Arellano, above, looks resplendent in his 1940 photo with his royal purple robes and oversized bejeweled gold cross. Like the aristocracy, the Church was accustomed to ministering to Indians who were on their knees. United Fruit was accustomed to government-guaranteed low wages, total exemption from sales taxes and regulation, and duty-free import of all supplies. Árbenz, it was clear, intended to break both United Fruit’s stranglehold on the nation’s economy and its racist slave-labor system. 20
In June, 1952, Árbenz passed through the Guatemalan National Assembly the Agrarian Reform Law. He seized nearly 400,000 of United Fruit’s 550,000 acres, all unused, and all originally seized from the Indians. He compensated United Fruit in government bonds based on the company’s own radically deflated 1952 book value, which the company had used to lower its already miniscule land taxes. The company was enraged, and the company was led by Sam ‘the Banana Man’ Zemurray, one of the craftiest and most dangerous fighters ever to rise from the streets of New Orleans. .
Zemurray’s team included not only his Mafia partners on the New Orleans docks, led by the deadly Carlos Marcello, but the Boston Brahmin Thomas Dudley Cabot, Director of the State Department’s Office of International Security Affairs, a large shareholder and a director of United Fruit for many years, and president of the company from 1948 to 1949. Thomas Cabot was the brother of John Moors Cabot, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, another large shareholder and former president of United Fruit.Like other Latin America specialists at State, John Moors Cabot, although a Fruit stockholder and an anti-communist, was sensitive to the diplomatic reality that Guatemala’s neighbors did not consider Guatemala’s government communist. Such distinctions did not trouble another relative and major Fruit stockholder, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who violently denounced Arévalo’s unionism from the Senate floor in 1949. Henry Cabot Lodge was so consistent in his opposition to Guatemalan nationalism he was called “the Senator from United Fruit.” 22 23
Unloading Bananas in New Orleans, c. 1924
(Wikimedia commons)
Both Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles, CIA Director since 1953, were major Fruit stockholders and Board members. Through their law firm, the seminal corporate powerhouse Sullivan and Cromwell, they had helped arrange, through J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation, the 1936 United Fruit takeover of Guatemala’s entire rail system, the International Railways of Central America, IRCA. United Fruit had been an important Sullivan and Cromwell client since its inception in 1899. In 1901, the government of Guatemala hired United Fruit to run the country's postal service, and in 1913 United Fruit created the Tropical Radio and Telegraph Company. By 1930 United Fruit had absorbed more than 20 rival firms, becoming the largest employer in Central America. Sullivan and Cromwell had also organized the American and Foreign Power Company, a General Electric spin-off of Electric Bond and Share Company, which owned Empresa Eléctrica de Guatemala, which controlled about 80% of Guatemala’s electrical capacity. Even this abbreviated corporate geneology makes it easy to see how difficult it was to get a legal handle on these corporate nesting dolls. 25
Schroder Banking, on whose board both Dulles brothers sat, was the banking and asset management equivalent of Sullivan and Cromwell, a seminal force in the industry. Founded in 1804, Schroder had offices in the City of London, Wall Street, Zurich, and its birthplace Hamburg, and was a principal of the Bank of New York. Schroder was the financial agent of United Fruit, IRCA and American and Foreign Power. It was John Foster Dulles, senior partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, who authored all of these arrangements for Schroder. Pragmatically, through their legal management contracts, the Dulles brothers owned Guatemala.
The Dulles brothers’ grandfather was President Harrison’s Secretary of State, John W. Foster, and their uncle by marriage was President Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing. It was grandfather Foster, an influential friend of firm cofounder William Nelson Cromwell, who got John Foster his first job after Princeton graduation at Sullivan and Cromwell in 1911. If any one firm can be said to be the originator of the corporate privateer-run government from which we now suffer, it is Sullivan and Cromwell.
The term ‘privateer’ originated with the piratical likes of Drake, Raleigh and Morgan, authorized to operate for the Crown under ‘letters of marque,’ literally licenses to steal from the government’s enemies. Warships have turned into corporations, and the license to steal has extended to the government itself, so long as the privateer could control government policy, which was Sullivan and Cromwell’s forté. That is, small wars, which left Sullivan and Cromwell’s clients in control of the country, were Sullivan and Cromwell’s business model.
Sullivan and Cromwell, in the late 19th and early 20th century, had organized General Electric and U.S. Steel. They also engineered, through astute congressional lobbying, the Republic of Panama and the Panama Canal, all controlled and serviced by Sullivan and Cromwell clients – bondholding banks, construction companies and produce companies with a global reach. It was in the interests of Sullivan and Cromwell’s corporate clients, heavily invested in Cuba, that John Foster Dulles engineered, through his uncle, the Secretary of State, the 1917 landing of Marines in Cuba, called the ‘Sugar Intervention.’ The nationalist Liberals had legally wrested power, through the ballot box, from the pro-American Conservatives, so Dulles sent in the Marines.
By 1920, after accompanying President Wilson’s financial adviser Bernard Baruch to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, John Foster Dulles became a full partner at Sullivan and Cromwell. The disastrous reparations section of the Versailles Treaty of 1919, which led directly to the German economic collapse and the rise of Hitler, was actually authored by John Foster Dulles, ghostwriting for his boss, Bernard Baruch. The consequences of the punitive reparations were famously forwarned at the time by seminal economist John Maynard Keynes, a delegate to the conference for the British Treasury. To the enormous irritation of John Foster, Keynes’ prescient 1919 book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, became a worldwide bestseller. By 1926 John Foster Dulles became Sullivan and Cromwell’s managing director, arguably the most powerful lawyer in the country, coordinating prestigious banks and industrial corporations throughout the world. He was brought on to the board of directors of many of those corporations. 26
Younger brother Allen Dulles entered the diplomatic service on graduation from Princeton in 1916. In 1917 he was transferred as a young embassy secretary from Vienna to Bern, the capital of neutral Switzerland. He was tasked to write his uncle, Secretary of State Lansing, weekly intelligence reports. He impressed his superiors deeply with brilliant summaries of German troop movements, planned attacks, and even the location of a secret factory making Zeppelin bombers. While serving in Istanbul in 1921, Dulles apparently took the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic forgery of the czar’s secret police, seriously enough to send a coded report back to his State Department. 24
Upon earning his law degree in 1926, Allen Dulles left his post as chief of the Near East Division of the State Department and joined Sullivan and Cromwell, hired by his brother. After nine years as a State Department intelligence officer at sensitive posts throughout the world, Allen Dulles brought important global contacts with him to Sullivan and Cromwell. The next year he became the first director of the Council on Foreign Relations, established as a right-wing think tank in 1921. After legally forcing Royal Dutch Shell out of Colombia and fixing the 1930 Colombia presidential election in favor of the Sullivan client with the prior claim to the oil concession, Allen Dulles became a full partner at Sullivan and Cromwell.
John Foster Dulles helped to design the 1924 Dawes Plan, which restructured Germany’s war reparation payments in ways beneficial to Sullivan and Cromwell’s client banks. He also brokered, over the next few years, the equivalent of $15 billion in loans to major German industrial outfits, including the backbone of Germany’s military-industrial complex, dealing with great European banks such as Credit Lyonnais and Dresdner Bank, as well as American powerhouses. John Foster had worked closely for years with Hitler’s finance minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and so organized massive American financing for the new Hitler government, which John Foster saw as a bulwark against ‘bolshevism.’
Sullivan and Cromwell became the major broker of German government and industrial bonds in the USA. Sullivan and Cromwell sold these bonds through the investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman, and represented BBH in Germany. Senator Prescott Bush, President George H.W. Bush’s father, was the managing director of Brown Brothers Harriman, which co-owned, along with the Thyssens, vast German mining, industrial and banking interests. Prescott Bush was also a director of the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), co-owned by Bush, E. R. Harriman and Fritz Thyssen, Hitler's primary financier. Thyssen owned the largest steel and coal conglomerate in Germany, founded by his industrialist grandfather Friederich in the Ruhr city of Duisburg. Thyssen profited mightily from Hitler's re-armament between the wars. Fritz Thyssen controlled the vast German Steel Trust, formed in 1926 with Dillon Read and Prescott Bush’s UBC, modeled on U. S. Steel. The German Steel Trust was Hitler’s key armorer. Prescott Bush personally managed Fritz Thyssen’s vast American portfolio from 1926 until 1942. Fritz Thyssen was Adolph Hitler’s single most important financier before Hitler took power in 1933.
Hitler and his Finance Minister Hjalmar Schacht, center, 1936
(Wikimedia Commons)
In 1931, Bush’s outfit, W. A. Harriman, merged with Brown Brothers, bringing the Thyssen account with it. Prescott Bush’s father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, had been president of W. A. Harriman and Co., Averell Harriman’s investment company, when he brought young Prescott Bush into the company to manage the new Thyssen account. Averell was the son of railroad baron E. H. Harriman, who owned the Union Pacific. Prescott Bush became a director of Union Banking Corporation in 1934, as a reward for his expert handling of the Thyssen account.
Hitler with Thyssen, smiling center right, behind Hitler’s left shoulder, at United Steelworks, Thyssen’s Ruhr factory that Bush helped to manage, 1935, (Bundesarchive photo)
In 1942 the U.S. government confiscated two of Prescott Bush’s ventures co-owned with the Thyssens, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the Union Banking Corporation and the Silesian-American Company. Silesian-American was based in mineral-rich Silesia on the German-Polish border, and was run out of G. H. Walker and Co.. Sullivan and Cromwell floated bonds for Krupp and I.G. Farben, and blocked the Canadian effort to halt the export of steel to German arms makers. John Foster Dulles at Sullivan and Cromwell arranged dummy Swedish ownership of the U.S. branch of the German Bosch engine-parts company. This enabled the Nazis to maintain actual ownership - and operatives in key U.S. defense installations. 32
Roosevelt’s Alien Property Custodian concluded, in the order that confiscated all of UBC’s stock, that the Union Banking Corporation had been the Nazis single biggest operating front in the U.S., and had “been of considerable assistance to that country in its war effort.”
John Foster Dulles’ brother Allen expressed deep alarm at Hitler’s 1933 accession to power and forced the firm to cut all German ties in 1935. Allen was concerned mainly with the damage to Sullivan and Cromwell that public association with Hitler could cause. But John Foster drew up the 1940 incorporation papers for the neofascist America First Committee pro bono, and gave speeches to them praising Hitler, after Hitler had already taken Austria and Czechoslovakia, denouncing Churchill and Roosevelt as “warmongers.” Roosevelt, of course, had dared to saddle American banks and investment houses with “regulations.” The New Deal innovation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, was run by anti-Nazi firebrand William O. Douglas, who, from John Foster’s perspective, was “communist,” especially after he put John Foster on the stand for two days. John Foster publicly supported Hitler even after the Nazis took Poland.
One of Allen Dulles’ good friends was the Republican candidate for New York governor in 1932, ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan. Donovan was a legendary soldier who led a cavalry troop against Pancho Villa in 1916. In France, Donovan led New York’s ‘Fighting 69th,’ also called the ‘Fighting Irish.’ He won the Medal of Honor, the Croix de Guerre (which he wouldn’t accept until the Jewish soldier who participated with him in the rescue under fire was equally rewarded) and the Distinguished Service Cross, twice, becoming famous for his frontline courage and endurance. That earned him the moniker ‘Wild Bill,’ a sobriquet popularized by a turn of the century major league pitcher, also named Bill Donovan, a smiling baseball card favorite who was a star of the 1915 Yankees. Donovan went on to become a powerhouse Wall Street lawyer at his own firm of Donovan, Leisure, Newton, Lumbard, and Irvine, occupying three floors of the expensive office building at No. 2 Wall Street.
Donovan and President Roosevelt were friends from their Columbia Law School and New York politico days, so Roosevelt tasked Donovan, who had been promoting a centralized international intelligence service, to meet the British high command in Whitehall – PM Winston Churchill, intelligence chief Stuart Menzies, and naval intelligence chief Rear Admiral John Godfrey. Donovan was also to scout the current battlefields in the Balkans and North Africa and report back regarding the efficacy of covert operations. Early in 1941 Churchill reciprocated by sending Admiral Godfrey and Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming (yes, that Ian Fleming) to the White House to urge Roosevelt to develop Donovan’s idea and build a modern centralized intelligence service for the coming conflagration, which had already engulfed Britain. Roosevelt asked Donovan to present him with a design for such a service. Upon approval of Donovan’s plan, Roosevelt gave Donovan a White House office, called the Coordinator of Information (COI), and had it very heavily funded.
By early 1942, Allen Dulles was acting as Bill Donovan’s right hand man, running hundreds of multi-lingual COI operatives from a large multi-floor suite of offices in Rockefeller Center, adjacent to the offices of the British Passport Control Office, the hub of British intelligence operations in the U.S., known governmentally as British Security Coordination.
The FBI’s international intelligence operation, the Special Intelligence Service (SIS), calling itself the Importers and Exporters Service Company, was in the same building complex. But Hoover’s SIS was finding out the hard way that an international intelligence operation needed years of specialized preparation, and a lot more than gung-ho gunsels who just wanted to bust commie heads. They needed extensive international experience and the ability to speak the native tongue of the countries they were investigating. In the end, this job was so far out of Hoover’s wheelhouse that he reluctantly asked Roosevelt to let the SIS be subsumed by Donovan’s operation. Then, in the summer of 1943, an Assistant Secretary of State pulled Hoover’s chestnuts out of the fire by inventing the post of legal attaché. This enabled Hoover to put operatives in every U.S. embassy, and, like the military and naval attaché, the FBI operative held diplomatic status. Hoover’s legal attachés could now socialize with police chiefs and security ministers, and set up liaison offices with access to high level military and criminal intelligence from any country with a U.S. embassy.
Lt. Colonel Donovan serving with the 165th Regiment in France, September 1918; Admiral John Godfrey and Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, 1941 (Wikimedia Commons)
The British, who had been doing international intelligence for their empire since Queen Elizabeth I, had a much firmer grasp. The British operation in America was run by Sir William Stephenson, the WWI flying ace who brought down 12 German aircraft, earning the Military Cross and the Distinguished Flying Cross. Stephenson obtained a patent for the wireless transmission of photographs in 1924, a seminal invention that earned him the equivalent of $12 million a year for the duration of the 18-year patent. This enabled him to found Shepperton Film Studios and numerous other industrial outfits. His code name was Intrepid. Stephenson had been one of Churchill’s most important early sources of information demonstrating that Hitler was building a devastating military threat to England that he intended to use. It was Stephenson’s 1936 evidence that MP Winston Churchill used to warn against Chamberlain’s suicidal appeasement. Commander Fleming wrote that “James Bond is a highly romanticized version of a true spy. The real thing is ... William Stephenson.” It is obvious that one of Fleming’s other models was himself. Fleming was attached to Stephenson’s U.S. operation. Stephenson and his hit teams were indeed “licensed to kill” Nazi operatives in the U.S., and did just that. Commander Stephenson was also, by Allen Dulles’ own admission, his teacher.
Since he had the languages and extensive contacts in the German, Swiss and greater European business community, and the cover of actually working for the Germans, Donovan tapped Allen Dulles to establish the renamed Office of Strategic Services base in neutral Switzerland in 1942. Dulles knew Bern well, having functioned there as both spy and diplomat during and immediately after WWI. His years of corporate financial work for major German firms made his cover as Special Assistant to the Minister of the American Legation plausible. But Dulles barely made it into Switzerland, evading a Gestapo search just after the Germans had sealed the border with France. He was carrying classified documents, a codebook, a letter of credit for one million dollars and microfilm gear. 34
Once ensconced in a beautiful old townhouse at No. 23 Herrengasse in the Swiss capital Bern, his financial cover was cover enough. The Germans, who knew him, would see him as a useful tool in any case, since Dulles knew the leadership of Hitler’s Reichsbank and its tool, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), based in Basel, just 43 miles away from Dulles in Bern. Dulles knew the leadership of the Reichsbank and BIS intimately, having worked with them for years. Thomas McKittrick, the BIS president from 1940 to 1943, a close associate of the Dulles brothers, washed billions for the Nazis through BIS.
Dulles’ extensive pre-war local contacts, which included the pro-Nazi elements of British and European aristocracy, enabled him to build an intelligence gathering organization in Bern, despite constant German surveillance and, indeed, communication. The Germans had no problem with Lord and Lady Astor, the social center of Britain’s pro-nazi aristocracy, nor with their aristocratic German friends. Nor did they have a problem with the Dulles brothers continuing to launder Nazi funds through Sullivan and Cromwell, using the likes of McKittrick at BIS in Basel. McKittrick, of couse, was in daily touch with Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s Finance Minister. The DuPont-I.G. Farben connection, both Sullivan and Cromwell clients, was important to the Germans. Allen Dulles was also concerned with preserving the financial and physical integrity of the great Nazi vehicle factory, Opel, owned by General Motors, and Germany’s largest electric company, Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), the German General Electricity Company.
Stephenson with his device for the wireless transmission of photographs,1924; Dulles’ OSS ID card
Dulles did execute some spectacular German infiltrations, intelligence coups and surrenders, dealing with anonymous moles as well as the likes of Himmler, Canaris and Gehlen. He organized weapons supply to resistance units and targeted parachute and commando attacks. Fritz Kolbe, a secretly anti-Nazi German diplomat, blew the cover of many active German spies to Dulles, and provided the plans for the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter. Part of the German foreign ministry in Berlin, Kolbe was able to copy much of their cable traffic to Dulles, including a steady supply of order of battle information, causing the Nazis much battlefield destruction. The cable traffic pinpointed a transmitter in the German Embassy in Dublin that was targeting Allied shipping, and caused the destruction of a much needed shipment of tungsten from Spain to German armament plants. Another anti-Nazi German, Hans Bernd Gisevius of the German Consulate in Zurich, put Dulles in contact with those in the German high command plotting Hitler’s death. Gisevius also proved to Dulles that the special German codebreaking component, the B-Dienst Group, had broken the U.S. Legation code system in Bern. Gisevius also located the German V-1 and V-2 rocket factories, leading to the massive RAF air raid on Peenemunde, 8/17/1943, killing hundreds of civilians and many German scientists and technicians. Another German contact documented the Midget ‘Beetle’ tank a year before it was first used at Anzio.
Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, and Walter Schellenberg, chief of German foreign intelligence, actually sent Prince Max von Hohenlohe, a talented diplomat Dulles knew, to Bern in early 1943 to discuss a separate peace with Dulles, since Himmler knew that Dulles agreed with him that a strong postwar Germany was a necessary bulwark against ‘bolshevism.’ Dulles spent weeks in 1943 negotiating an alternative other than unconditional surrender with Himmler’s emissary, but Roosevelt would have none of it. Dulles did receive verifiable evidence of the organized mass murder of the Jews, but did not forward it to Washington, preferring instead to warn Washington about burgeoning communist strength.
Dulles worked with SS General Karl Wolff, Himmler’s chief of staff as Himmler ran the Holocaust. Wolff actually scheduled those famous trains to the death camps. Wolff became commander of Nazi forces in Italy, and was second in power only to Kesselring, who also was looking for a peaceful surrender. Wolff worked with Dulles and Swiss military intelligence to flank the Russian takeover of Italy by engineering an early German surrender. The rewards for saving this Nazi war criminal from Italian partisans seemed considerable to Dulles, since it prevented the destruction of north Italy’s many hydroelectric power plants, and put American military power in place before the arrival of the Russians. Dulles and Wolff engineered the German surrender at Allied Force Headquarters in the Italian Royal Palace at Caserta, Italy, April 29, 1945, only a few days before the general European surrender on May 7 at Allied headquarters in Reims, France. SS-Obergruppenführer Wolff contributed to the German final collapse by breaking the Nazi army into pieces with his surrender, which was acceeded to by Kesselring, cracking hardline Nazi control of the remains of the Wehrmacht. This prevented the guerrilla war Hitler and Himmler wanted. Dulles called his creative diplomacy “Operation Sunrise.” He is credited with shortening the war.
Dulles had turned Wolff into an OSS agent, feeding Dulles unique insight into the collapsing German regime. Dulles gave Wolff his guarantee of immunity for war crimes, although he had no such authority. Dulles saw this Nazi as a business partner, in that those north Italy power plants and factories were mostly owned by Italian Superpower Corporation, incorporated in Delaware in 1928 and owned by J.P. Morgan, a Sullivan and Cromwell client. Of course, the case can be made that saving the power plants was a strategic coup regardless of who owned them. But that begs the question, why weren’t those plants bombed to rubble years before? Who was doing the targeting? Why were so many German heavy industrial installations spared from destruction?
Protected by Dulles, Wolff, Himmler’s right-hand man, one of the key managers of the Holocaust, remained unpunished and did go on to become, as planned in Operation Sunrise, part of Dulles’ post-war German network. Dulles actually betrayed his own men, preventing evidence of Wolff’s personal torture of captured OSS agents in his Bolzano SS headquarters from reaching the prosecutors at Nuremberg. Dulles executed the survival of significant parts of the Nazi war machine, much of it, such as I.G. Farben and Merck, also Sullivan and Cromwell clients. 35
John Loftus, while serving as a prosecutor in Jimmy Carter’s Justice Department, got access to classified wartime documents. He said “Shredding of captured Nazi records was the favorite tactic of Dulles and his [associates] who stayed behind to help run the occupation of postwar Germany.” With control of U.S. military intelligence in Germany after the war, Dulles destroyed much documentation that incriminated his Nazi clients in war crimes, thereby helping to preserve much of their power. OSS veteran and Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who had studied the Dulles brothers’ wartime operations for years, flatly told Aarons and Loftus, authors of The Secret War Against the Jews, “The Dulles brothers were traitors.” 33
Coordinating with Wolff, American military intelligence engineered the May 22, 1945 tactical surrender of Hitler’s best intelligence officer, 40 year-old Reinhard Gehlen. The essential intelligence-gathering technique of Gehlen’s Einsatzgruppen, death squads integrated into the Nazi army, was torture. Gehlen had not only microfilmed all his Eastern-front records, but preserved his entire operating intelligence organization, which was strongest where the OSS was weakest - in Russia. Gehlen ran a large cadre of Russian monarchists and death squad butchers, called the Vlasov Army, who now went to work for Allen Dulles’ U.S. Secret Intelligence Branch in Germany. General Vlasov originally agreed to collaborate with Nazi Germany after his unit was captured on the Eastern Front. Since most of his unit were White Russian conscripts who hated the Reds, it was a natural fit.
Gehlen’s 1945 OSS photo (Wikimedia Commons)
Gehlen also ran German, Ukranian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Byelorussian, Albanian, Estonian and other East European former Waffen-SS units, so-called “forces of national liberation.” The stay-behind German units called themselves “werewolves,” but as they began to coordinate with American military intelligence they changed it to “gladiators,” swordsmen. They weren’t humanitarians, reasoned the U.S. high command, but they were anticommunist. The American-run pan-European anti-communist effort came to be known as Operation Gladio, after the gladiators’ short swords. In 1945, the Pope, during his private meetings with OSS chief Donovan to discuss the implementation of Gladio, decorated Donovan as a crusader against Communism with the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Sylvester, the most prestigious of papal knighthoods.
Assisting Dulles, operating as OSS Berlin station chief, later as Bern station chief, was Frank Wisner. Assisting Wisner was Richard Helms and OSS Secret Counterintelligence (SCI) chief James Angleton. As former OSS Bucharest bureau chief, Wisner had contested control of Romania with Stalin, and was Gehlen’s chief contact during his tactical surrender to the U.S.. Wisner ran “Operation Paperclip,” the recruitment, with Gehlen’s help, of ‘useful’ Nazis throughout Europe. The operation was controlled directly from the office of the Joint Chiefs, using a secret Army intelligence unit, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency. Explained Angleton to journalist Joe Trento, “We did it because Gehlen was a shortcut to intelligence wherever the Nazis had a puppet government….The biggest difficulty was that we had no way of knowing if they had been revealed to Moscow and forced to work for Soviet intelligence.” 36 42
Angleton’s pro-Nazi father, Hugh, just before the war, had been president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Italy and owner of the Milan branch of the National Cash Register Company. As such he was technically useful to Mussolini. While operating for the OSS during the war in Italy, the elder Angleton developed many contacts of use to his son James, including the rabid Nazi Prince Junio Valerio Borghese. Coordinating with the Germans after Italy’s September 1943 surrender, Borghese used his 10,000-man naval commando unit to wage effective guerrilla war against the partisans in northern Italy. After Borghese’s May 15, 1945 arrest, Angleton saved him from trial for his war crimes when the OSS high command put Borghese and his 10,000 fascist guerillas, and all other police and military resources of the Italian state, under the command of Angleton’s SCI unit, there to become part of Operation Gladio. It was these Nazi thugs, under Angleton’s command, who proved pivotal in the destruction of the Italian left, by murder, sabotage and propaganda, in the fixing of the 1948 election in favor of the Christian Democrats and their dope-dealing mafia allies.
In September of 1945, Gehlen was personally escorted to the U.S. by Eisenhower’s chief of staff., General Walter Bedell Smith, on Ike’s own VIP aircraft. Assisting Smith was Colonel William Quinn, future head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Gehlen’s U.S. headquarters, fittingly, were at Pullach, near Munich, a former Waffen-Schutz Staffel (‘Armed-Defense Forces’) training center. Many of Gehlen’s high command were famous war criminals, expert in torture and mass-murder. In 1956, the Gehlen Organization, operating under CIA command, became the West German BND (Federal Intelligence Service). Through the 1960s, the CIA’s Berlin Operating Base and Soviet Branch Chief, David Murphy, insisted on close intelligence sharing with the BND, which had been thoroughly infiltrated by the KGB. This infiltration included Gehlen’s second in command, KGB agent Heinz Felfe. Through the Vlasov Army connection, Gehlen’s outfit was suffused with Soviet moles, including Felfe, Gehlen’s counterintelligence chief throughout the 1950s, who wasn’t arrested until November, 1961. Felfe, who was in the CIA loop, personally destroyed every single major CIA operation against the Soviets in the late fifties, dozens of operations costing hundreds of lives. 37 38 40
According to Victor Marchetti, the CIA’s former chief analyst of Soviet military plans and capabilities, a frontline CIA veteran of 1950s Berlin, Gehlen’s supposed Soviet expertise served as a screen behind which the Counterintelligence Corps and the CIA could exaggerate Soviet might and intentions, and thereby continually increase their budget, part of which always went to Gehlen. “In my opinion, the Gehlen Organization provided nothing worthwhile for understanding or estimating Soviet military or political capabilities in Eastern Europe or anywhere else.... The agency loved Gehlen because he fed us what we wanted to hear. We used his stuff constantly, and we fed it to everybody else: the Pentagon; the White House; the newspapers. They loved it, too. But it was hyped up Russian boogeyman junk, and it did a lot of damage to this country.” 39 41
That is, the CIA adopted the Nazi ”Communist conspiracy” model of foreign affairs whole hog for covert institutional and political reasons which utterly corrupted the empirical value of its intelligence, much as the Nazis themselves had done. In 1946, when the bankrupt, exhausted and overextended Soviet Army was tearing up the East German rail system, essential to the Soviet military in Germany, and sending it back to Russia, Gehlen insisted that they were preparing to use East Germany to attack the West. By 1948, General Lucius Clay, America’s European commander, was cabling Washington that war was imminent. Given that Stalin and Beria were also falling all over themselves to employ Nazis, perhaps it was. Then again, perhaps it was a measure of our institutional corruption that we valued the same Nazi BS that Stalin and Beria did. 43
The Red Scare did encourage passage of the sensible and effective Marshall Plan, but the plan’s secret codicil, inserted by George Kennan, James Forrestal and Allen Dulles, allowed the CIA to conduct political warfare (fix elections) in Europe, specifically setting aside 5% of Marshall Plan funds for covert CIA use. The administrator of Marshall Plan funds in Germany, Hermann Abs, the Nazi wartime head of Deutsche Bank and director of I.G. Farben, was arrested for war crimes in 1946, but rescued by Dulles to work on the Marshall Plan.
The State Department’s Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), headed by Wisner, became the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. It defined political warfare as “rumor-spreading, bribery, the organization of non-communist fronts.” The Pentagon defined it as “guerrilla movements…underground armies…sabotage and assassination.” Until 1947, Dulles ran the OPC from his Sullivan and Cromwell office at 44 Wall St.. The CIA Acts of 1947 and 1949 gave the CIA legal authority to do virtually anything it wanted anywhere in the world, except in the USA. The Acts also gave the CIA the right to override U. S. immigration law in the name of national security, that is, import Nazis. 44
One of the craftiest and most successful operations initiated by OPC chief Frank Wisner had nothing to do with warfare or political subversion. Before joining the OSS, Wisner had been a white-shoe Wall Street lawyer at Carter, Ledyard & Milburn, an ally of the Dulles brothers at Sullivan and Cromwell. Working closely with Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner was the first OSS liaison to the Gehlen organization. As OPC chief, Wisner got the Allies to replace the Western occupation zone currencies with a new stable Deutsche Mark to avoid runaway inflation, a visceral German fear, and provide a platform for stable economic growth, economically connecting West Berlin (the American, British and French zones, 100 miles inside East Germany) with West Germany. The Russians were so badly burned politically by that brilliant maneuver that they blockaded Berlin, demanding that the Allies discontinue the new currency in West Berlin. The Allies responded with the Berlin Airlift. The airlift, run by the U.S., the British, the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders and the South Africans, was such a logistical success, with over 200,000 flights from June 1948–12 May 1949 delivering more cargo than had previously been delivered to the city by rail, that the humiliated Russians lifted the blockade. Obviously the centralized totalitarian economic system of the Russians was proven, over the next few decades, to be far inferior to the free market economy of the West, as an impoverished East Germany rushed to join a prosperous West Germany on the collapse of the Soviet Union.
While these innovative anti-communists were full of great ideas, like the Marshall Plan and the Deutsche Mark, they defined their anti-communism, per their Dulles brothers colonialist model, as pro-fascism, choosing the radical right over the center or center left every chance they got, unfailingly caricaturing the democratic, free-market left as ‘communist,’ just as the Dulles brothers had caricatured Roosevelt’s Democrats. We are still living with the catastrophic consequences of Dulles brothers policy, the institutionalization of the global drug trade as a covert tool of the world’s fascist secret services.
The Dulles brothers turned Iran into an enemy, and Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador into destabilized narcostates, when, in each case, they could have established real capitalist or mixed economy democracy. Their rabid, colonialist anticommunism, that is, anti-nationalist fascism, became institutionalized CIA policy, resulting in today’s protected worldwide drug trade, one of the most important tools of global fascism. Among the first moderate center-left democrats falling to CIA coup were the Italian Socialists in 1948, followed by Iran’s Mosaddegh in 1953, Guatemala’s Árbenz in 1954, Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in 1960, Guyana’s Cheddi Jagan in 1964, Brazil’s João Goulart in 1964, Papandreou’s Centre Union overthrown by the American-supported Greek military junta of 1967, and on and on. As Allen Dulles put it, “You can’t run the railroads without taking in some Nazi Party members.”
Hilger, glasses, with Molotov and Ribbentrop, 1940 (Bundesarchiv); Reichstag Session, 5/4/1941, Clockwise from top left: Funk, Krosigk, Goebbels, Ribbentrop and Neurath (Wikimedia Commons)
In 1948, Operation Bloodstone, designed by these geniuses of ‘containment,’ placed 250 top Nazi administrators, their most dangerous people, in high positions in the U.S. State Department and in each of our military services. Those directly involved in Bloodstone included the entire ruling elite of the CIA and the State Department. Gustav Hilger, a top aide to Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, had helped to negotiate the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. Hilger reported directly to Hitler on the progress of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. By 1950, thanks to Operation Bloodstone, Hilger was reporting directly to Truman, as a top aide to the State Department’s George Kennan, the designer of the doctrine of containment.
Kennan’s idea of an ideal government was Salazar’s Portugal, a fascist Catholic theocracy. As the lead American diplomat in Portugal in 1943, Kennan negotiated the use of bases in the Azores by U.S. aircraft with Salazar himself. Kennan arrived in Moscow on July 1, 1944 as Ambassador Harriman’s second-in-command. That is, he learned his distrust of the Russians by dealing with Stalin himself. He was in the room when Stalin refused Harriman’s request to save the August 1944 Warsaw uprising, preferring to let the SS wipe out the Polish resistance, the easier to turn Poland into a Russian puppet state.
In February, 1946, Stalin delivered a speech in which he described the Second World War as the “inevitable result . . . of modern monopoly capitalism.” The alarmed Secretary of State, James Byrnes, asked our embassy in Russia for an analysis. The embassy’s answer was Kennan’s famous 'Long Telegram,' advising us to expect nothing but perfidy from Stalin, suffering, as many Russians did, from a neurotic fear of another Napoleon or Hitler. “At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity….[fearing] capitalist encirclement….please note that…this party line is…simply not true. Experience has shown that peaceful and mutually profitable coexistence of capitalist and socialist states is entirely possible…. In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.”
But Kennan was a realist as well as a professional diplomat. He emphasized that the Soviet Union was relatively weak, territorially overstretched, and most definitely not seeking more war. This Long Telegram was turned into the July 1947 Foreign Affairs article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” “It is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” Referring to the use of his realistic assessment of Stalin and his doctrine of containment as an excuse for our postwar militarism, Kennan told David Gergen on PBS in 1996, “I should have explained that I didn't suspect them of any desire to launch an attack on us. This was right after the war, and it was absurd to suppose that they were going to turn around and attack the United States. I didn't think I needed to explain that, but I obviously should have done it.” In 1966, Kennan told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Vietnam does not represent America’s vital interests and that we should get out – or be defeated. He invoked John Quincy Adams’ famous warning about not going abroad in search of monsters to destroy, saying that U.S. credibility would be better served by the “liquidation of unsound positions than by the . . . stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.”
But for all his military pragmatism, Kennan encouraged the colonialist, racist arrogance of the elite of his generation that led to the aggressive antinationalist militarism of the Dulles brothers. Kennan saw their racist colonialism as an inherent part of “our traditional way of life.” Kennan was bitterly opposed to the Nuremberg trials, insisting that the bulk of what was “strong, able and respected in Germany” was in the Nazi party. In the two volumes of his memoirs, there is not a single mention of the Holocaust, although he was serving right there in the middle of it. Kennan wrote his sister in 1935, “I hate democracy; I hate the press. . . . I hate the ‘peepul’” He hated what he called “the Latin-American fringe.” Kennan actually advocated restricting the vote to white males.
In 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall appointed Kennan chief of the new Policy Planning Staff, giving him a leadership role in the formulation of American foreign policy. The brilliant Marshall Plan, and the insertion of leading Nazis into U.S. military intelligence and administration using Marshall Plan money, was largely Kennan’s idea. Kennan warned the intelligence agencies employing those Nazis to beware of the promulgators of socialist ideology, “labor unions, youth leagues, women’s organizations, racial societies, religious societies, social organizations, cultural groups, liberal magazines [and] publishing houses.” Kennan urged “the inauguration of organized political warfare…[run by a] covert political warfare operations directorate within the Government.” This became Frank Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination (OPC).
One of the earliest OPC operations was the rigging of the 1948 Italian elections, run by Angleton, which included the caricature of illiterate Sicilian farmers looking for land reform as Soviet agents, and using dope-dealing mafiosi for systematic political assassination throughout Italy. This necessarily entailed the protection of the Mafia’s drug business, seen by the OPC as covert, off-the-books street muscle. Kennan wrote the White House that he feared the commie seizure of “the most ancient seat of Western Culture. In particular, devout Catholics everywhere would be gravely concerned regarding the safety of the Holy See.” 45
NSC directive 10/2, June 18, 1948, called for covert anti-Soviet attacks worldwide, anti-Soviet usually meaning pro-fascist. Kennan’s man on the National Security Council was investment banker Paul Nitze, author of the influential NSC 68, April 7, 1950, which, per the Dulles brothers Sullivan and Cromwell philosophy, called for tripling military spending and a “reduction of Federal expenditures for purposes other than defense and foreign assistance, if necessary by the deferment of certain desirable programs.” This turned the postwar world into a binary choice of Red or Dead, promoting the profitable militarization of American culture and foreign policy by America’s military-industrial elite, the global devaluing of social programs, and the demonization of neutralist nationalism.
Pushed by General Curtis LeMay, commander of USAF Europe and coordinator of the Berlin airlift, who commanded the Strategic Air Command (SAC) from 1948 to 1957, the U.S. actually used Gehlen’s postwar SS commando structure to site Soviet targets for the coming world war, which LeMay was convinced was imminent. The East European guerrilla army we were going to employ after we destroyed Soviet infrastructure was disguised as the U.S.-created ’Labor Service Divisions’ in Germany. They were created from, and led by, Gehlen’s former Waffen-SS units.
The 4000th Labor Service Company, the Albanians, were used by Dulles and Wisner in 1949, as a combined OPC and British MI6 operation, to spark a ‘spontaneous uprising’ in Albania. Since these small paratroop units were thoroughly infiltrated by double agents, Uncle Joe and his Albanian proxy Enver Hoxha were ready and waiting to greet their errant Albanians. And the overseer of security for these operations against the Soviets in eastern Europe, James Angleton, coordinated with his MI6 liaison in the Pentagon, the famous Soviet double agent Kim Philby. All these operations, which went on for years in Albania, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and of course, Russia, had been penetrated before the fact and failed miserably, suffering almost 100% losses. 47
Wisner’s operational analogy seems to have been the combined British SOE and American OSS Jedburgh operations into Nazi occupied France and Belgium, which found large active resistance groups on the ground to greet their paratroopers. George Sharp, Dulles’ partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, headed up the OSS Western European section that ran the Jedburgh operations. DeGaulle’s Free French were formally in charge. These French-speaking Allied paratroopers were an impressive, death-defying lot, including Bill Colby, Stewart Alsop and Lucien Conein. Using their lightweight radios, they dropped behind enemy lines to target weapons drops, which included grenades, bazookas, plastic explosives and machine guns, to the French Maquis, the rural resistance groups. The lightweight hand-held Sten submachine gun had a 32-round magazine, and the ammo matched standard German issue for their Lugers and MP 40 submachine guns, so the French guerrillas never ran out of ammo. They just took it off the dead krauts. They made the Nazi rear very uncomfortable on D-Day. But despite the CIA’s institutional need to analogize the Communists with the Nazis, there were few popular resistance groups under the Russians, who were not nearly as hated, or as genocidal, as the Nazis. The Nazis concentrated on genocide and enslavement, the ideological Soviets concentrated on conversion. 46
Gehlen’s own plans for these Labor Service Divisions, led by his League of Young Germans, that is former Wehrmacht professionals, were exposed in a famous 1952 scandal. They included the elimination of the entire leadership of the West German Social Democratic Party in a coup d’etat. These ‘Labor Service’ and ‘Young German’ troops were trained and financed by the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps. And the Nazis had not been reticent with their U.S. trainers about their political intentions. The U.S. rationale for this reorganization of Wehrmacht killers was, of course, the need to counter Soviet activities. These non-American contract killers were, obviously, deniable, and gave the U.S. the ability to effect cross-border penetrations and assassinations. Latvians don’t stand out in Latvia. 48
These contract killers were organized with the help of the very powerful fascist elements within the Vatican. Working closely with Gehlen and Allied military intelligence, they organized a vast “refugee relief” program for these Latvian, Croatian, Ukranian, Romanian, Byelorussian and Hungarian war criminals. The majority of the German puppet governments in Europe during the war were led by Catholic fascist political parties. Nazi Slovakia was run by Monsignor Jozef Tiso. Admiral Nicholas Horthy’s Hungary was ruled by the Church. It willingly cooperated in identifying and legally isolating the “Zionist/Bolshevik” elements of society, although Horthy himself, to the annoyance of Hitler, hesitated at actual mass-murder, as did Mussolini. Vichy France, Franco’s Spain and Mussolini’s Italy, of course, were all fascist Catholic theocracies. The Polish genocide was very popular with the pro-Nazi elements of the Polish Catholic Church, which to this day has the gall to contest control of Aushwitz with the remnants of Polish Jewry. Croatia’s Ante Pavelic, leader of the Ustashi fascist death squads, led Hitler’s puppet Independent State of Croatia from 1941 to 1945. Pavelic oversaw a mass extermination program targeting Croatia’s 2.2 million Serb Orthodox Christians and a smaller number of Jews and Gypsies. Pavelic, in early fall of 1941, after an appalling wave of ethnic murder, was received by the Pope Pius XII.
Hitler Greets Pavelic at the Berghof in Bavaria, 6/9/1941; Pavelic’s Celebrating his Ascension to Dictator (Poglavnik) of Hitler’s Independent State of Croatia, 2/1942; Pavelic celebrates recognition of his Croatian government by Mussolini, May 18, 1941 (Wikimedia Commons)
After the war, the Allied secret services, working with the fascist elements within the Vatican, provided the well-organized East European Nazis with false papers and passports, and smuggled them out through ‘rat lines’ in Trieste and Genoa. Lithuanians went to Reverend Jatulevicius on the Via Lucullo, Hungarians to Padre Gallov on the Via dei Parione and so forth. 49
These Western intelligence operations, working exclusively with former Nazi collaborators, functioned parasitically on the Vatican’s generalized relief operations. The technique, perfected by Reinhard Gehlen, was to place operatives in key refugee assistance posts. Thus, Theodore Oberlander, the Nazi commander of the Ukranian genocide, served as West German minister for refugee affairs until 1960.
Intermarium (‘Between the Seas’), the influential Catholic lay organization, became the single most important source of CIA East European assassins and “exile” political leaders. A U.S. Army Intelligence report defined Intermarium, established in the mid-30s, as “an instrument of the German intelligence [Abwehr].” 50
Archbishop Ivan Buchko of the Ukraine, for instance, on Intermarium’s ruling council, intervened with Pope Pius XII to win freedom for a Ukranian Waffen-SS legion. Virtually the entire original Intermarium ruling council were Nazi collaborators. As the Abwehr’s senior officer in the East, Reinhard Gehlen had worked closely with Intermarium on behalf of Hitler. He performed the same function for U.S. military intelligence.
Intermarium became a mainstay of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The CIA umbrella organization for Radio Liberty, the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, was originally created by Hitler’s SS and the Nazi Foreign Office in 1944, as the German Committee, as were its member groups, the North Caucasian National Committee, the Georgian Government in Exile and so forth. All the CIA groups, which kept their original Nazi names, were led by the original Nazi leaders. Some Nazi war criminals, such as Viorel Trifa and Vilis Hazners, actually became well-known personalities on Radio Free Europe. 51
Monsignor Don Giuseppe Bicchierai of Milan, who helped Allen Dulles negotiate the surrender of German troops in Italy, also helped Walter Rauff of the SS to escape retribution. Rauff was the inventor of the gas truck extermination program, which killed, by suffocation, at least 100,000 women and children. Rauff, as he later testified, was hidden “in the convents of the Holy See.” Rauff died at the age of 77 in 1984, working for Pinochet’s death squads, the DINA, thanks to Allen Dulles. During the 1948 Italian elections, Bicchierai lead a CIA-financed goon squad of 300 men. Dulles worked with Bicchierai for years. 52
The Croatian Ustashi (‘Insurrection’) was part of the Vatican ‘refugee’ operation, run by Monsignor Draganović and Father Levasic, was run out of the Instituto di Santa Jeronimus at 132 Tomaselli Street in Rome. During the war, in Croatia, Krunoslav Draganović had helped Ante Pavelic “relocate” at least 400,000 Serbs and Jews. With the help of Draganovic and Abwehr officer Kurt Merk, who was running his spy network for U.S. Army Counterintelligence, Lyon Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, the most hated Nazi officer in France, made it to Bolivia in 1951. With bases in La Paz, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Madrid, Asunción, Melbourne and throughout Europe, Ustashi functioned as contract killers for Stroessner, Trujillo and the CIA (in the Congo, for one). 53 54
Ante Pavelić and Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac, 1941; Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac (far right) with two Catholic priests at the funeral of the Ustashi leader and Croatian Parliament President Marko Došen in September 1944; An entire Serbian family lies slaughtered in their home following a raid by the Ustashi militia.1941 (Wikimedia Commons, Stepinac)
Licio Gelli had been one of Mussolini’s Black Shirts in Spain, then he became Mussolini’s key liaison officer to Field Marshall Hermann Göring’s elite SS Division. Upon the Allied occupation of Italy in 1943, Gelli quickly volunteered to serve with the Counter Intelligence Corps of the Fifth Army. OSS chiefs William Colby and Allen Dulles found Gelli useful in the establishment of the Office of Reserve Affairs, their new strong-arm squad located on Rome's Via Sicilia. Gelli helped Ustashi Fr. Krunoslav Draganović set up the ratlines that ferried Nazi war criminals to safe haven in South America, or service in another covert U.S. operation.
One of Cardinal Montini’s first acts upon becoming Pope Paul VI in 1963, was the appointment of Licio Gelli as Equitem Ordinis Sancti Silvestri Papae, a Knight in the Order of St. Sylvester, one of Catholicism’s highest honors. This was an obvious political act since Gelli was well-known as an avowed atheist who never did anything in the name of the Church. It simply signaled to CIA Gladio operatives worldwide that the fascist power elite and the Vatican were on the same page.
The Republican Party’s 1952 “ethnic” effort was headed by Arthur Bliss Lane, former ambassador to Poland. His Russian and Ukranian specialist was Vladimir Petrov, who ran the Nazis’ publicity campaign for Gehlen’s Vlasov Army and administered the city of Krasnodar during the gas truck extermination program. The 1984 Republican Party “Guide to Nationality Observances” listed April 10, 1941, the day the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia and the Ustashi joined the SS, as “Croatian Independence Day.” 55
Civil engineer John Kosiak, leader of the Byelorussian Liberation Movement, active in the Chicago Republican Party, built the Minsk ghetto for the SS. He was wanted for war crimes in Russia. The Daugava Hawks, led by officers of the Latvian Waffen-SS death squads, became, under CIA sponsorship, the Latvian-American Republican National Federation and the Committee for a Free Latvia. 56
Between 1945 and 1955, U.S. military intelligence spent at least $200 million on the Gehlen Organization, which became the West German BND. The pragmatic Nazis themselves, as CIA analyst Marchetti says, were “sucking off both tits,” that is, functioning as double agents for the Russians whenever convenient. Gehlen’s own agenda entailed using his most dangerous agents, like Otto Skorzeny and Klaus Barbie, to build an operating chain of fascist terror groups - in Spain, Paraguay, Greece, Argentina, Brazil, Turkey - all working as contractors for the secret services of those countries and all financing themselves with drugs and arms. As Robert Crowley, the CIA’s first Covert Operations Executive put it, “Our dependence on Gehlen made us sitting ducks for disinformation. The more paranoia he could foster among U.S. officials, the more dollars and power for himself.” 57
Papadopoulos’ Greece, Peron’s Argentina and Stroessner’s Paraguay became major drug entrepôts thanks to cooperating German, British, French and American secret services. During the 1946-49 civil war in Greece between the popular leftist coalition that had defeated the Nazis and the British-backed Royalists, the U.S., using Gehlen’s agents, backed IDEA, the Holy Bond of Greek Officers, founded by the Greek army’s Nazi collaborators in 1944. These were the fascist elements in the professional army that had fought with the Nazis during the war. There certainly were communists on the other side, looking to establish a Soviet-style police state, but they were not in power. The democratic Greek government of National Unity was. Papadopoulos became a U.S. intelligence asset at this time. With enough American matériel for 15,000 men, Colonel George Papadopoulos was able to take control of Greek intelligence, the KYP, and thereby control the Greek military. In 1967, Papadopoulos took direct control of Greece in a bloody coup initiated by a period of death squad assassinations and false flag terrorist operations blamed on the left, for which Greek democrats have yet to forgive the U.S.. That same year, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman J. William Fulbright (D-AR), published The Arrogance of Power, in which he charged that in its mindless pursuit of the Red Menace the United States was actively supporting fascism worldwide, just as the Dulles brothers wanted.
The Greek colonels overthrew the perfectly democratic center-left government of the Center Union coalition led by the elderly George Papandreou, who died under house arrest in November of 1968. When one of the lead CIA agents in Greece who engineered the coup with the Colonels, Greek-speaking Gust Avrakotos, who later helped Charlie Wilson win his war against the Russians in Afghanistan, was asked by the Colonels what to do with Papandreou’s politically powerful 48-year-old son Andreas, Avrakotos replied, “Shoot the motherfucker because he’s going to come back to haunt you.” They didn’t, and he did. From exile the younger Papandreou organized the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, PASOK, which took the government by electoral landslide in 1981, ruling for 11 of the next 15 years.
One of the leaders of the democratic resistance, a cofounder of PASOK, was the heroic and glamorous Melina Mercouri, who I fell madly in love with at the age of 15 in 1960 when I saw Never on Sunday. This film, written, directed and costarring her husband Jules Dassin, one of the writers known as the Hollywood Ten (actually more like the Hollywood 500), made her an international superstar. The movie theme song, sung by Mercouri, became a worldwide hit and Mercouri won Best Actress at Cannes. Risking her life, Mercouri toured Europe’s capitals organizing resistance and speaking against the fascist Colonels. The regime reacted by revoking her citizenship and confiscating her property. She famously replied, “I was born a Greek and I will die a Greek. Mr. Pattakos [Minister of the Interior] was born a fascist and he will die a fascist.” I remember walking past Melina Mercouri and Irene Pappas in the late 60s, strolling arm-in-arm near Washington Square in the Village after a performance on a beautiful summer night. They had to be followed by bodyguards. The charismatic Mercouri became Minister of Culture in Papandreou’s government from 1981 to 1989, then won a seat in the Hellenic Parliament. She established the European Capital of Culture within the framework of the European Union, and began a campaign for the return of the Parthenon Marbles, stolen from the Temple by Lord Elgin in the early 1800s. She is the most beloved Greek in modern history.
When the Dulles brothers engineered the destruction of the Mosaddegh government in Iran in 1953, the largest corporate beneficiary was the denationalized Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, owned by the British government and largely controlled by Sullivan and Cromwell client Schroder Banking. The Dulles brothers sat on the board of Schroder Banking. Per its 1901 concession agreement, the AIOC owned all of the oil in Iran. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company became BP. By 1950 Iran’s Abadan oil refinery was the largest in the world. The global threat coming from the Mosaddegh government wasn’t communism, but economic nationalism, nationalization, which would indeed threaten American and British colonial interests globally. 29
Like Arévalo, Mohammad Mosaddegh had in fact refused to re-legalize the Communist (Tudeh) Party, banned after a 1949 attempt on the Shah’s life. Although he respected their support of nationalization and women’s rights and did not crush them, Mosaddegh deeply disrespected their support for imperialist Russian policy, especially the 1944 Russian grab for Iranian oil in Azerbaijan, and allowed no Communists in his government. Henry Grady, Truman’s ambassador in Iran, reported that Mossadegh “has the backing of 95 to 98 percent of the people of this country.” Undersecretary of State George McGhee reported that Mossadegh was “a conservative….a patriotic Iranian nationalist….[with] no reason to be attracted to socialism or communism.”
Roger Goiran, chief of the CIA station in Tehran, had built a formidable anti-Russian propaganda operation, attempting not to overthrow the government, but to influence it in the right direction, for which he had considerable Iranian support, including Mosaddegh. As soon as Goiran learned of the projected coup, he refused to support it, insisting that the Iranians would forever view the United States as a supporter of what he called “Anglo-French colonialism.” Dulles fired Goiran, the coup went off as planned, and Goiran’s dark prophesy came to pass.
Mosaddegh was a pragmatic neutral in the Cold War, that is, insufficiently anticommunist from the Dulles perspective. But his pragmatism was informed by his Persian nationalism. He, like most Persian nationalists, had always regarded the Russians as an imperialist threat. Persian nationalists were far more anti-Russian than anti-American. There were five Russo-Persian wars for regional hegemony between 1651 and 1828. There was also the 1911 Russian invasion of Tabriz, the Anglo-Soviet invasion of 1941, and the 1946 Azerbaijan Crisis. 30
Truman with Mossadegh, 10/23/1951; Fascist hoodlum Shaban Jafari, one of the Shah’s street gang thugs (Wikimedia Commons, Mossadegh)
Dulles ally Henry Luce, the powerhouse publisher of Time, Life, Fortune and Sports Illustrated, who closely coordinated propaganda with the Dulles brothers, twisted it this way in Life, “If disorders flare up in Iran as a result of nationalization, the Russians may intervene, grab the oil, even unleash World War III.” That was word for word John Foster Dulles. Eisenhower, planning Iranian policy at a National Security Council meeting on March 4, 1953, innocently asked why we couldn’t “get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us.” The slick, international lawyer John Foster Dulles answered with a longer version of the double talk Luce put in Life, always bringing it back to the boogeyman of the Red menace, never even considering that a stable, well-financed, democratic, capitalist Iran, which Mosaddegh was building, would be a powerful bulwark against Russian incursion, and a valuable ally. What the duplicitous Dulles never mentioned was that his real enemy was Iranian control of its own oil. Dulles learned this imperialist deflection about the “bolsheviks” from his Nazi clients, word for word. 58
Luce, working with Joe McCarthy and the “China Lobby,” widely advertised their every hysterical claim, especially that China had been “lost” because the Democrats had been running policy, as if the fascist killer we financed, Chiang, had nothing to do with it. John Foster Dulles purged the State Department per Senator Joe McCarthy’s instructions, using Hoover’s FBI bulldog Scott McLeod as “internal security chief.” Liberals, and gays, who weren’t fired were bullied into resigning. The common-sense old Persia hands favored by Pesident Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson were gone, replaced by amateur right wing ideologues who couldn’t even speak Persian. Ambassador Harrison Symmes, who worked in the Near East division of the State Department under Secretary of State Dulles: “John Foster Dulles had taken the view that anything we can do to bring down these neutralists—anti-imperialists, anti-colonialists, extreme nationalist regimes - should be done.” If that wasn’t your tilt, you were a “pinko.” 60
Allen Dulles began contemplating the overthrow of the Iranian government when Mosaddegh succeeded in killing Dulles’ Overseas Consultants project in the Iranian parliament in 1950. In 1949, Allen Dulles, through Sullivan and Cromwell, put together a consortium of eleven major American engineering firms, Overseas Consultants. Inc., that proposed to redevelop the entire nation of Iran – roads, dams, major infrastructure – in exchange for the equivalent of $5 billion in today’s money. OCI would own the country, and would be a model for development agreements for Sullivan and Cromwell industrial clients globally. Dulles got his chosen puppet to back the plan, the young Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, whom the Allies used to replace his pro-Nazi father during the Anglo-Soviet invasion of 1941. The pragmatic problem, therefore, not beyond the Dulles brothers to solve, was the installation of their chosen puppet as the absolute ruler of this constitutional monarchy, that is, the neutralization of the Iranian parliament. 27
In March of 1951 the Iranian parliament had voted unanimously to nationalize the entire Iranian oil industry, voiding the 1901 agreement with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. On May 1, 1951, the day Mosaddegh, leader of the center-left National Front Party became Prime Minister, he nationalized the AIOC. The move was so spectacular that Mosaddegh became Time Magazine ‘Man of the Year.’ The Brits, who did indeed need the money, responded with outrage, despite their own nationalization of coal and steel, in 1946 and 1949. The updated 1933 concession agreement was largely window dressing which left the situation basically unchanged, with the Iranians getting about 10% of the oil income, as figured by AIOC. The Brits condescendingly rejected Mossadegh’s offer of a 50-50 split of the oil income and access to the books. Mossadegh’s reaction to the British condescension was nationalization.
In reaction to the nationalization, Britain engineered an international trade embargo on Iranian oil with the world’s major oil companies, the ‘seven sisters’ who controlled global oil refinery and distribution, five American and two British, causing Iran severe economic dislocation. Without a refinery to buy the crude oil, or a tanker to deliver it, crude oil is worthless, and the seven sisters owned most of the refineries and tankers in the world. Iranian crude oil production went from 241 million barrels in 1950 to 10 million barrels in 1952. Iran lost its entire oil income. With the big Saudi step-sister, the Arabian-American Oil Company, ARAMCO, filling in the production gap at friendly pricing, the Iranians were the only ones to feel the economic squeeze.
The Brits also sent the fleet to blockade Iranian ports, physically preventing the export of Iranian oil by tanker, and enthusiastically joining Dulles in planning Mosaddegh’s military overthrow, even if that meant the permanent destruction Iranian democracy. Iran, reacting to the British blockade and suspecting a coup, had closed the British embassy in Tehran in October of 1952, so the Brits had to act in concert with the Americans. This was just fine with the Americans, because British connections in Iran with the military, the press, the clergy, industry and the political opposition were far superior to that of the Americans.
Unfortunately for Mosaddegh, sitting in the PM’s office in Whitehall from 1951 to 1955 was Winston Churchill, who had been First Lord of the Admiralty from 1911 to 1915. It was Churchill who converted the British fleet from coal-fired steamships to oil-fired engines, and was personally responsible for the 1913 British government takeover of the very same Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (then called ‘Anglo-Persian’) that Mosaddegh had just nationalized. Needing a Cold War political victory, a hesitant Eisenhower, whose first instinct had been to support Mosaddegh, approved the Dulles brothers’ relatively bloodless overthrow plans, so Churchill and Eisenhower, emotionally accustomed to working together anyway, were on the same page.
The CIA team for Operation Ajax, under the command of Frank Wisner, Deputy Director of Plans, was run by OSS veteran Kermit Roosevelt Jr., Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson, a leading CIA Arabist. In 1952 he was CIA liaison to Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers Movement, helping to overthrow the useless, self-indulgent and grotesquely profligate King Farouk. This operation was hilariously called Project FF (Fat Fucker). During the transition from Truman, who was not coup-friendly, to Eisenhower, who was putty in the Dulles brothers’ hands, it was the CIA’s Dulles, Smith and Wisner who were making policy. Wisner actually commented at this time that the “CIA makes policy by default.”
In the summer of 1953, operating from Tehran, along with MI6, Roosevelt bribed key politicians, army and security officers and coordinated nationwide propaganda by buying anti-Mosaddegh newspaper editorials and sermons. Mosaddegh’s army security chief, General Mahmoud Afshartous, was kidnapped and murdered, as were numerous other key Mosaddegh supporters. When a premature attempt by the commander of the Shah’s Imperial Guard to arrest Mosaddegh backfired, causing the arrest of the Guard commander himself, near civil war broke out in the streets.
At this point riots were not hard for the CIA team and MI6 to organize, since Mosaddegh, not a military man, was retreating, not attacking. False flag black ops proliferated, which included the heavy financing of right-wing mullahs who opposed Mosaddegh’s secular democracy (one of whom was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 coup). Bands of hired thugs and ‘Islamic’ gangs were employed to advertise fear of a communist takeover, and to promote a royalist government, in defense of Islam. Other hired thugs, advertising themselves as ‘pro-Mosaddegh communists,’ performed widely publicized terrorist acts and attacked the ‘Islamic’ thugs. The police, many of whom had been bought by Roosevelt, ignored Mosaddegh’s orders to restore peace. When hired street gangs and pro-fascist military, including the Shah’s imperial guard, attacked Mosaddegh’s heavily defended house, and each other, on August 19, 1953, city-wide rioting left three hundred dead, providing the coup plotters the chaos they needed to ‘restore order.’
The fixed machine gun positions in Mossadegh’s house were countered with army tank fire. Roosevelt’s paid operatives seized Radio Tehran, the foreign ministry, the central police station and army headquarters. Roosevelt sat General Fazlollah Zahedi down at Radio Tehran with instructions to proclaim that he was “the lawful prime minister by the Shah’s orders.” The coup was artful, cheap as these things go, and not one single American lost his life. It was also one of the stupidest, most evil, and counterproductive things ever done by the CIA. 59
The cowering Shah, who had already signed the required royal decrees legitimizing the coup and dismissing Mosaddegh, was personally flown back from Rome by Allen Dulles, who, per Dulles’ instruction, publicly dismissed the fleeing Mosaddegh. With CIA control of the key national media, the army took over and Mosaddegh surrendered. Nazi collaborator General Fazlollah Zahedi became prime minister. Professor Masoud Kazemzadeh in The Day Democracy Died: “Bahram Shahrokh, a trainee of Joseph Goebbels and Berlin Radio's Persian-language program announcer during the Nazi rule, became director of propaganda. Mr. Sharif-Emami, who also had spent some time in jail for his pro-Nazi activities in the 1940s, assumed several positions after the 1953 coup, including Secretary General of the Oil Industry, President of the Senate, and Prime Minister (twice).”
The Shah, declaring martial law, ordered the execution of many of Mosaddegh’s most influential supporters, including Hossein Fatemi, his charismatic foreign minister. Political dissent and free speech became a thing of the past. The Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, was trained and organized by the U.S. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which became British Petroleum (BP), was replaced, at the behest of John Foster Dulles, with a Sullivan and Cromwell-organized American-led consortium, Iranian Oil Participants Ltd, which included BP, Gulf, Royal Dutch Shell and six others. The consortium shared its profits 50-50 with Iran’s National Iranian Oil Company, although the Iranians did not have access to the books. Zahedi’s new puppet government signed all the CIA-approved oil contracts presented to it. The coup manager, Kermit Roosevelt, went to work for one of the coup beneficiaries, Gulf Oil. The well-managed and docile U.S. media called it a “popular uprising.” The Shah, until his 1979 overthrow, traded his oil and massive amounts of Iranian opium, a traditional crop, and heroin for U.S. arms. Another Sullivan and Cromwell construct made in privateer heaven.
Like Árbenz, Mosaddegh was a moderate secular democrat replaced by a murderous fascist dope peddler. The results, as we have seen, have not been happy. Until he was talked out of it by the Dulles brothers, waving the magic word ‘communist,’ the fuzzy and pliable Eisenhower’s own first instinct had been to support Mosaddegh with a $100 million loan. The ultimate ascension of the ultra-nationalist fascist clergy in Iran in reaction to the colonialist overthrow of Mosaddegh was predicted in detail at the time by many of the old Persia hands that Dulles had replaced during the McCarthy witch hunt. Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson said the British had “a rule-or-ruin policy in Iran.”
The next pro-fascist coup of the Dulles brothers took place the next year in Guatemala, in favor of United Fruit, a Sullivan and Cromwell client run by Sam ‘the Banana Man’ Zemurray. Zemurray’s United Fruit team included ’Tommy the Cork’ Corcoran, one of Roosevelt’s original brain trusters. Corcoran was part of the three-man legal team that wrote the legislation that created the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 1937 Corcoran, who was personally close to Roosevelt, made sure that Sam Rayburn of Texas became Speaker of the House. That was the beginning of a lifelong closeness to Texas big oil. But Corcoran fell out with Roosevelt over Spain. An effective domestic liberal in Rooseveltian terms, he was a pro-fascist conservative Catholic internationally. Roosevelt always regretted letting Corcoran talk him out of arming the Spanish Republicans, especially after we found ourselves at war with Hitler and Mussolini, who had supported the Spanish Nationalists and so gained strategic depth and time to build their armies. But Corcoran was in strong agreement with Roosevelt over the need to stop the Nazi Japanese in Asia. Roosevelt asked Corcoran to leave government to set up an ostensibly private corporation, China Defense Supplies, so as to have a mechanism, not subject to the oversight of the isolationist Congress, to arm Chiang Kai-shek in his resistance to the Japanese. Roosevelt knew we’d be facing a military superpower if the Japanese took all of China.
Corcoran’s China Defense Supplies worked closely with Chiang’s military adviser, Captain Claire Chennault, Chief of Pursuit Section at the Air Corps Tactical School in the 1930s. Corcoran got Roosevelt’s approval of the American Volunteer Group, the Flying Tigers. One hundred Curtiss-Wright P-40 warhawk fighters, intended for Britain, were redirected to Chennault in China. William Pawley, Curtiss-Wright’s Asia representative, reassembled the fighters with his Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company (CAMCO) in Rangoon. It was Pawley’s CAMCO that paid the pilots. Corcoran’s China Defense Supplies approached Disney for a logo for the Flying Tigers, a name that had already evolved in the media. Disney did indeed make each plane look like an attacking tiger, with shark’s teeth.
Corcoran with Roosevelt’s powerful Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes, 12/6/1938 (Wikimedia Commons, Corcoran)
Recruited from army, navy and marine reserve officers, the pilots were very well-paid, $600 a month and $500 for every kill. $600 in 1940 money equals $10,286 in 2016 money. The Flying Tigers, three fighter squadrons of around 30 aircraft each, began operating against the Japanese as part of the Chinese Air Force on December 20, 1941, just 12 days after Pearl Harbor. Their P-40s had pilot armor, self-sealing fuel tanks, and heavy armament riding on sturdy construction. Most importantly, the P-40 had a higher diving speed than most Japanese aircraft, preventing the Japs from twisting out of the way of a diving attack from altitude. In seven months, the Flying Tigers, with superior “dive and zoom” tactics, destroyed 296 Japanese planes and lost only 24 men. Their very first mission, 12/20/1941, saw two squadrons intercept 10 unescorted Kawasaki twin engine light bombers attacking Kunming. Only 1 Japanese bomber survived. The Flying Tigers were a major factor in keeping the Burma Road open, a key supply route to China, providing good news at a time it was sorely needed.
Having been shown the way by Roosevelt, Corcoran became one of the original defense contractor privateers. He helped builder Henry J. Kaiser obtain lucrative government contracts from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. He introduced Kaiser to William S. Knudsen, head of the Office of Production Management, who provided $645 million in building contracts, keeping Kaiser’s ten shipyards humming. Kaiser’s two main partners were Stephen D. Bechtel and John A. McCone. In 1937 McCone became president of Bechtel-McCone, who joined forces with Kaiser to establish the California Shipbuilding Company. Thanks to Corcoran’s way with defense contracts, there were plenty of ships to build. John McCone became Eisenhower’s AEC chief, and Kennedy’s DCIA.
Understanding the necessity for magnesium to produce lightweight metal alloys for aircraft, Corcoran arranged a Reconstruction Finance Corporation loan for Kaiser to build a magnesium production plant in San Jose, California. Corcoran took $135,000 in cash and 15% of the business. During the war, Corcoran kept Brown & Root busy building ships on the Houston Ship Channel. During the war years, the Brown Shipbuilding Company built 359 ships and employed 25,000 people – most contracts delivered by Tommy Corcoran.
Hell’s Angels Squadron, Flying Tigers, 5/28/1942; Flying Tigers squadron photo, 1942 (Wikimedia Commons, Flying Tigers)
But Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall and General Joseph Stilwell, the American commander in Asia, resented Chiang as a corrupt fascist dealing dope and arms with the Japanese, and so disapproved Corcoran’s support of Chiang. Marshall and Stilwell preferred Mao’s more popular, and far more disciplined, Yan’an-based force, which they regarded as far superior anti-Japanese fighters. Mao, at this time, was deeply friendly to the United States, needing a counterbalance to the Russians and the Japanese, if only we would reciprocate. Stilwell complained about Corcoran's ability to present Chiang in the best possible light with Roosevelt. Stilwell wrote to Marshall that the “continued publication of Chungking propaganda in the United States is an increasing handicap to my work….we can pull them out of this cesspool, but continued concessions have made the Generalissimo believe he has only to insist and we will yield.” 28
Chennault with Chiang; Chennault Planning Tactics, Kunming, 1942; Life, August 10, 1942 (Wikimedia Commons, National Archives)
Corcoran worked closely with Colonel Paul Helliwell, OSS chief of special intelligence in China. Civil Air Transport, CAT, was the peacetime version of Chennault’s Flying Tigers, also cofounded with Helliwell. That grew into the CIA proprietary Air America, also a Helliwell operation. Corcoran was Helliwell’s Washington DC representative, representing CAT and Helliwell’s other ventures. On November 1, 1948, Corcoran, on behalf of CAT, signed a formal agreement with the CIA to fly agency personnel and equipment in and out of Chungking, Kweilin, Luchnow, Nanking, and Amoy. In March, 1950, Frank Wisner, on behalf of the CIA, arranged the CIA purchase of CAT with Corcoran, who was not only CAT’s attorney but also part owner. Upon the creation of the CIA on July 26, 1947, Allen Dulles engineered the original Agency structure and recruitment with his trusted friend, Tommy Corcoran. 61 62
In late 1950, as the prospect of an Árbenz victory in the 1951 Guatemala elections loomed, Corcoran had no trouble getting Allen Dulles, Deputy Director of the CIA, to sit down for a nice long discussion of regime change in Guatemala in favor of his client, United Fruit Company. But the Truman administration wasn’t coup friendly – it was satisfied with the democratic elections being held in Guatemala. Then Eisenhower took the presidency. With the Dulles brothers on board, Corcoran sat down with Walter Bedell Smith, who moved from DCIA to Undersecretary of State in the new Eisenhower administration. Smith promised Corcoran his full support, making it clear that he would appreciate a place on the United Fruit board upon retirement from State. He got it. Corcoran was as effective a political manipulator as Allen Dulles himself. Dulles moved up to DCIA and with John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State, Tommy the Cork got his Operation Success.
When the operation went into action, Corcoran arranged arms deliveries to the CIA’s operatives in Guatemala using United Fruit’s ships. Corcoran arranged for his friend and partner in Civil Air Transport, CAT, Whiting Willauer, to become Eisenhower’s ambassador to Honduras. Willauer arranged training sites, instructors and air crews for the rebel air force, and kept the Honduran government “in line so they would allow the revolutionary activity to continue,” as Willauer wrote to his long-time friend, Claire Chennault. Sam ‘the Banana Man’ Zemurray had the most powerful lobbyists in Washington on his side.
During the war, the Flying Tigers and the OSS functioned in China through the Sino-American Cooperative Organization, SACO, under the directorship of General Dai Li. Dai Li headed Chiang’s vast secret police, which ran as many as 300,000 operatives from China to San Francisco. It was this organization that was the inspiration for the KMT’s World Anti-Communist League (WACL).
Chiang with Roosevelt and Churchilll at the 1943 Cairo Conference; Green Gang leader Du Yuesheng and fifth wife, 1950 (Wikimedia Commons)
Chiang’s Kuomintang used the Shanghai Green Gang, their Mafia, to organize its vast opium-for-arms trade. Green Gang death squads had helped Chiang and Dai Li put down the 1927 Communist uprising in Shanghai, and had been a key factor in Chiang’s power structure ever since. Du Yuesheng, the Green Gang leader, had been invested with the rank of Major General by Chiang.
General Dai Li and Rear Admiral (then Commander) Milton E. Miles on Christmas, 1942. (Photo by Jack Miller, courtesy of SACO US Naval Group China Veterans)
Wherever the Japanese conquered in north China after 1930, they immediately encouraged the planting of opium. Du Yuesheng, on behalf of Chiang, worked out a plan whereby Japanese gunboats would ferry his and their Yangtze opium to his 24 heroin labs in Japanese-controlled north China. The heroin was then sold throughout all of China, in the north by the Japanese Army through its new chain of 6,900 pharmacies, and in the south by Chiang’s KMT. In return, Du, Chiang and Dai-Li were left in control of the Yangtze River opium trade and the export market for their surplus heroin. One of their more famous distributors was Lanksy-Luciano partner Lepke Buchalter. 63
The OSS expected Chiang’s opium traders to function as intelligence agents behind Japanese lines, running a fairly effective guerrilla war against the Japanese, blowing bridges and killing troops, while also trading opium with them. Dai-Li and Du, for instance, controlled all the dives and opium dens in Japanese-controlled Shanghai, as well as most of the labor unions and police. Thanks to Dai-Li, when the retreating Japanese decided to demolish the port, the OSS had the street muscle to prevent it. The inverse, of course, was also operative. Many of SACO’s street fighters were Japanese agents, since the vast opium/heroin trade was sanctioned by both sides across the battle lines. 64
Stilwell, right, marches American troops out of Burma, 5/1942; With Chiang “the little peanut” and his famous dragon lady, Burma, 4/1942; Planning tactics in Burma with Gen. Frank Merrill (Wikimedia Commons, Stilwell)
The OSS Far Eastern chief, Commander. Milton Miles, was Dai-Li’s first Deputy Director of SACO. Miles launched OSS operations throughout the opium-producing Golden Triangle of Burma, Laos and Thailand, closely coordinating his efforts with Dai-Li. Dai-Li’s elite officer corps was trained by American agents on loan to the OSS from Hoover’s FBI and Anslinger’s FBN. At this time Dai-Li was among the biggest opium and heroin smugglers in the world. 65 66
Stilwell’s outfit, Merrill’s Marauders, crossing the Tanai River in the Burma monsoon, March 18, 1944 (Photo: U.S. Army). The Myitkyina attack was the climax to four months of unrelenting combat that saw 5 major and 30 minor engagements. Capture of the all-weather airstrip at Myitkyina would allow supply planes flying over the Himalayas to China to refuel en route. The 2400 Marauders suffered 80% casualties. Every single member of the unit won the Bronze Star. (Photo; Hoover Institution)
Col. Fletcher Prouty: ”I was with the Air Transport Command in Cairo then. We sent a transport plane every month with the Finance Officers to Burma so they could physically pay the troops with cash. These men had ‘foot-lockers’ full of cash: American for the Americans, British for the British and foot-lockers packed with small white envelopes of heroin to pay the Chinese. That was the customary Chinese ‘pay.’” 67
General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, commander of American forces in the China-Burma-India theater, protested that the alliance with “the little peanut” Chiang was a de facto alliance with the Japanese, since Dai-Li, whom he called “the Chinese Himmler,” was trading dope and arms on a massive scale with the enemy. OSS agents who moved independently against SACO’s pro-Japanese dope smugglers were murdered. Mao’s Yan’an-based force, which had to face SACO’s KMT dope smugglers as well as the Japanese, was implacably hostile to all aspects of the opium trade, perceiving it as a security threat on all levels. Mao’s troops, if they valued their lives, did not smoke opium. Stilwell, a great field general, insisted that Mao’s force was “battle-hardened, disciplined, well trained in guerrilla war and fired by a bitter hatred of the Japanese.” This from the commander of one of the greatest fighting units in the history of American arms, Merrill’s Marauders. 68
Stilwell strongly advocated an all-out alliance with Mao, and Mao wanted a U.S. alliance as a counterweight to both the Kuomintang and the Russians. Although many OSS officers agreed that Mao’s was the far superior anti-Japanese force, Chiang was able to prevent the Stilwell-Yan’an alliance through his direct contact with the likes of Tommy Corcoran, thus giving the Russians a leverage with Mao they otherwise never would have had.
Chiang demanded and got Stilwell’s recall in October of 1944. Stilwell became chief of Army Ground Forces and commanded the U.S. 10th Army on Okinawa in the final months of the war, but lost his influence on China policy. Like Castro and Ho, Mao started out as strongly pro-American. Stilwell’s pro-Yan’an OSS officers, our most effective fighters, and their allies in the State Department, became a target of the Hoover-McCarthy witch hunters in the 1950s.
Chiang’s Republic of China established the Taiwan Provincial Government in September 1945. In 1947, two years before his final military defeat on the mainland, Chiang moved the KMT base to Formosa. The native Formosans were reluctant to give up their autonomy, so, in March of 1947, 12,000 KMT regulars slaughtered 20,000 Formosans, the leading lights of the society. Thereafter Formosa became ‘Taiwan,’ with a million Chinese nationalists ruling 15 million Formosans. 70
American Military Intelligence, led by MacArthur, then decided that Chiang’s Taiwan was the perfect base from which to pursue the Korean War. The American Military Assistance Advisery Group showered this fascist killer with a torrent of arms and money. John Singlaub of Iran-Contra fame was CIA deputy chief in South Korea at this time.
In 1954, Chiang founded the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League. Chiang’s partners were the CIA’s partners. There was Park Chung Hee, founder of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, who became President of Korea in 1961. Park was a fascist who fought with the Japanese in China and then broke the Korean Communist Party as a double agent for South Korean dictator Syngman Rhee.
Then there was the absolutely incredible Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who is the Son of Jesus Christ. Sun is also the Son of the KCIA. The Unification Church was run by Colonel Bo Hi Pak, who used to be the KCIA military attaché in Washington. Richard Nixon Himself acknowledged that Reverend Moon’s message resonated with God Almighty Himself. When Moon’s International Federation for the Extermination of Communism, financed by the Tong-il Armaments Company, opened up its American branch, the name was wisely changed to the Freedom Leadership Foundation - so much more, como se dice, Republican.
Postwar mug shots; Sasakawa with Mussolini
Joining Chiang, Park and Moon in founding the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League were Japan’s Ryoichi Sasakawa, Yoshio Kodama and Nobusuke Kishi. Just after the war American occupation forces had arrested Sasakawa, Kodama and Kishi as Class A war criminals. However, thanks to their wholesale rape of China, they were fabulously wealthy Class A war criminals - and their Yakuza street gangs were needed to break the so-called communist unions. American Military Intelligence, if that’s the right word, then decided, in 1948, to rehabilitate these misunderstood patriots by allowing them to form the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party, which ruled Japan as a “liberal” one-party police state for decades thereafter. This rule included the coordinated CIA sabotage of Japan’s Socialist Party and labor unions. That is, the LDP literally went on the CIA’s payroll, insuring, among other things, continued U.S. military presence on Okinawa during the Vietnam war, despite considerable local resistance. Thus, the old fascist Yakuza-industrialist coalition that had started World War II came back into power, resurrected as “democrats” - with a 99% criminal conviction rate and violently enforced social conformity.
These Asian ‘anticommunists’ were represented in Washington by ’Tommy the Cork’ Corcoran. Corcoran was the mid-50s diplomatic escort of Claire Chennault’s wife, Anna Chen Chennault, head of the KMT China Lobby. Like the Chennaults, Corcoran was a registered agent of Taiwan. The China Lobby was very worried about a Commie takeover of the opium-producing Golden Triangle, now partly controlled by the hard-core remnants of the mainland KMT. That army was serviced as a CIA Special Operation by Corcoran’s client airline CAT/SEA Supply operating from Taiwan and Bangkok. 71
Helliwell worked with Frank Wisner in the CIA’s action-oriented alter ego, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which was merged with the CIA’s Office of Special Operations (OSO) to become the Directorate of Plans in 1952. The reorganization was a reaction to the outing of the OPC’s support of the Thai and Burmese opium armies. Under Wisner’s guidance the OPC grew from 300 to more than 6000 contract employees, many of them active guerrillas. Wisner was given enormous independent power as the Deputy Director for Plans (DDP) of the CIA’s new covert operations division, the Directorate of Plans, 1951-1958. Richard Helms was Wisner’s chief of operations. It was this office that coordinated the overthrow of Mosaddegh in Iran and Árbenz in Guatemala.
Helliwell founded SEA (South-East Asia) Supply of Bangkok in 1950 specifically to transport cargo, such as arms from Okinawa, to his Civil Air Transport for the Burma KMT operation (Operation Paper). The 1950 idea was to use the Kuomintang troops in Burma to threaten “China’s soft underbelly.” But the underbelly didn’t turn out to be so soft, with the 1951-52 CIA-KMT jabs into Yunnan easily repulsed. So the entrepreneurial KMT settled into the opium business instead, sending CAT’s arms supply planes back to Bangkok and Taiwan loaded with opium or morphine from Burma’s Shan states of Kokang, Wa and Kengtung. 72
In fact, with military control of the richest opium-producing area in the world, the KMT was no longer dependent on even the pretense of political legitimacy, since it now had the tactical support of the Thai and Taiwanese armies. The CIA’s KMT operation, therefore, became self-sustaining, an enlightening object lesson for all intelligence professionals in achieving complete independence from civilian policy control. As DCIA William Casey, who worked under Helliwell, later put it, in relation to the Contra-Cocaine operation he engineered, “a completely self-funding, off-the-shelf operation.”
In the early 1950s Miami-based attorney Paul Helliwell, of Helliwell, Melrose, and DeWolf, organized not only Civil Air Transport, SEA Supply of Bangkok and Air America, but the Bank of Perrine in Key West, the Bank of Cutler Ridge, and the Bahamas’ Castle Bank of Nassau, the CIA-Syndicate money laundry through which the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban hit teams, serviced by SEA Supply, were funded. Richard Nixon had an account at Castle Bank, as did many Santos Trafficante operatives. When Castro’s Cuba seemed to dry up as a Mafia drug distribution hub, Helliwell, through his extensive Asian connections, made sure Don Santos did not want for high quality heroin to sell. Trafficante and his partners distributed the Indochinese heroin ferried by Air America, which was not subject to customs inspection, throughout the U.S.. Helliwell’s law firm represented Trafficante-Teamster partners in Resorts International, as they developed Bahamas gambling, with the help of Johnson’s bag man Bobby Baker. 73 74
Gen. Bill Donovan, wartime head of the OSS and 1953 ambassador to Thailand, coordinated the now self-funding KMT dope operation with the Thai paramilitary units he helped to create. The CIA created the Thai National Police (TNP) and Police Aerial Reconnaissance Units (PARU), paramilitary operations which functioned essentially as extensions of the KMT’s opium army. The KMT’s main Bangkok connection, the brutal military dictator Gen. Phao Sriyanond, the commander of the Thai police who coordinated CAT air traffic with Gen. Li Mi’s 5,000-man Shan State KMT, was also the commander of the Thai government’s relationship with the CIA. Donovan hailed Phao’s generals, owners of Bankgkok’s opium dives, whorehouses, liquor and food distributors, as defenders of democracy, despite Phao’s habit of summarily executing his political opposition without trial.
Explained KMT Gen. Tuan Shi-wen, “To fight you must have an army, and an army must have guns, and to buy guns you must have money. In these mountains, the only money is opium.” So the KMT went into the business of enslaving the Karen hill tribes as opium sharecroppers. This is the origin of the so-called ‘ethnic’ conflict in bordering Burma (Myanmar). According to Professor McCoy, the first snow-white #4 heroin lab was opened by KMT-affiliated Hong Kong chemists on the Thai-Burma border in the late 60s. The KMT are also known, fittingly, as the “White Chinese.” 75 76
The KMT’s lawyer, ‘Tommy the Cork’ Corcoran, was also United Fruit’s lawyer. Corcoran was intimate with the entire leadership of the CIA, which he had helped to organize, and which was, in any case, extremely sympathetic to United Fruit. Walter Bedell Smith, Gen. Eisenhower’s wartime chief of staff and Truman’s CIA director, was now John Foster Dulles’ Undersecretary of State. In 1953 he had asked Corcoran for the presidency of United Fruit, and in 1955 was named to its board of directors. Gen. Robert Cutler, chairman of the National Security Council, already sat on the United Fruit board. John J. McCloy, the president of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, was a former board member. Robert Hill, ambassador to Costa Rica, got to the UF board in 1960. Hill was connected to Grace Shipping, another CIA friend heavily invested in Guatemala. 7778
United Fruit was so profitable because it paid no duties or taxes and was subject to no labor regulations. Sam ‘the Banana Man’ Zemurray’s team also included Edward Bernays, the formidable “father of public relations,” who filled the American media with phony reportage about “communism in Guatemala.” Bernays could place stories at will in the ‘liberal’ New York Times, the ‘liberal’ New Leader, Time, Life, New York Herald Tribune, Readers Digest and on and on. The right-wing John Clements helped from his perch as Director of Public Relations for the Hearst Corporation. As the Editor of The American Mercury, Clements, with Russell Maguire, owner of the Thompson Submachne Gun Company, decided that what was happening in Guatemala was all a liberal Jewish plot.
When a real New York Times journalist, legendary reporter Sydney Gruson, on the ground in Guatemala, began filing stories detailing the beneficial effects of Árbenz’ reforms, Allen Dulles called his old Princeton classmate, Gen. Julius Ochs Adler, The Times' general manager, and had the reporter recalled, with the consent of The Times’ publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. As The Times’ 1998 obituary for Mr. Gruson puts it, “In 1977, The Times reported that the C.I.A.’s files contained some evidence that it had feared that Mr. Gruson’s reporting, while based in Mexico City, was edging toward a premature discovery of the agency’s role in Guatemala.” 79 80
Eisenhower’s private secretary, Ann Whitman, was the wife of Ed Whitman, United Fruit’s publicity director. Whitman’s 1953 film, Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas, is now up on YouTube. Opening with cheerful Carmen Miranda-Chiquita Banana music, we are introduced to the grey-haired Scripps-Howard Latin America beat reporter Edward Tomlinson. Pointing to a map of the Panama Canal, just below Guatemala and Nicaragua, “one of the vital and strategic waterways of the Free World,” Tomlinson explains in stentorian tones that Guatemala is just “a few minutes by guided missile” from the United States. “Little wonder then that the leaders in the Kremlin are determined to establish a political, if not a military, bridgehead in this area.” The only thing preventing them is the Church, and the economic and social progress offered by United Fruit and its commercial partners. “And therefore the agents of international communism have selected the United Fruit Company as a prime target of attack.” This publicity campaign included the coerced Organization of American States (OAS) approval of the necessity to reverse “communist intervention” in Guatemala.
Once the ‘demographics’ had been taken care of, Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers had the support of every Democrat in Congress. With Nicaragua’s Somoza, the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo, Venezuela’s Pérez Jiménez and Cuba’s Batista champing at the bit, Operation Success began in early June of 1954. John Peurifoy, who took over as Ambassador to Guatemala in October 1953, led the operation, assisted by Flying Tiger co-founder William Pawley, who provided deniable aircraft. Deputy Director of Plans Frank Wisner was the operational director assisted by former U.S. Army Colonel Albert Haney, recent chief of the CIA station in South Korea. With control of the air, the sea and all the neighboring countries, Allen Dulles’ CIA had no trouble overwhelming Jacobo Árbenz with a military and propaganda campaign coordinated from both inside and outside the country.
Aerial bombardment of the presidential palace, with both munitions and leaflets, was combined with a mercenary ground force of about 450 low-rent hoodlums, divided into four strike forces scattered around the country, led by Guatemalan Col. Carlos Castillo Armas. Castillo had originally supported the Arévalo and Árbenz progressive 1944 coup against Ubico, but was later cashiered for supporting the 1949 counter-coup led by Col. Francisco Javier Arana, who thought power should remain in military hands. Arana was killed, but Castillo either escaped or was released to Honduras, where he plotted yet another coup with Somoza and Trujillo. Castillo had achieved some name recognition among the right-wing military, and proved to be an obedient CIA puppet. Army commanders were bought off, and those that wouldn’t sell out were assassinated. The size and popularity of Castillo’s force was wildly exaggerated by well placed and very powerful Radio Liberty transmitters, which easily overrode the Government’s weak signal, advertising Castillo’s various F-troop defeats as great victories for the “uprising.”
The propaganda campaign was run in-country by David Phillips, who would play a prominent role in the war on Castro. The propaganda for the “Voice of Liberation” radio station was scripted by Phillips and OSS China veteran Howard Hunt, the Political Action Officer who later planned the Watergate burglary for Nixon. “Struggle against Communist atheism! Struggle with Castillo Armas!” The invasion was timed to coincide with United Fruit stockholder Henry Cabot Lodge’s tenure as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Lodge was able to prevent the Security Council from sending a team to investigate, so Árbenz’ last hope evaporated on June 25, 1954.
The American contingency plan, ‘Hard Rock Baker,’ had U.S. fighter planes at the ready and a Marine landing force as part of a naval blockade of Guatemala, but Plan A worked so well that Plan B wasn’t needed. Eisenhower replaced two of the four P-47’s that had gone out of action, so there was just enough airpower, with the Thunderbolt’s eight .50-caliber machine guns and rockets, to terrify the civilian population, and to convince the military that if it resisted it would be facing the U.S. military. When the phony war achieved a high level of hysteria in Guatemala City, with aerial bombs exploding everywhere, including at munition dumps and fuel depots, agents were sent in to buy off key army officers, who were in the mood to deal. Árbenz, disheartened by the prospect of civil war with his own army, resigned on June 27, 1954. 81
Castillo Armas, seated third from left with his junta, celebrating victory with Papal Nuncio Verolino (World Wide Photos)
The U. S. had actually turned into the communists’ best recruiting tool. The 1954 Doolittle Report on the Covert Activities of the CIA told President Eisenhower, “It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost….We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us….There are no rules in such a game… If the United States is to survive, long standing concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered.” Fascism is the best possible recruiting tool for radical communism. By supporting fascism worldwide, in the name of anticommunism, we turned ourselves into the Soviets’ best argument. 89
The young doctor Ché Guevara, who had come to Guatemala filled with hope, vainly tried to organize guerrilla units to retreat into the mountains to continue the fight. Guevara realized that it was Árbenz’ failure to inflame and arm the populace that made his defeat inevitable. Intelligence professionals, it was obvious, could always rent mercenary troops and manipulate the media. The enraged Guevara made his way to Mexico City, where he met a like-minded Fidel Castro, himself a miraculous survivor of bold attempts to overthrow both Trujillo and Batista. Back in Guatemala City, David Phillips, pouring over Árbenz’ captured documents, opened a file on Ché Guevara.
One of the first things Guevara told Castro on their accession to power in January of 1959 was that “We cannot guarantee the Revolution before cleansing the armed forces. It is necessary to remove everyone who might be a danger. But it is necessary to do it rapidly, right now!” By taking that advice, Castro became as ruthless a streetfighter as Allen Dulles himself - executing three hundred Batistianos by March of 1959. Castro did that because he knew he was under CIA military attack, and those officers were key CIA military cadres. 82
The Cuban Communist Party, both because it was close to Batista and because it had orders from Moscow, had opposed Castro when he was in the hills. In 1959, before he was driven into Russian arms as a matter of survival, the CIA agent who interviewed the cooperative Castro concluded that “Castro is not only not a Communist, he is a strong anti-Communist fighter.” The only thing intractable about Castro, concluded Agent ‘Frank Bender’ (Gerry Droller), was his social idealism and his nationalism. Although the military and political pressure inherent in his situation forced Castro to embrace the radical left, he always preferred his Fidelismo, what he called “utopian socialism,” to Guevara’s Communismo. 83
Castro met with Vice-President Richard Nixon in April. Despite Castro’s willingness to compromise, and before he had expropriated anything, Nixon, Eisenhower’s point man on Cuba, decided that all-out war was the only answer. Nixon recommended using the newly-exiled Batistianos as the spearpoint. This was, of course, a CIA Special Operations Group plan that had already been designed before Castro’s visit. For Castro, talking to Nixon was like talking to a wall. The political signals from the Eisenhower administration, which had immediately recognized Castro, were far more positive, but the wary Castro always kept his eye on the military signals. He knew Nixon represented the ‘Sullivan and Cromwell’ interests threatened by Cuban nationalism, including United Fruit, which had extensive interests in Cuba. There was also Texaco, ITT, Standard Oil, Cuban-American Sugar Company, Domino Sugar, American and Foreign Power Company and any number of others. 84
Col. J. C. King, chief of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division, the man who had been the CIA’s chief liaison to United Fruit during the Guatemala coup, had advised Eisenhower, in his Cuba “action plan,” that “Thorough consideration be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro.” Eisenhower signed off on the plan on March 17, 1960, after Allen Dulles’ formal presentation of “Operation Pluto” to the National Security Council. But, however sympathetic he may have been to the elimination of Fidel, Eisenhower had approved only a small 300-man force of small-team infiltrators, not the massive 3000-man over-the-beach invasion presented to Kennedy. In the transition from Ike to Kennedy, January 1961, diplomatic relations were broken with Cuba, and Brigade 2506 was set to invade. 85
Castro, who had plenty of double agents among the Batistianos, realizing he was under attack, opened diplomatic relations with Moscow on May 7, 1960. In October he began the process of nationalizing every significant U.S. business in Cuba. Dulles’ protégé, Richard Bissell, who had replaced Wisner as Deputy Director for Plans, was in charge of the ‘covert’ Operation Pluto.
The model for all the Cuba planners was their Guatemala operation of 1954. The Cuba plan included not only assassination, but sabotage and an expert operation, that almost succeeded, aimed at destabilizing Cuba’s currency. This, ultimately, was no more than Castro expected. ‘Imperialism’ was not an empty word to Fidel and Ché. They never forgot Jacobo Árbenz and the destruction of democracy in Guatemala, and they knew, right from the start, that they would be treated the same way. It was Árbenz’ fate that convinced Ché that the Communist military model - a model developed in reaction to the death-squad fascism of the Czar and the 1919 invasion of Russia by the colonial powers - was the only survivable alternative to CIA-United Fruit “democracy.” 86
All the intelligence services were aware of the Dulles thesis, that revolt in Eastern Europe had proven impossible to foment under Stalin, but possible under Khrushchev, whose relative liberalism gave intelligence operatives wiggling room. “We should also like to extend a special greeting to Jacobo Árbenz,” said Ché in 1960, “president of the first Latin American country which fearlessly raised its voice against colonialism; a country which, in a far-reaching and courageous agrarian reform, gave expression to the hopes of the peasant masses. We should also like to express our gratitude to him, and to the democracy that gave way, for the example they gave us and for the accurate estimate they enabled us to make of the weaknesses which that government was unable to overcome.” 87 88
The essential militarism of communism, of course, enraged Castro’s democratic supporters, like Manolo Ray, Huber Matos, Manuel Arrutia, David Salvador and Amador Odio, all heroes of the revolution who broke with Castro, but those that didn’t end up behind bars in Cuba found little comfort among the CIA’s Batistianos. Ché knew that real political democracy presented an opportunity for the CIA to destabilize the revolution from the inside, as it had done with Árbenz.
The then-current CIA destabilization of the neutralist government of Souvanna Phouma in Laos was a case in point. Souvanna Phouma was driven into an alliance with the Pathet Lao and the Viet Minh, both of which had vast popular support, by a corrupt gang of fascist dope peddlers who had no popular support whatever, just a mountain of CIA money and arms. The “Royal Laotian Army” and the “Royal Lao Air Force” were created out of whole cloth by the CIA - they literally didn’t exist before the Dulles brothers invented them, and had no funding, including Laotian, other than American.
In 1958 the Pathet Lao, through legal elections, became an important element in Souvanna Phouma’s neutralist coalition. The Dulles brothers immediately cut off all aid and engineered the military collapse of the coalition, using the CIA’s strongman, the former French-serving Gen. Phoumi Nosavan. Eisenhower was informed of U.S. coup involvement, of which he would not have approved, only after the fact. 90
Nationalist paratroop captain Kong Le, in an attempt to return Souvanna’s coalition to power, took Vientiane away from Phoumi in August of 1960. But Kong Le couldn’t hold it in the face of the combined CIA forces of Phoumi and Vang Pao’s Hmong opium growers, operating in the Plain of Jars. So, in December 1960, Kong Le led a substantial portion of the Royal Laotian Army, in American trucks loaded with American equipment, into the Plain of Jars to join up with the Pathet Lao and challenge Vang Pao. The sum total of the Eisenhower-Dulles policy in Laos was to radicalize the Pathet Lao, vastly increase its strength, and badly weaken the democratic center.
The whole mess was then handed to John Kennedy, who found the CIA’s Laotian strongman Phoumi completely intractable. Kennedy cut off Phoumi’s American funding, at least that part of the funding he was aware of. But, as Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger recalled, of both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, “The CIA station chief refused to follow the State Department policy or even to tell the Ambassador his plans and intentions.” 91
Rather than accede to the State Department’s demands for another coalition government, Gen. Phoumi, who continued to receive covert CIA funding, sent Gen. Ouane Rattikone into Burma to arrange independent funding for the Royal Laotian Army. Using his vast stores of CIA arms as barter, Ouane was enabled to build up enough regular trade with the KMT Shan state opium armies to become the first Chairman of the secret Laotian Opium Administration, in 1962. 92
The CIA, meanwhile, as the French had done, had been organizing the Hmong army of Vang Pao in the Laotian highlands, the only possible military counterweight to the Pathet Lao in northern Laos. The only cash crop of the Hmong was opium, and there was no way 40,000 Hmong troops would fight for any outfit that didn’t support their economy. The Hmong are also called Meo, a Chinese insult, meaning ‘barbarian.’ Hmong means ‘the people,’ ‘mankind.’ It was largely the Pathet Lao hostility to the opium trade, a traditional tool of the colonialists, that turned the scattered Hmong highlanders, who had been French allies, into American allies. Phoumi and Ouane shipped their Laotian opium, as their Burmese, to Ngo Dinh Nhu in Saigon via the CIA-run Royal Lao Air Force.
Ché knew that the CIA modus operandi in Guatemala and Cuba was no different than in Laos. It not only originated with the same policy makers, it employed the same CIA agents and military trainers, the same individuals and front companies. Immediately after the Guatemalan coup, as Ché looked on from Mexico City, Secretary of State Dulles instructed the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala to instruct Col. Castillo that all unionists were to be labeled “communist” and that all “communists” were to be charged with high treason and either shot or summarily exiled. The obedient Castillo immediately outlawed all political parties, labor unions, peasant and Indian organizations and restored the old dictator Ubico’s death-squad chief to his old post, as head of the secret police. That is, Dulles insisted on the revitalization of the old political death-squads. At least 8,000 people, many of them political and union leaders, were murdered in the first two months of the Castillo regime, and another 10,000 imprisoned. Every political leader who could left the country. 93
The secret police imposed press censorship and even burned all “unauthorized” books, including not only the writings of Arévalo, but Dostoyevsky and Victor Hugo. Castillo’s party was called the National Democratic Movement. His personal secretary, a man who had proven very handy with a gun, was Mario Sandoval Alarcón, the man who, funded by the CIA, went on to become “the godfather of Latin America’s death squads.”
Castillo drove all the Native American and mestizo campesinos off the land Árbenz had given them and gave it back to the old landlords, returning the country to the monocrop coffee and banana slave-labor economy, virtually bankrupting it. Vice-President Nixon, after his 1955 visit, declared that “President Castillo Armas’ objective, ‘to do more for the people in two years than the Communists were able to do in ten years,’ is important. This is the first instance in history where a Communist government has been replaced by a free one.” Fascist doublespeak, all his life. 94
In 1957 the intrepid Mafia point-man and Trafficante operative, Johnny Roselli, made another trip to Guatemala City, as he had done many times throughout 1956. This time the trip was in reaction to Castillo’s jailing of his partner, casino operator Ted Lewin. Castillo was promptly gunned down, and Col. Enrique Trinidad Oliva, Johnny Roselli’s gambling and narcotics partner, became the new head of Guatemala’s secret police. 95 96
Col. Trinidad Oliva was also the key CIA contact in the Guatemalan government, working under his half-brother, the defense minister. Trinidad Oliva coordinated all “foreign aid” coming through the CIA conduit ICA, the International Cooperation Administration, the forerunner of the Agency for International Development, AID. Roselli and Trinidad then helped the murderous old Gen. Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, one of Ubico’s assassins with close ties to mob partner Trujillo, to become head of state. Mario Sandoval Alarcón organized the right-wing of Castillo’s party into the National Liberation Movement (MLN) and hired himself out to Trinidad and Roselli.
This Republican-supported dope dealer government instituted a policy of genocide against the bulk of Guatemala’s people, the Native Americans and mestizos, that continues to this day. Little 7-year-old Jakelin Caal, the girl who died in ICE custody on 12/8/2018, was a Native American whose family was fleeing the racist Guatemalan government the U.S. installed in 1954 and still supports. Had we left Árbenz in peace, we would now have a major Guatemalan trading partner, and no hysterical refugees begging for their lives at our door.
The same year that Johnny Roselli helped the CIA engineer the change in the Guatemalan government, he was asked by his Syndicate associates to put together Giancana in Chicago, Costello in New York, Lansky in Miami, and Marcello in New Orleans for the huge $50 million Tropicana construction project in Las Vegas. According to Fred Black, a political fixer who was close to Roselli, Bobby Baker and Lyndon Johnson, Roselli’s influence was such that he gave orders to the Dorfmans, who controlled the Teamsters’ huge Central States Pension Fund. During the 50s and 60s, it was Johnny Roselli who “set up protection” in Las Vegas. 97 98
Throughout 1956 and 57 Roselli travelled back and forth from Mexico City, the planning center for all CIA operations in Latin America, and Guatemala City. An experienced ICA operative noted that “John had access to everyone and everything that was going on there. He had an open door at the embassy in Guatemala, and in Costa Rica. He was in there plenty of times. I know because I saw him. He supplied information to the government, and had a hand in a lot of the intrigues that were going on.” 99
Roselli’s mug shots, 1925 & 1966
This means, operationally, that Johnny Roselli’s interests became the CIA’s interests. “Throughout Latin America,” notes Frank McNeil, a junior political officer in the Guatemalan Embassy in 1960, “there were two American governments - one intelligence and one official.” McNeil’s boss, Ambassador John Muccio, learned of the Bay of Pigs invasion force being trained in Guatemala only after the story broke in The New York Times. As John Kennedy found out to his chagrin, Roselli, his Syndicate and Batistiano allies, had more operational clout than the State Department. 100
But Gen. Ydígoras’ death-squad rule was not popular, even with the Guatemalan military, nor was his gift of a military base in Retalhuleu to the Americans, for the training of their Batistiano invasion force. Castro’s macho nationalism was deeply admired by Latin military men, and Ydígoras was bitterly resented for turning Guatemala into another “USS Honduras.” In November of 1960, a month before Kong Le joined up with the Pathet Lao, more than half the Guatemalan army rose against Ydígoras. The U.S., fearing harm to the Bay of Pigs operation, squelched the revolt as a training exercise for its fascist Cuban force, which now had the run of Guatemala. 101
This created an alliance in Guatemala, as it had in Laos, of the nationalist military and the revolutionary left. In Guatemala, the left was led by the Guatemalan Party of Labor, the PGT, and its Revolutionary Movement of November 13th (MR-13). Both nationalist military rebels who led their regular troops into the hills to join up with the PGT, Luis Turcios Lima and Marco Antonio Yon Sosa, had U.S. counterinsurgency training. Master-spy Roselli, following traditional intelligence practice, maintained relations with both sides in this guerrilla war, supplying arms and selected information as necessary.
Roselli had important ties to Standard Fruit, the smaller of the two fruit giants, through Seymour Weiss and Carlos Marcello in New Orleans, fruit importing mafioso Jack Dragna on the West Coast and the Genoveses in New York. Using Col. Trinidad Oliva and some of Dragna’s best hitters from the Coast, as well as guerrilla hit teams from MR-13, Roselli convinced United Fruit that it would be cheaper to allow Standard Fruit to use United’s rail and port facilities than to fight with Roselli. This was also the position of the U.S. Justice Department, which supported “free enterprise” in Guatemala. 102
The popular Guatemalan guerrilla war was a convenient “crisis” for the intelligence services, providing a willing John Kennedy an excuse to approve the sending of Office of Public Safety (OPS) trainers to organize a “pacification” program in Zacapa and Izabal provinces. U.S. Special Forces were flown in from Laos, and Ydígoras’ best killers were matriculated from the CIA’s counterinsurgency college in the Canal Zone. The ensuing mass murder made even the arch-conservative churchmen puke in public, and they were a constituency John Kennedy heeded. In January of 1963 Kennedy engineered the departure of Ydígoras in favor of a hopefully more politic murderer, who disappointed expectations.
Over the next few years, under the OPS-Military Assistance Program, Guatemala’s “counterinsurgency” force was modernized with tens of millions of dollars. The Zacapa-Izabal campaign turned into a political mass-assassination program, run by the same OPS-Green Beret operatives who ran Operation Phoenix in Vietnam. This became the most horrible genocide in Guatemalan history, aimed at the Mayan people. Amnesty International said that in 1966 alone, 30,000 Guatemalan civilians were assassinated by the OPS death squads. 103 104
U.S. AID Photo, Guatemala, 2005 (Wikimedia Commons)
Leading those death-squads was Mario Sandoval Alarcón, who, with CIA-KMT help, had organized his MLN (National Liberation Movement ) into a politico-military unit that not only fielded troops, but local jefes politicos capable of regimenting the campesinos and identifying death-squad targets. When a village wouldn’t submit to an MLN political chief, U.S. Special Forces jets, operating out of the U.S. Southern Command in Panama, bombed it with napalm. Hundreds of Guatemalan children were burned to death by flaming jelly. 105 106
This is what earned the Guatemalan army commander, Col. Carlos Arana Osorio, Sandoval’s commanding officer, the sobriquet “Butcher of Zacapa,” which he took as a compliment. The CIA/OPS, working with Sandoval, founded and funded numerous free-lance assassination teams, with cute acronyms like OJO, “Eye for an Eye” and MANO, “National Organized Anticommunist Movement.” By 1970 over 30,000 Guatemalan police had received Office of Public Safety training, many going directly into the free-lance death-squads, all of which supplemented their income by running drugs for their employers, the Syndicate and the Guatemalan secret police. 107
The Salvadoran equivalent of the MLN, ORDEN (‘Order’), the Democratic Nationalist Organization, was created by the OPS in El Salvador between 1960 and 1965. Taiwan’s Col. Chu was instrumental in organizing ORDEN on the populist KMT model, with 80,000 cadres. As in Guatemala, rural ORDEN informants turned over subversive names to the Salvadoran National Security Agency, ANSESAL, headquartered in the Presidential Palace, which dispatched a death squad to deal with the “traitor.” The infamous Roberto D’Aubuisson, funded by Reagan during the Contra war, was strongman Blondie Medrano’s protégé in ANSESAL. 108
Brazil went through the same process, with some 100,000 police receiving OPS training. This resulted directly in General Castelo Branco’s 1964 overthrow of President João Goulart’s reformist parliamentary government, and the resurgence of Brazil’s death-squads. Brazil remained a military police state for the next 40 years. The coup was engineered by US ambassador Lincoln Gordon and his military attaché, the CIA’s Colonel Vernon A. Walters, actively organizing right-wing elements of the Brazilian military and providing heavy financial and military support.
The popular ‘Jango’ Goulart was a moderate, center-left democrat whose Rooseveltian policies addressed Brazil’s structural problems, quite like the policies of Jacobo Árbenz. On April 4, 1962, President Kennedy publicly welcomed Goulart to the USA, explicitly referencing President Roosevelt’s ‘Good Neighbor’ visit to Brazil 26 years before. Kennedy lauded Goulart’s efforts, under the Alliance for Progress model, “To provide housing for our people, education for our children, employment for our workers, security for our older citizens, a better and more secure life for our farmers.” Kennedy loved Goulart’s Rooseveltian politics, and would have bitterly resisted the CIA’s ‘Operation Brother Sam.’ The coup was cooked up by ITT President Harold Geneen and CIA Director John McCone, as was their ex post facto BS about Kennedy’s approval. The coup, explained the CIA, was necessary to “prevent Brazil from becoming another China or Cuba.” The Operation was brought to fruition on April 1, 1964. Goulart, to save his life, fled to Uruguay.
Goulart with President Kennedy during his visit to the U.S., April 3,1962; Goulart’s tickertape parade in New York City, April 5, 1962 (Wikimedia Commons, Goulart)
On April 9, 1964 coup leaders published the First Institutional Act, which granted authority to remove elected officials from office, dismiss civil servants, and revoke the political rights of those found guilty of subversion or misuse of public funds. On April 11, 1964 the Brazilian Congress, under this gun, elected the Army Chief of Staff Marshal Branco as President. Branco granted all the Sullivan and Cromwell-style commercial concessions demanded by the U.S. government, including a new profit remittance law and an investment guarantee treaty covering U.S. corporate subsidiaries. By 1967 foreign companies owned 50 percent of Brazilian industry. Because Goulart remained an influential voice, Sérgio Paranhos Fleury, head of the Department of Political and Social Order, engineered Goulart’s murder on orders from President Ernesto Geisel. On December 6, 1976 João Goulart was poisoned to death in his apartment.
The Confederación Anticomunista Latina, CAL, was part of the CIA-KMT’s World Anti-Communist League, WACL, an extension of their Asian People’s Anti-Communist League. The first meeting of the CAL was organized by the CIA’s Howard Hunt in 1958, to celebrate the 1954 Guatemalan coup, in which he played a major role. Old OSS hand Hunt had direct ties to Taiwan’s KMT. 109 110
Ray Cline, CIA station chief in Taiwan from 1958-1962, later Deputy Director of the CIA, founded the WACL along with Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek’s son. Ching-kuo headed the Kuomintang’s secret police under Chiang and rose to become President of Taiwan. He was overall military commander of the KMT’s Shan states opium armies. The WACL’s finishing school was the Political Warfare Cadres Academy in Peitou. Roberto D’Aubuisson, ‘Major Blowtorch,’ graduated from both this school and the International Police Academy in D.C., as did many of South America’s finest. When appropriate, courses at Peitou, Taiwan, were taught in Spanish. By 1961, the American military was providing 75% of Taiwan’s budget. Kuomintang heroin flooded the world. 111
‘Political warfare’ is a combination of sheer terror and unrelenting propaganda aimed at the merciless domination of the bulk of the population by the ruling industrial elite - what the KMT calls “total war.” The cadres are schooled in the arts of interrogation, propaganda, militarily-based social organization and terror. Major Blowtorch got straight A’s. D’Aubuisson’s party, ARENA, the Nationalist Republican Alliance, was structured exactly like the Kuomintang. It “has a politico-military organization which embraces not only a civilian party structure but also a military arm obedient to the party,” to quote President Carter’s ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White. 112
White is a good example of the deep divisions that existed within the structural U.S. government between many of the democratically-minded professionals of the State Department and the pro-fascist elements of military intelligence. White was fired in 1981 by Reagan’s first Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig, for bitterly protesting the 12/2/1980 murder of three Maryknoll nuns and a lay worker, who were personal friends of his. White swore, at the site where their bodies were being dug up, “this time the bastards won’t get away with it.” Ambassadors John Binns in Honduras and Anthony Quainton in Nicaragua also loudly protested dope-dealing CIA-supported death squads and were also summarily fired by Haig. Upon his ouster, Ambassador White told the AP, “In 1981, as the ambassador to El Salvador, I refused a demand by the secretary of state, Alexander M. Haig Jr., that I use official channels to cover up the Salvadoran military's responsibility for the murders of four American churchwomen. I was fired and forced out of the Foreign Service.”
The FBI’s Stanley Pimentel, the ranking FBI legal attaché in Central America, that is, an officer of the State Department with diplomatic immunity, showed the backbone he was born with. Pimentel penetrated the Salvadoran military with the help of a State Department political officer to prove that the kill orders came directly from the director of the Salvadoran National Guard, General Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova. Risking his life, Pimentel obtained the original murder weapons, placed them in a diplomatic pouch, and, after an armed confrontation at the airport with Salvadoran troops, who didn’t dare shoot an American diplomat, shipped the weapons to the FBI lab. The lab matched the weapons to the bullets found in the nuns’ bodies and the fingerprints found at the murder scene. Four National Guardsmen were convicted in the killings. But Vides Casanova was promoted to become the Salvadoran minister of defense in 1983, still heavily financed and armed by the U.S., in the name of the antidrug effort.
As senior CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman, who was in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence at the time, put it, “White exposed the cooperation of U.S. military advisers and CIA operatives in aiding El Salvador’s brutal death-squad military.” In 1999, as President of the Center for International Policy, Ambassador White said, “In the name of anticommunism, U.S.-supported armies suppressed democracy, free speech, and human rights in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama. Torture and assassination of democratic leaders, including presidential candidates, journalists, priests and union officials became commonplace.”
Ambassador Binns’ successor in Honduras, John Negroponte, had no problem covering for those dope-dealing death squads. Negroponte, a close ally of cold-warrior DCIA Casey, as U.S. ambassador to Honduras, 1981-85, went on to become a key player in the Contra-Cocaine machinery run by Casey from the Contra bases in Honduras, which I describe in detail in the ‘Contra-Cocaine’ chapter in Vol. II, using the photos and narrative given me by Cele Castillo, the DEA’s lead agent.
Negroponte went on to become Director of National Intelligence, 2005–2007, and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, 2007–2009. Negroponte and his ilk, still running our diplomatic and intelligence machinery, institutionalized the protected global drug trade, which is still run by those death squads and their secret services. That’s why we have a flood of terrified campesinos from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, literally mothers with babes in their arms, begging for asylum from those dope dealing death squad police states. Police states that we built and still finance, in the name of the anti-drug effort. ‘Drugs’ was just substituted for ‘communism’ in the Sullivan and Cromwell privateer script. The policy is now “antidrug” as well as “anticommunist.” Casey, Negroponte and their ilk have institutionalized the hard drug business. Negroponte helped run Reagan’s Somocista Contra Cocaine operation, trading multiton loads of cocaine for Contra arms. Negroponte was sitting directly behind Colin Powell, next to DCIA George Tenet, when Powell made his phony pitch for Bush Jr.’s Iraq War. 113
Prepared Statement of: Richard H. Glenn, Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, May 23, 2018: “In Central America, debilitating gang violence, staggering homicide rates, pervasive extortion, and weak state institutions, especially in the ‘Northern Triangle’ of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, are key drivers of irregular migration to the United States. TCO [Transnational Criminal Organization] networks are fluid, flexible and successfully dismantling them requires that we apply well-coordinated and comprehensive solutions at the local, national, and international levels. In support of Executive Order 13773, Enforcing Federal Law with Respect to Transnational Criminal Organizations and Preventing International Trafficking, INL leads the Department of State’s efforts to combat transnational crime overseas by strengthening the capacity of partner nations to prevent and combat crime before it reaches U.S. borders.” That is word for word the same BS as in 1980. To stop the drugs from entering the U.S. we are arming and training the drug dealers.
U.S. Department of State, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), ‘Countering Narcotics,’ 1/25/2019: “In 2016 Guatemalan police seized record amounts of narcotics as INL programs started to take hold. Despite these gains, drug traffic has risen dramatically through Guatemala leading INL to expand its counternarcotics programming to combat the increase. In the coming months INL intends to begin a program to restore helicopter mobility to specialized anti-narcotics teams, giving them national interdiction capability. INL continues to support, train, and vet DEA-sponsored units that investigate and arrest drug traffickers. Coordination between U.S. and Guatemalan units has been excellent, and DEA intelligence has been used by Guatemalan police to seize over one thousand kilograms of illicit drugs in 2017.” One thousand kilograms sounds like a lot, but it is just one metric ton, a miniscule fraction of the 1,400 metric tons of cocaine produced, according to the UNODC, by Colombia alone in 2017, making the seemingly large figure of “one thousand kilograms” a propagandistic bone, PR.
The State Department and the DEA forgot to mention that the Guatemalan police they are arming and financing are the drug dealers, and that the drugs are transported on those donated helicopters. These State Department reports have been word for word identical since 1954, as if next year the anti-drug policy will finally “take hold” and the pure physics of supply and demand, or Salvadoran or Guatemalan police, will be different this year than last year.
Insightcrime.org:, ‘Intelligence Report’ Details Role of Guatemala Police in Drug Trade,’ by Elyssa Pachico, 10/14/2014, “A report allegedly produced for US anti-drug and intelligence agencies has detailed how corrupt factions of Guatemala’s police - including high-level officers - dedicate themselves to stealing and reselling drug shipments, among other illicit activities. The report, reprinted in elPeriodico, called these corrupt police the ‘Charola Cartel’ (‘charola’ being a reference to police insignia), and said they emerged after drug traffickers began paying Guatemalan police officers to protect their drug shipments in the 1990s. Some officers allegedly began stealing these shipments (a practice known as a ‘tumbe’) and selling them to traffickers based along the Guatemala-Mexico frontier.”
The Washington Post, ‘Guatemalan Anti-Drug Official Indicted,’ By Mark Sherman, The Associated Press, 11/16/2005: “Washington - Guatemala's top anti-drug investigators have been arrested on charges they conspired to import and distribute cocaine in the United States after being lured to America for what they thought was training on fighting drug traffickers.”
The Associated Press, ‘Guatemala arrests 28, including 9 police, in crime ring bust,’ 2/5/2018: “Guatemala City (AP) - Guatemalan authorities have arrested 28 people, including nine police officers, in a bust of a network allegedly involved in organized crime and drug trafficking.” I could go on for the next 500 pages with identical stories. We are arming and financing the drug dealer governments that we built, and we know it, because that’s how these fascist police states pay for our armaments. That’s the fascist policy the Dulles brothers and their ilk institutionalized. 114
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