DEA Agent Cele Castillo with Vice President Bush at the Guatemala City embassy reception, January 14, 1986 (Photo Cele Castillo)
Cocaine Coup
Almost all of the world’s cocaine originates in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia. The Bolivian military was built up by massive CIA/OPS assistance after its collapse in the face of a leftist uprising led by Victor Paz Estenssoro, a populist Peronist who took the Presidency in 1952. Paz, leader of the National Revolutionary Movement, MNR, nationalized the mines, instituted universal suffrage and land reform, and permitted the foundation of COB (Central Obrera Boliviana), the trade union organization, and CSUTCB (Confederación Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia), the campesino (Indian) national union. By giving the Quechuan speaking Native American majority the vote and securing their hold on the land, the revolution of 1952 changed Bolivian politics forever. Paz served as President of Bolivia from 1952 to 1956, 1960 to 1964 and 1985 to 1989.
But Paz was no Jacobo Árbenz. He had totalitarian tendencies and connections, which dated to WW II, to the Nazi-infested secret services. His administration drifted steadily rightward. His 1960s vice-president was air force General René Barrientos, who overthrew him with CIA help in 1964. Nazi assassin Klaus Barbie went to work for Barrientos, identifying “enemies of the state” from his perch in military intelligence. Ché Guevara died trying to reverse Barrientos’ coup. It was under a 1967 AID contract, ostensibly for a Bolivian road survey, that overflights, using new infrared film, were able to pinpoint Ché’s nighttime heat signature through the jungle canopy. Ché, against Moscow’s orders, had gone up against a full-scale CIA Special Operations Group. 1 2
Leading that Special Operations Group was Batistiano assassin and Operation 40 (Bay of Pigs) vet Felix Rodriguez. Rodriguez was a close associate of George H.W. Bush, according to Bush’s own admission, and the numerous smiling photos of the two published in Rodriguez’ self-adulatory 1989 biography Shadow Warrior. Rodriguez also published photos of him marching Ché to his death, 10/9/1967. Rodriguez wore Ché’s watch when he went to Vietnam to help out in Operation Phoenix. Rodriguez lifted the watch just after the captive Guevara had been machine gunned to death. Rodriguez’ boss in Vietnam was Donald Gregg, Vice President Bush’s National Security Advisor during the Reagan presidency. Gregg kept an autographed picture of Rodriguez on his White House desk. 3
Felix Rodriguez with Vice President Bush
Rodriguez and his deputy, Luis Posada Carriles, another member of Batista’s secret police and an Operation 40/Brigade 2506 vet, ran the Contra cocaine operation out of the U.S. base at Ilopango in El Salvador. Posada had provided cover jobs, through DISIP, the Venezuelan secret police, for Nixon’s 1973 assassination teams in Chile. Posada worked closely with Orlando Bosch, another Batistiano assassin and Operation 40 vet, who founded the Cuban Action terrorist group. Pinochet put Bosch up in style immediately after the CIA’s 1973 murder of Allende, financing his terror campaign. 4
The 1960s to 1980s version of the pro-fascist CIA plan for Europe and South America, built on the drug business, was known as Operation Gladio (Shortsword), which created CIA-funded organizations to coordinate right-wing death squads aimed at decimating and demonizing the moderate left, per the Dulles brothers' philosophy that the moderate left were no better than communists and the drug trade was the appropriate tool to deal with them. These CIA organized and financed fascist groups, all major international drug gangs, included Italy’s Propaganda Due (P-2), The World Anti-Communist League WACL), Confederacion Anticomunista Latinoamericana (CAL), Chile’s Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), Coordinación de Organizaciones Revolutionarias Unidas (CORU) and, or course, the West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), founded by Nazi war criminal Reinhard Gehlen. All these groups traded drugs and arms with each other, as well as contracts for political assassinations.
The Dirty War on South America’s popular ‘liberation theology’ activists, called Operation Condor, was run through Chile’s DINA, coordinating fascist death squads throughout Latin America and Europe. The U.S. Southern Command, operating out of Doral, Florida, was the command and control for Operation Condor. The 1976-82 Condor death toll, which included the napalm bombing of Guatemalan villages, is estimated at 150,000.
As the U.S. Defense Department explained in an interagency memo on October 1, 1976: “Operation Condor is the code name given for intelligence collection on leftists, communists and Marxists in the Southern Cone Area. It was established between cooperating intelligence services in South America in order to eliminate Marxist terrorist activities in member countries with Chile reportedly being the center of operations. Other participating members include: Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia. Members showing the most enthusiasm to date have been Argentina, Uruguay and Chile.” 5
Following the Dulles Guatemala pattern, which overthrew the great Jacobo Árbenz in favor of a cabal of fascist dope dealers, the CIA overthrew physician Salvador Allende’s populist government in September, 1973, using General Pinochet’s fascist military cabal, which became Chile’s Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, DINA, the organizer of Operation Condor. Condor’s most famous victim was Orlando Letelier, who had been Chile’s U. S. ambassador in 1971, and later led several ministries, Foreign Affairs, Interior and Defense. From his perch as a senior fellow at DC’s Institute for Policy Studies, Letelier became an influential international voice of the Chilean resistance, blocking several European loans to the Chilean government, which revoked his citizenship in September, 1976. That same month Letelier was blown to pieces by a car bomb in DC’s Sheridan Circle.
A month prior to Letelier’s assassination, the CIA’s Tom Clines arranged a meeting at a Holiday Inn in suburban Virginia between CIA privateer Ed Wilson and Raymond May of Scientific Communications Inc, a CIA supplier of specialty electronic devices, including radio-controlled bomb detonators. Wilson sold these detonators to Gaddafi, to the Shah, to Indonesia’s Suharto and to Pinochet’s DINA. A month later one of Mr. May’s detonators was used to kill Letelier.
DINA contract killer Michael Townley was convicted for the murder, along with General Manuel Contreras, former head of the DINA, and DINA’s Brigadier Pedro Espinoza. In 1993, Townley was also convicted, in absentia, by an Italian court for the 1975 attempted murder in Rome of former Chilean Vice President Bernardo Leighton and his wife. They were shot in the head and back with a 9-mm Beretta. Both lived, crippled for life.
Townley’s accomplice, the actual shooter, was Pierluigi Concutelli, Stefano Delle Chiaie’s Avanguardia Nazionale (P-2) hit man. These terrorist groups were coordinated internationally by the CIA through operations like Italy’s Propaganda Due (P-2 – the name is a direct reference to P-2’s favorite tactic – false-flag terrorism), the World Anti-Communist League, WACL, and the Confederación Anticomunista Latina, CAL. Townley was also under investigation for the murder of Allende’s former army deputy chief of staff General Carlos Prats and his wife, and former Chilean Defense minister Oscar Bonilla and the five other people who died in the helicopter explosion.
Bolivia’s military dictator Hugo Banzer was another leading force in Operation Condor. In 1978 the CIA’s Confederación Anticomunista Latina, CAL, adopted an extrapolation of Operation Condor called the Banzer Plan, for the coordinated death-squad tracking of ‘liberation theology’ priests and nuns throughout Latin America. The Banzer Plan was, in fact, the CIA Plan. All participants in the Banzer Plan had the full technical, logistical and political backing of the CIA. DINA chief Manuel Contreras held a lengthy set of meetings in January 1975 with CIA Deputy Director General Vernon Walters at Langley to coordinate arms sales and what became known as the Banzer Plan. After he left Langley the CIA’s Tom Clines set up meetings for Contreras in Florida with CIA Cuban assassins Felix Rodriguez, Rafael Chi Chi Quintero and other job seekers. 6
The Banzer Plan was an attempt to address the populist priests and nuns of Catholic Action, for instance, which had become a formidable force in Guatemala, bordering southern Mexico. Catholic Action organized at least 150,000 peasants into rural co-ops that provided economic autonomy, the very last thing that the fascists wanted to see. Catholic Action’s ‘Christian Base Communities’ stressed education and consciousness-raising, and cooperated with one another throughout the highlands. They presented an alternative to both the guerrillas and the government, and, in many cases, peacefully supported the political goals of the guerrillas.
Catholic Action stood in opposition to a Latin Church too often ruled by the likes of Archbishop Casariego, who, in a famous photo, blessed U.S. military equipment for the Zacapa mass-murder campaign. “If you mix in politics, you get what you deserve,” quipped the Archbishop. But during the 70s, throughout Latin America, the local Catholic hierarchy was pushed into active support of “the Church of the Poor” by the genuine Christian mysticism of its working class priests and nuns. The most famous convert to social activism was El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero, whose support for the poor was deep and genuine. The Maryknoll Sisters have also proven to be particularly effective international freedom fighters who have indeed brought glory upon the Church. Many have been murdered by CAL death squads. 6a
Overseeing the Banzer Plan in Mexico was the former Bolivian CIA station chief who was Felix Rodriguez’ boss when they hunted down Ché Guevara, Hugh Murray. In Mexico, Murray operated as a DEA agent. He had been recruited into the DEA to work with his old CIA buddy Lucien Conein, then running Nixon’s covert DEA operations. “The Federal Bureau of Narcotics provided cover for the Central Intelligence Agency since just about the day it was formed,” writes criminologist Prof. Alan Block. 7
U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger with Pinochet in 1976 (Wikimedia Commons)
That’s also what Gary Webb found when he looked into the DEA/CIA in Costa Rica. CIA/DEA agent Murray’s two chief Mexican contacts, DFS chief Miguel Nazar Haro and Mexico City Police Chief Arturo Durazo Moreno. Both made a fortune in the drug trade, and both ran fascist death squads. Durazo amassed a fortune in the cocaine and kickback business. He was busted by the FBI in 1984 and extradited to Mexico in 1986, where he was sentenced to 16 years. His Mexico City palace is now a popular ‘museum of corruption.’ 8 9
The DFS, the Federal Security Directorate, Mexico’s CIA-formed and trained combined CIA and FBI, was created as a subdivision of the Interior Ministry in the 1940s. It was merged with the Center for Investigation and National Security (CISEN) in 1985. In the mid-70s it organized Mexico’s competing dealers and growers, centralizing all Mexican-based dope distribution. This operation was based in Guadalajara, home of the ‘Owl’ death squads and the CIA’s Autonomous University of Guadalajara, the Owl base, from which emanated the DFS’s ‘White Brigade’ death squads. The centralization enabled the DFS to rake off 25% of the cartel’s gross - billions - and to protect its income more efficiently.
The Owls were founded by Carlos Cuesta Gallardo, a Mexican Nazi who spent World War II in Germany. Hitler’s plan was to use Cuesta as his Mexican Quisling. The cofounder of the Owls was Father Julio Meinveille, an Argentine Jesuit. Meinveille is the author of The Jew, The Cabal of Progressivism, Among the Church and the Reich and Conspiracy Against the Church. These are the Owls’ bibles.
High, very high up on the Owls’ enemies list was Pope John XXIII, certainly the greatest Pope of the 20th century. He was a Jew, doncha know. Makes us Hebes proud. Pope John’s successor, Pope Paul VI, was not only a Jew, but a drug addict! Makes us dopers proud. Every time I take a poke, I get the heavenly feeling that I’m tokin with the Pope. Meinveille was the main speaker at the 1972 CIA-organized CAL (Confederación Anticomunista Latina) conference in Mexico City. The Owls’ front man at the 1962 Vatican Council II organized by Pope John XXIII was Jesuit Father Saenz y Arriaga, who was excommunicated for forging the signatures of Catholic leaders on hate literature. 10
Carlos Cuesta Gallardo founded the Autonomous University of Guadalajara in 1935. By 1960 Gallardo’s University was just a few dilapidated buildings with an annual budget of $50,000. But CIA agent Oscar Wiegland, U.S. consul in Guadalajara, arranged AID funds for the struggling ‘university.’ By 1975 Cuesta’s annual budget was $10 million. This was a CIA-financed hate-center, posing as a university, that ran classes in fascist ‘philosophy’ and, literally, coordinated CAL death squad activities, and the dope-dealing that financed them, throughout Latin America.
When Manuel Buendia, a famous investigative journalist for Mexico City’s daily Excelsior, revealed these facts in 1984, he was shot dead. First on the murder scene was the Federal Security Directorate, the DFS, whose agents immediately cleaned out Buendia’s files, which were said to contain a videotape of high government officials meeting with Mexico’s most powerful drug dealers. The engineer of the murder was the head of the DFS, Antonio Zorilla, whom Buendia had trusted as a source and confidant. Buendia was apparently unaware that the DFS shared operational control of the Owls. On his 1989 fall from grace, Zorilla was charged with the murder of Buendia. 11 12
At this time the DFS ran a fleet of 600 tanker trucks, ostensibly for ferrying natural gas, actually ferrying pot, coke and heroin. According to both objective DEA investigators and an informant DFS agent considered reliable by these hardboiled pros, “They ran ten to twelve trucks a day into Phoenix and Los Angeles. They had the whole border wired.” The wiring was done, obviously, using the DFS border zone commanders. The DEA and FBI are always chasing some DFS (federal) border zone commander for trafficking, usually following his money trail. 13 14 15
Manuel Buendia (Wikimedia Commons)
The first director of the DFS, Capt. Rafael Chavarri, after he left the agency, went to work for Mexico’s leading drug trafficker, Jorge Moreno Chauvet. Through the 40s and 50s Chauvet was a major Syndicate heroin, pot and coke supplier. The Mexican Port of Entry at Otay Mesa is as corruptible today as it was then. Elaine Shannon: “Most DEA agents who worked in Mexico and on the border considered the DFS the private army of the drug traffickers. They called the DFS badge ‘a license to traffic.’” 16
The drug business organically connected the Latin American Dirty War with the European Dirty War. Operation Condor and the Banzer Plan was called Operation Gladio in Europe, connecting and coordinating the same fascist death squads on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the things that made the death squads so formidable was their CIA-provided international coordination. Italian magistrate Vittorio Occorsio, during his investigation of the August 1974 bombing of a commuter train that killed twelve people, uncovered evidence connecting the assassins of the Italian fascist group Ordine Nuovo to Fuerza Nueva in Spain, Forces Nouvelles in France and Novios de la Muerte (Fiancés of Death) in Bolivia. Thirteen bullets from an Ingram M-10, distributed to those groups by the CIA’s Mitch WerBell and Lucien Conein, who shared offices at the DEA, were found in Vittorio Occorsio’s body on July 14, 1976.
The Ingram M-10 silenced machine pistol was manufactured at WerBell’s Marietta, Georgia plant and sold only to intelligence agencies. WerBell had served in the OSS in China with Helms, Clines, Singlaub and Hunt, and so was a trusted Company player. In the late seventies WerBell’s deadly silent submachine gun turned up in the hands of contracting fascist terror groups throughout Europe. Stefano Delle Chiaie of Ordine Nuovo, a major target of Occorsio, was the protégé and partner of Count Junio Valerio Borghese, one of Mussolini’s Navy commanders turned CIA death squad chief after the war. CIA Counterintelligence chief Angleton used Borghese’s thugs to fix the 1948 Italian elections in favor of the Mafia’s partners, the Christian Democrats. Borghese was provided with the Ingrams by Spain’s Brigada Central de Informacion, in exchange for his considerable help in running anti-ETA death squads throughout the Pyrenees. When Delle Chiaie’s favorite hit man, Pierluigi Concutelli, was trapped by police in January of 1977, he was found with the Ingram M-10 that had killed Occorsio, traceable from WerBell’s Georgia plant to the Spanish secret service. 18 19
Junio Valerio Borghese; Stefano Delle Chiaie; Pierluigi Concutelli (Wikimedia Commons)
Ordine Nuovo’s second-in-command, Elio Massagrande, was nailed by Italian police for masterminding that crime, as well as a 1976 bank robbery that netted Ordine Nuovo $25 million. But the SID, the Servizio Informazione Difesa, Italy’s major secret service, had been working since the late sixties with Stefano Delle Chiaie, Elio Massagrande and Ordine Nuovo to pin the terrorist label on the Italian left. They used the old Reichstag Fire trick - framing innocent leftists for their own vicious attacks on civilians. Massagrande, who knew way too much, was therefore allowed to escape to Paraguay, where he helped the aging General Stroessner with his dope-dealing duties. Elio Massagrande attended the CIA-organized 1979 meeting of the World Anti-Communist League.
Vittorio Occorsio at work; His bullet-riddled body on a Rome street (Wikimedia Commons)
Skorzeny as commander of the Waffen SS Sonderverband Friedenthal special forces unit, 1943; Skorzeny, left, with Argentinian dictator Juan Peron, center, early fifties (Wikimedia Commons)
Hitler’s favorite commando, Col. Otto Skorzeny, working with the Portuguese secret service and French OAS veteran Yves Guérin-Serac, helped set up Aginter Press in Lisbon in 1966, an espionage bureau masquerading as a news bureau. This was a Gehlen-BND-CIA operation to coordinate the various European fascist groups. Thus the Italian Delle Chiaie, who had worked for Aginter-Press, was in ready contact with Spain’s Fuerza Nueva and the secret service behind it. On January 24, 1977, in an office near the Atocha railway station in Madrid, Fuerza Nueva terrorists burst into a meeting of nine liberal lawyers trying to navigate Spain’s transition to democracy after Franco’s 1975 death, and machine-gunned them all, killing five and severely wounding four. One Fuerza Nueva maniac actually walked up to a politically active high school girl and shot her in the head. 20
When Ford-appointee George Bush and Nixon-appointee Vernon Walters were running the CIA, in 1976, they asked another CIA-trained Bay of Pigs veteran, Frank Castro, to help Orlando Bosch put together an umbrella organization for Bosch’s Cuban Action, Brigade 2506, the Cuban Nationalist Movement and the other Cuban splinter groups. CORU, the Coordinación de Organizaciones Revolutionarias Unidas, ran contract terrorist warfare and drugs for the CIA and Chile’s DINA throughout the world. 17
When CORU’s Orlando Bosch needed to arrange a contract in Europe, he knew who to call. In the first ten months of its operations CORU took credit for more than 50 bombings and assassinations, including the murder of Pinochet’s most dangerous critic, Orlando Letelier, Allende’s ambassador to the U.S.. Letelier was killed by a car bomb on September 21, 1976, in Sheridan Circle in Washington, D.C., along with his American co-worker, Ronni Moffitt. One of Letelier’s indicted assassins was Michael Townley, David Phillips’ CIA assistant in Chile. Phillips’ good work in establishing Pinochet won him the directorship of CIA Western Hemisphere operations. Townley went to work for Pinochet’s DINA, coordinating it with CORU. 21
In July of 1976, the U.S. Ambassador to Chile, George Landau, sent a cable to the State Department asking that two DINA agents - one likely Townley - be allowed to enter the U.S. with Paraguayan passports. The cable specifically requested a meeting with Gen. Vernon Walters, DCIA Bush’s outgoing Deputy CIA Director. The July-August cable traffic with Walters and Bush was revealed in Townley’s trial, but was then immediately expunged from the record. When CORU operatives, and fall guys, Ross and Novo were arrested, along with Townley, for the murder of Letelier, they were in possession of more than a pound of uncut cocaine - probably just a wholesale sample.
In 1976 CORU’s Bosch arranged the assassination of Miami Cuban liberal Luciano Nieves. Nieves had the effrontery to challenge Castro to an open election, something Castro was apparently willing to consider. Treating Castro as if he too were a Cuban was not tolerated in Little Havana, which saw more than a hundred of these political murders in thee 1970s. CORU also took credit for the 10/6/1976 midair destruction of a Cubana passenger jet which snuffed 73 lives. 22
Responding to Castro’s specific charges, Venezuelan police raided the offices of Luis Posada’s detective agency. They found evidence of connections to Orlando Bosch, the Letelier assassination and the Cubana bombing. Posada, a close associate of Bush operative Felix Rodriguez, was formally charged with planting the Cubana bomb, but “security considerations” forced dismissal of the case. In 1977 Orlando Bosch’s daughter and son in law were arrested on cocaine smuggling charges. 23
Bolivian President Lidia Gueiler; General García Meza Celebrting the Cocaine Coup, July 17, 1980 (Bolivian National Archives)
Posada, of course, was then hired by the CIA to run Hangar 5 at Ilopango Airbase in El Salvador with Rodriguez, financing the illegal Contra war with tons of Bolivian cocaine, shipped into the U.S. by CIA pilot Barry Seal on huge CIA C-130 cargo aircraft, under direct orders from Vice President Bush (see the ‘Contra Cocaine’ chapter below, co-written with me by Cele Castillo, the senior DEA agent in El Salvador at the time, using the formal evidence Castillo reported to the DEA). 24
Much of the Contra cocaine originated in Bolivia, according to another frontline DEA agent, Michael Levine. “It seemed that whenever the CIA had an ‘interest’ in a doper, the doper never appeared in the DEA computer.” Levine, a 25-year veteran of the force, knew what he was talking about. In 1980, as the DEA’s Country Attaché to Argentina and Uruguay, he was working dangerous undercover operations to set up the biggest coke dealers in neighboring Bolivia. The famous dealers he was hunting not only failed to appear in the DEA computer, but, with CIA and Argentine help, overthrew the centrist, anti-dealing Bolivian government of President Lidia Gueiler that Levine had been cooperating with: “The only ruling government of Bolivia - a nation that produces the raw material for as much as 90 percent of the cocaine entering the United States - that ever wanted to help DEA defeat their drug barons was paid for its faith in our sincerity with torture and death at the hands of CIA-sponsored paramilitary terrorists under the command of fugitive Nazi war criminal (also protected by the CIA) Klaus Barbie.” (Levine’s parenthesis) 25 26
Roberto Suárez Goméz, ‘the King of Cocaine (Wikimedia Commons
Levine had just arrested two top leaders of cocaine baron Roberto Suarez’ operation after delivery of their product. Levine had made the deal for 500 kilos of cocaine in the Bolvian jungle with Suárez himself. “On May 24, 1980, the sting ended with our UC plane making a miraculous takeoff from a ranch (Sonia Atala’s) in the middle of the Bolivian jungle. Within hours [of arriving in Miami from Bolivia] I arranged for the payment of $9 million to Suarez’s U.S. representatives, Alfredo ‘Cutuchi’ Gutierrez and Jose Roberto Gasser, two major drug traffickers…. The world was rocked by the news. It was the biggest drug case in history….Mike Wallace reported on 60 Minutes that the DEA told him that Suarez had been arrested in Bolivia in 1976 for drugs, and that in 1979 Brazil had named him that country’s ‘chief source of [cocaine].’ Yet three months earlier they were telling me, their top enforcement officer in Argentina and Uruguay, that Suarez wasn’t in the DEA computer.”
Levine was doing something politically insubordinate by going after the CIA’s cash cow Suarez, and the CIA-DEA intentionally gave him very little, and very amateurish, support. The DEA had been trying to sabotage Levine’s gutsy high-profile operation from the start, making a point of giving him faulty equipment and inadequate support. His DEA suppliers actually refused to change the serial numbers on the small, poorly maintained pickup plane he was using in Bolivia, leaving the plane traceable to another operation. That discovery would have led to Levine’s death.
Roberto Suarez, with active CIA cooperation, gave Levine a definitive answer by overthrowing Bolivian President Lidia Gueiler on July 17, 1980, and installing his own drug gang, led by General García Meza. After a couple of days of both indiscriminate and political murder, General Luis García Meza was in unchallenged control of Bolivia. His Novios de la Muerte, commanded by cocaine baron Roberto Suárez’ cousin, Col. Luis Arce Gómez, Klaus Barbie’s boss, herded thousands of populist leaders into the La Paz soccer stadium and machine-gunned most to death. The CIA fixed the release of Suarez’ top lieutenants arrested by Levine, who joined the new cocaine dealing Bolivian government, armed and financed by the CIA, using the excuse of anticommunism. Gueiler escaped to France, returning to Bolvia when the dictatorship fell in 1982. She went on to a long career in Bolivia’s diplomatic corps.
The 65th President of Bolivia, from 2006 to 2019, Native American Evo Morales, citing this CIA-engineered Cocaine Coup, kicked the DEA out of Bolivia in 2007, specifically agreeing with Agent Levine that it was a tool of the CIA. President Morales, born to an Aymara family of subsistence farmers in the Altiplano, has significantly reduced poverty and illiteracy in Bolivia, profoundly improving medical care, environmental stewardship and the country’s economic trajectory. Morales is a trusted ally of the current Bolivian president, former Minister of Finance Luis Arce. Morales still leads Bolivia’s ruling party, the Movement for Socialism (MAS).
President Morales’ view of coca leaf as a traditional medicine and religious sacrament is not shared by prohibitionist Levine, who, operationally, does not distinguish coca leaf from cocaine, even though they are as different as kitchen matches are from grenades. It takes 2000 pounds of coca leaf to make 20 pounds of cocaine. It is certainly true that cocaine should not be available over the counter. Levine is sensitive enough to understand the campesino economics of coca leaf, but supported the fascist goal of wiping out coca cultivation in Bolivia, because cocaine comes from coca leaf. That is, in Levine’s book, there is no consideration of the profound importance of this sacred food in Bolivian culture. For Levine, coca leaf is always just cocaine, therefore wiping out coca leaf cultivation in the countryside is a worthy goal. That DEA goal never was anything but evil and ridiculous, an excuse to disenfranchise Native Bolivia by criminalizing their culture - and having the effect of popularizing cocaine.
Confusing whole herbs with their refined concentrates was a monopolistic commercial trick invented by nascent organized medicine to achieve a commercial monopoly not only on the newly-invented refined concentrates, like cocaine, but on the traditional whole herbs as well, like coca leaf, which were over-the-counter bestsellers. “Coca leaves and any salt, compound, derivative or preparation thereof” as the Chief Chemist of the USFDA, Harvey Wiley, first put it in the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, legally equating coca leaf with cocaine. The current USFDA Code of Federal Regulations puts it exactly the same way. This commercial trick was profoundly useful not only to nascent organized medicine, but to the colonialist slavers, intent on criminalizing the Incas en masse so as to institute land theft and sharecropping.
Wiley was a commercial operative who sat on the board of the AMA and the APA. He succeeded in restricting most of the traditional medicinal herbs, available over the counter, to prescription-only, vastly enriching his beloved licentiates with a legal monopoly on the bestselling whole herbs. America’s bestselling tonic wine in 1900 was Vin Mariani, an alcoholic tincture of whole coca leaves in good French wine, sweetened with sugar. True, you could buy cocaine over the counter in 1900, and that did indeed need restriction to physician’s prescription, but Vin Mariani wasn’t cocaine, it was coca leaf in wine, and was safe, healthful and delicious. Wiley’s 1906 Pure Food law, and the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, effectively criminalized Vin Mariani with the old ‘no-license’ trick. Licenses were mandatory, and no licenses were issued. Cocaine is popular today only because coca leaf products are illegal.
Bolivia’s President Evo Morales in 2011 using the Spanish translation of The Big White Lie to insist that the CIA is behind the dopers; DEA agent Michael Levine, right, with DEA agent John Coleman, left, and Ricord capo Claude Andre Pastou, center in cuffs, during the 1971-72 takedown of Ricord’s organization; Levine’s essential book
Levine, certainly no racist, and most definitely a serious antifascist, should look more deeply into the racist, anti-tribal origins of our own drug laws. He could start with Volume I of this three-volume set, which discusses Wiley’s seminal trickery in detail. Nonetheless, Levine displayed truly uncanny political and military courage, by angrily pointing to the perpetrators of the coup, including his own CIA, making himself, as President Morales affirms, profoundly useful to Native America. But there is no bucking the pure physics of supply and demand. Intercepting a load of cocaine, even a very large load, is nothing but a cocaine price support. The only way to destroy the street trade in cocaine is to legalize the leaf and medicalize the artificial concentrate. When coca leaf products were legal, the street trade in cocaine was virtually nonexistent. By the way, surgically effective local anesthesia was invented with cocaine, so it’s not as if cocaine is without medical utility.
A major planner of the Bolivian Cocaine Coup was General Carlos Guillermo Suárez Mason of Argentina’s First Army Corps. He was inducted into Italy’s international terrorist clearing house, the fascist masonic lodge P-2, through José Lopez Rega, Juan Peron’s Minister of Social Welfare, the country’s top police officer. Lopez Rega, known as El Brujo, the Warlock, was an ally of the fascist Paladin terrorist group in Spain, founded by Gehlen operative Otto Skorzeny, attached to Franco’s Direcion General de Seguridad (DGS).
The Paladin COO was Dr. Gerhard Hartmut von Schubert, one of Joseph Goebbels’ chief aids. Paladin financing came from the drug trade, as well as from Skorzeny’s massive weapons trading through his company, World Armco. Lopez Rega used the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (AAA) that he founded with the CIA, based on Skorzeny’s Paladin death-squad model, to take over Argentina’s massive global cocaine business.
Just west of the Golden Crescent of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran is the enormous U.S. military strength in Turkey. On January 21, 1997, a judge in Frankfurt, presiding over the sentencing of three convicted heroin smugglers, concluded that, on the basis of the evidence before him, there were close ties between the Turkish government and Europe’s major organized heroin traffickers. Judge Rolf Schwalbe concluded that two Kurdish clans known to be heavily involved in heroin trafficking had “excellent relations with the Turkish government” and “personal contacts with a woman minister in the government.” 1
The Turkish publicity hit the fan on November 3, 1996, when a black Mercedes Benz 600 crashed in the Susurluk neighborhood of Ankara. It is open to question whether the crash was accidental, or an attempted coup-related assassination, since the brakes had been tampered with. The driver was Huseyin Kocadag, former Istanbul deputy police chief and CIA organizer of military special counterinsurgency teams aimed at the PKK. The popular rebellion of Turkey’s 15 million Kurds, led by the Partiya Karkeran Kurdistan (PKK), the Kurdish Workers Party, had drawn the CIA into yet another dirty war. The car was filled with silencer-equipped pistols and numerous machine guns.
The death of the glamorous young Gonca Us, Abdullah Çatlı’s beauty queen girlfriend, in the Susurluk crash only served to advertise it further. Abdullah Çatlı was the leader of the Grey Wolves, the death squad of the Turkish secret service. Seriously injured was the Kurdish turncoat Sedat Bucak, Village Guard chieftain and True Path Party (DYP) parliamentarian who made his living killing Kurds in southeastern Turkey for the Turkish government.
But it was the presence of Abdullah Çatlı in the Mercedes that made the heroin connection. Çatlı, who died in the crash, was a founder of the Grey Wolves, the street fighting arm of the fascist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Çatlı was responsible, along with Haluk Kırcı and several other MHP members, for the 10/9/1978 Bahçelievler Massacre in which seven left-wing university students, members of the Workers Party of Turkey, were murdered. Since 1978 Çatlı had been wanted for mass murder and international drug smuggling. Çatlı was arrested in Paris on 10/24/1984 for drug trafficking, sentenced to 7 years, and then, in 1988, extradicted to Switzerland, where he was also wanted for drug dealing. What was this famous international terrorist and drug wholesaler doing riding, a free man, in a car with Huseyin Kocadag, one of the most powerful police officials in Turkey?
And why was Çatlı holding a license to carry arms, eight differently-named national identity cards, and two diplomatic ‘Green’ passports reserved for senior Ministry officials, both signed by Interior Minister Mehmet Agar? Agar was the most powerful security official in Turkey, head of the 120,000-strong police and counterinsurgency force financed and trained by the CIA. Çatlı was actually part of a highly secret CIA-trained death squad recruited from Turkey’s OHD (Ozel Harp Dairesi - Special Warfare Department). That meant that Çatlı’s heroin business was protected and financed not only by Turkish secret police, but by the CIA as well. The CIA-trained Çatlı had the status of an ‘asset.’
The Washngton Post, ‘Heroin Source Alleged,’ By Rick Atkinson, 7/25/1984:
“U.S. officials charged yesterday that, for at least 14 years, the official Bulgarian trading agency KINTEX has been a front for narcotics traffic and that 10 percent of heroin entering the United States comes from Bulgaria.”
“KINTEX, formed in 1968 and headed by top Bulgarian intelligence officials, typically sells weapons ‘to a Middle Eastern trafficking group’ in exchange for heroin, according to a Drug Enforcement Administration report to the House Foreign Affairs Committee's task force on international narcotics control.
The drugs frequently are trucked by distributors to western Europe, the report said.”
“The heroin trafficking is intended ‘as a political weapon to destabilize western societies’ and as a way for Bulgaria to earn hard currency and ‘supply and support several dissident groups in the Middle East with western arms and ammunition,’ the report said.”
“The DEA report alleged that, ‘among the more notable traffickers linked to KINTEX are Turkish nationals [Grey Wolves] Abuzer Ugurlu, Bekir Çelenk and Mustafa Kisacik, members of the ‘Turkish Mafia.’"
The Washington Post, “Child of Turkish Slum Finds Way in Crime,” By Michael Dobbs, 10/14/1984:
“There is convincing evidence that the Malatya subgroup of the Gray Wolves killed the prominent Turkish newspaper editor, Abdi Ipekci, in Istanbul in February 1979. Agca [who shot Pope John Paul II on 5/13/1981] first confessed to this murder, but he now has retracted this confession. Who actually killed Ipekci is still unknown.”
“In a country renowned for its smugglers, Abuzer Ugurlu was known as ‘the godfather.’ Like many of the people in this story, he too was born in Malatya Province, the scion of a family of smugglers. By the time he had reached his late thirties, he was wanted in half a dozen European countries on suspicion of being the linchpin in a huge illicit trade of arms, cigarettes and narcotics to and from Turkey.”
“Much of Ugurlu's business seems to have been conducted through Bulgaria, a country that straddles Turkey's transportation lines with Western Europe. According to testimony provided by fellow smugglers, he illegally imported tens of thousands of weapons into Turkey with the active connivance of the Bulgarian authorities - a crime for which he was convicted in 1974 and later released under a Turkish government amnesty.”
“To carry out this large-scale smuggling operation, Ugurlu also needed agents in the Turkish customs ministry. It is now known that key customs posts were infiltrated by supporters of the extreme right-wing National Action Party, the political wing of the Gray Wolves, during the late ‘70s.”
“It was a self-serving kind of relationship. Ugurlu's interest was making money -- but he needed political protection to cover his smuggling activities. The National Action Party, whose leader, Col. Alparslan Turkes, served as deputy prime minister in successive conservative-led coalition governments between 1975 and 1978, needed funds to pursue political aims.”
The New York Times, ‘Turk In Rome Case Details Smuggling,’ By John Tagliabue,7/13/1985
“Mr. [Bekir] Çelenk, 50 years old, had been under house arrest in Bulgaria until Sunday, when he was sent home to Turkey. He was formally arrested by the Turkish authorities today, apparently on smuggling charges, and transferred from police headquarters in Istanbul to a military prison in Ankara.”
“Seven single-spaced typewritten pages summarizing the results of the interrogations, which were made available for examination today, contained extensive descriptions by Mr. Çelenk of shipments of weapons from such countries as West Germany and Czechoslovakia through Bulgaria to Turkey and Lebanon. The smuggled weapons, he said, were exchanged for heroin from the Middle East.”
“At least two of the people are known to European drug enforcement officials. Sabri Ugurlu, one of five brothers charged by Turkish investigators with being members of a Turkish group deeply involved in international arms and drug smuggling, was one of them. Mehmet Cakir, also named by Mr. Çelenk, was arrested in Switzerland in 1983 in a major drug sweep that seized eight Turks, four Italians and an Armenian from Beirut.”
“Heroin Shipments Called Large
Jorg Schild, a drug prosecutor in Basel, Switzerland, has said the case involved large shipments of heroin from the Middle East via Bulgaria to Switzerland and northern Italy.”
“The Swiss police have traced more than 1 million Swiss francs - about $410,000 - through a complex money-laundering process involving several Swiss banks and watch-trading companies. They say the amounts traced are probably only the tip of the iceberg.”
When Grey Wolf chief Abdullah Çatlı entered Miami in 1982 under a Green Passport, he was accompanied by none other than Stefano Delle Chiaie, one of Klaus Barbie’s key CIA Cocaine Coup engineers, a Gehlen P-2 operative. The CIA-organized NATO secret services called their international death squad cooperation Operation Gladio. That’s what DEA Agent Levine went up against, the protected drug trade of the world’s cooperating secret services. The great heroin and cocaine smuggler Abdullah Çatlı had been taking orders from the most powerful security official in Turkey, as had Çatlı’s senior Grey Wolf henchmen, also issued documents signed by Interior Minister Mehmet Agar, the CIA’s main security contact in Turkey.
Minister Mehmet Agar took orders from the CIA because it was his major arms supplier, military trainer and financier. Deputy Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, the DYP “woman minister” Judge Schwalbe referred to, was forced to accept Agar’s resignation. But she insisted that “those who have fired bullets as well as those who have been shot in the name of the state are honest.” Judge Schwalbe’s investigation confirmed the opposite. The CIA-founded and financed Turkish security apparatus had used Turkey’s fascist hoods in a no-holds-barred street fight for control of the vast Golden Crescent heroin trade, a financial key, as Richard Helms and his experienced dope-dealing team well understood, to military power in Turkey.
The racist Grey Wolves were established by Colonel Alparslan Türkeş in 1965. Türkeş was court-martialed on charges of ‘fascist and racist activities’ in 1945, but went on to be the spokesman for the right-wing 1960 coup and the leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). “What is our ideology? The Turkism of the Grey Wolf (Bozkurt)… We believe that the Turkish race and the Turkish nation are superior. What is the source of this superiority? The Turkish blood… War is a great holy principle of nature. We are the sons of warriors. The Bozkurtcu believe that war, militarism, and heroism should receive the highest esteem and praise.” Immediately on their founding the Grey Wolves joined the CIA’s Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations and World Anti-Communist League, targeting not only the nascent PKK, but liberal journalists, politicians and activists throughout Turkey, hence the Bahçelievler Massacre of seven left-wing university students.
Mehmet Ali Ağca, the idiot who, along with two accomplices, shot Pope John Paul II on 5/13/1981, was a Grey Wolf acting under orders. The Pope was very badly wounded and barely survived. The Vatican Bank was controlled by the Pope, and Banco Ambrosiano, of which Calvi was chairman, was an arm of the Vatican Bank. The Pope had apparently aroused the Turkish Mafia’s ire by not acquiescing to Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, who ran the Vatican Bank, and Italian military intelligence, SISMI’s, second-in-command Francesco Pazienza’s plan to rescue Roberto Calvi and Banco Ambrosiano, where the Grey Wolves kept much of their heroin money. That rescue refusal initiated the Bank of Italy investigation into Banco Ambrosiano and the Vatican Bank’s drug money washing shell companies. Calvi had built Banco Ambrosiano on “Letters of Patronage” from the Vatican Bank, provided to Calvi by his partner, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, President of the Vatican Bank from 1971 to 1989. That meant that the Vatican Bank, under the Pope’s direct command, through Marcinkus, was on the hook for Banco Ambrosiano’s entire debt, billions. Stealing the Mafia’s money is not safe. The Pope then proceeded to completely infuriate the Mafia’s ally P-2, also heavily invested in Banco Ambrosiano, and the P-2 financed Reagan administration, by seeking rapprochement with the Soviets over liberation theology, nuclear disarmament and recognition of the PLO.
CIA operative Michael Ledeen, Kissinger and Casey’s man at Italian military intelligence, SISMI, spent a lot of time after the Pope’s shooting giving interviews on NBC TV and publishing articles in The New York Times, insisting that the CIA had evidence that this was the work of the communist Bulgarians. Ledeen coordinated with Ankara Station Chief Paul Henze and ‘journalist’ Claire Sterling in selling this BS – Sterling with her book The Time of the Assassins and Henze with The Plot to Kill the Pope.
Kissinger and Chile’s Pinochet,1976; Argentina’s Videla in the White House with Carter, 9/9/1977 (Wikimedia Commons)
Grey Wolves
This is a repeat of what Ledeen did after the Bologna railway bombing, laying down a ‘CIA-verified’ false trail to the PLO. The patsy, a supposed agent of the Bulgarian secret service name Sergei Antonov, just happened to live directly above Fr. Felix Morlion, the Vatican-connected CIA agent who developed the plot. When Ağca, under oath, was asked to describe Antonov’s apartment where the two supposedly planned the Pope’s assassination, he described, in accurate detail, Fr. Morlion’s unique apartment, including an ornate room divider and other features not found in Antonov’s apartment, directly above. Antonov was actually a completely innocent representative of Balkan Airlines, fingered by Morlion because he could be fit into the frame, with his Russian name and frequent trips to visit family in Bulgaria. Ağca described meeting Antonov’s family, but the wife and children were in Bulgaria the whole time and never met Ağca, who was just reciting his script. Antonov was brutalized with solitary confinement and mind-altering drugs to get him to confess, but he never did, and was acquitted by the Italian court. Ledeen and the CIA pros used every media outlet available to sell the ‘Commie Bulgarian’ BS.
This false-flag operation was, of course, a group effort involving, among others, Ted Shackley, who made a February 1981 trip to Rome to visit Giuseppe Santovito, head of SISMI (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare). Santovito was a P-2 leader, and customer, like Shackley, of Milan-based drug and arms exporter Stibam International. Both men were coordinating arms shipments and Gladio attacks with P-2 and Mafia chief Licio Gelli. Santovito’s second in command, Francesco Pazienza was also involved, as was Dominican friar and lifelong CIA operative Felix Morlion, Frank Terpil, special CIA liaison to the Grey Wolves and many others.
In fact the talkative shooter Ağca never mentioned the Bulgarians until he was visited in solitary confinement by SISMI agents, who were in a position to give him orders. Ağca’s prison visitors included Francesco Pazienza, named as a co-conspirator, along with P-2 chief Licio Gelli, in the Bologna bombing, Pazienza’s boss at SISMI General Santovito, Fr. Morlion, prominent members of the Camorra, CIA agents, and Archbishop Marcinkus’ Vatican Bank representative Monsignor Marcello. They were rehearsing the ‘Commie Bulgarian’ thesis. That this was a Safari Club operation from the get-go is supported by the fact that Safari Club founder, Count Alexandre de Marenches, French SDECE chief, in March, 1981, warned Vatican security services to expect an attack “from an unspecified foreign power.” The attack was the 5/13/1981 shooting of the Pope John Paul II.
On 9/25/1991, former senior CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman (now Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy, author of Whistleblower at the CIA) revealed that DCIA Casey had falsified their analysis to support the false-flag Bulgarian thesis. Goodman told the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, under oath, that “the CIA hadn't any proof” of the alleged “Bulgarian connection,” and that “the analysts were manipulated by [Casey’s Deputy] Bob Gates.”
Licio Gelli; Giuseppe Santovito; Francesco Pazienza (Wikimedia Commons)
Referring to Ronald J. Spiers, the director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Goodman wrote of Bill Casey’s first year as CIA Director, 1981, “Spiers’s well-intentioned efforts to produce a National Intelligence Estimate on international terrorism to disabuse [Secretary of State] Haig of his ideological and paranoid views on Moscow played into Casey’s hands. For the new director, a National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism would offer him an excellent opportunity to demonstrate that a new era had begun at the agency…. the exercise convinced the analysts that Casey was an ideologue, a polemicist, and a bully….As the deputy division chief for Soviet relations in the Third World, I was tasked with directing the first draft of the estimate on the Soviet Union and international terrorism….The draft was coordinated at a working-level meeting of analysts from the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and various military agencies, but it ran into a blistering attack from Casey - another proponent, along with Haig, of the ‘giant Wurlitzer in the Kremlin’ theory…..”
“One of the truly interesting aspects of the exercise on international terrorism was the unanimity between members of the CIA’s Directorates of Operations and Intelligence in working to counter the misuse of intelligence. In my 24 years at the CIA, I cannot recall another time (with the exception of the Papal plot assessment…) when there was such collegiality between the hard-nosed collectors of intelligence and the less flamboyant analysts of intelligence….In denouncing our draft as an ‘exculpatory brief,’ Casey ridiculed everyone who had anything to do with it. He cited the writings of Claire Sterling and noted that he had stopped at a bookstore to pick up her latest work, The Terror Network…. All of us knew that Sterling was a polemicist and that her writings were replete with disinformation and misinformation that CIA agents had planted in European newspapers and magazines. Sterling was a very willing user of CIA propaganda on virtually any subject….Haig had brought Sterling’s collaborator, Michael Ledeen, into the Department of State as a special assistant. Ledeen, who played a major role in bolstering Haig’s view that the Soviets were behind international terrorism, had close ties to the chief of the Italian Military Intelligence and Security Service [SISMI], General Giuseppe Santovito, and SISMI operative Francesco Pazienza, who were convinced that the Soviets were behind the plot to kill the Pope….Italian intelligence officers were also behind the fraudulent view two decades later that Iraq was purchasing uranium from Africa.”
“There was no credible empirical evidence of Soviet support for international terrorism in Western Europe and the Middle East. To the contrary, there was excellent evidence of Soviet efforts to persuade insurgent and radical groups, particularly the Palestine Liberation Organization, to forswear terrorism…. The next campaign was initiated by Casey, who remained dissatisfied with the inability of the CIA to link the Soviet Union with the 1981 shooting of the Pope. The intelligence record clearly exonerated both the Soviet Union and Bulgaria, and, as late as the winter of 1983–1983, even Gates’s briefings to Congress emphasized the non-involvement of Moscow and Sofia…. In other words, about the same time that Mikhail Gorbachev was taking the reins of the Soviet Union and pointing toward improved relations with the United States and an invigoration of the disarmament dialogue, the CIA was predicting a new round of Kremlin adventurism, a fixed notion with Casey and Gates. Fortunately, Casey’s efforts to worsen Soviet-American relations failed, because Secretary of State Shultz was one of many important policymakers who ignored the [falsified] estimate…. Secretary Shultz’s memoir documented the CIA’s failure to track changes in Soviet policy…. He [Casey] wanted the assessments to derail the momentum for improving US-Soviet relations that Secretary of State Shultz had created inside the Reagan administration. Casey and Gates wanted to end any interest in disarmament talks with the Soviets, just as Cheney and Rumsfeld had wanted to block Secretary of State Kissinger in the Ford administration in 1975.” 2
It was Shultz who, with a bankrupt Gorbachev, engineered the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987, and established the foundation for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), concluded in 1991. Shultz also helped to engineer the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). As Goodman details, Casey and Gates were intent on stopping these accords, in favor of more unnecessary weapons spending, making a point of promoting analysts who were willing to doctor intelligence to their specifications. In other words, they were running black ops, as the Contra Cocaine operation they engineered revealed. The Soviets had always calculated that terrorism did them no political good and would blow back on them, as it has on us.
The actual Pope assassination orders came from Turkish military intelligence as vengeance related to the enormous losses suffered by the Turkish dopers from the Banco Ambrosiano debacle, which they blamed on the Pope, who controlled Banco Ambrosiano as an arm of the Vatican Bank. This was a Safari Club false-flag P-2 Gladio operation designed to smear the left. Grey Wolf chief Çatlı told a Roman court under oath that the payment to the Grey Wolves for the operation was $1.7 million (3 million marks), paid by Bekir Çelenk, a Turkish heroin and arms dealer connected to Reinhard Gehlen’s BND, the German secret service that used the Grey Wolves as a drug transport service and death squad.
In the months before the hit on the Pope, Ağca, Çatlı and Oral Çelik, a fellow Grey Wolf assassin, were together in Munich. On 4/18/1981, Ağca, Çatlı, and Çelik traveled to Milan to meet paymaster Bekir Çelenk at Stibam International, the drug and arms transshipper they shared with the Safari Club secret services. They left a record of their stay in Milan, signing in at the Hotel Agosta, where Ağca registered as Faruk Ozgun. From Milan, they went to Rome to meet Fr. Morlion. That’s when Ağca learned the layout of the CIA priest's apartment, assuming that the patsy Antonov’s apartment directly above had the same layout. Grey Wolf founder Colonel Alparslan Türkes admitted that “[Grey Wolf chief Abdullah] Çatlı [Ağca’s commanding officer] has cooperated in the frame of a secret service working for the good of the state.” One of Abdullah Çatlı’s fake passports found in the wrecked Mercedes was in the name ‘Mehmet Özbay,’ an alias used by Ağca.
It was Uğur Mumcu, an investigative reporter for the daily Cumhuriyet (Republic), who revealed drug and arms dealer Bekir Çelenk as the paymaster behind the plot, and Çelenk’s connection to the Grey Wolves, the CIA, the BND and their international drug and weapons smuggling operations. It was Uğur Mumcu who dug up the specifics of the group’s meetings at Sophia’s luxurious Hotel Vitosha, including Ağca’s fake ‘Faruk Ozgun’ passport and the source of the guns used. The Bulgarian connection wasn’t to communists, but to the organized drug and arms dealing run by the Turkish and Bulgarian mafia with the Wolves’ anticommunist secret service allies. Journalist Uğur Mumcu was mortally threatened by CIA Ankara Station Chief Paul Henze for publishing the provable specific details of this plot. A few days later, on the morning of 1/24/1993, Uğur Mumcu was blown to pieces by military-grade C-4 plastic explosive as he started his car. Mumcu’s work, accessible online (West Europe Report, No. 2131), is referenced in note 3, as is many of my sources for this section.
Cover of Cumhuriyet (Republic) on the tenth anniversary of Mumcu's assassination; Carlo Palermo in 2015 (Wikimedia Commons)
Alerted by Uğur Mumcu’s pioneering journalism, Italian judge Carlo Palermo raided the offices of Stibam International and its director, Henri Arsan, on 11/23/1982. Magistrate Palermo arrested Arsan and about two hundred mafiosi - and SISMI chief General Giuseppe Santovito. Stibam Director Arsan and General Santovito were charged with using Stibam International, in concert with the unindicted Ted Shackley, Ed Wilson, Ray Cline and their CIA privateer team, to provide Exocet missiles to Argentina during the Falklands War, to deliver aircraft, Leopard tanks, freighters, missiles and flight simulators to Libya, on CIA cargo planes. They also shipped hundreds of kilos of morphine base to Gambino heroin labs in Sicily for U.S. distribution. SISMI General Santovito died in his holding cell a day before his scheduled 2/7/1984 interrogation by Italian detectives. No autopsy was performed, ‘heart attack.’ Stibam Director Henri Arsan met the same fate in his San Vittore prison cell in 1983 - no autopsy was performed, ‘heart attack.’ Until the 1982 bust of Stibam International in Milan, it had been a key meeting and planning venue for the Grey Wolves.
Abdi İpekçi was editor-in-chief of one of Turkey’s leading daily newspapers, the center-left Milliyet (Nationality). On 2/1/1979, Grey Wolves Oral Çelik and the Pope’s shooter Mehmet Ali Ağca, shot the liberal editor to death in his car in front of his home. Ağca, who proudly confessed to the crime on the stand, was sentenced to life. Just six months later, Abdullah Çatlı peacefully walked Mehmet Ali Ağca, dressed in a military uniform, out of a military prison in Istanbul. Sezai Orkunt, a former high ranking intelligence officer in the Turkish Armed Forces' Special Warfare Department, the Army’s Gladio unit, also called Counter-Guerrilla, told reporters that his unit had used the Grey Wolves to assassinate the inconvenient editor on the orders of the CIA’s Ankara Station Chief Paul Henze.
Eight months before the Pope was shot, on 9/12/1980, the Turkish military, led by Chief of Staff General Kenan Evren, overthrew the center-left Turkish government of Bülent Ecevit by coup d'état, establishing a military police state. This CIA-organized coup settled the see-saw parliamentary battle in Turkey between the center-right, led by Suleyman Demirel, and the center-left, led by Bülent Ecevit. The Grey Wolves, rioting on the streets in their tens of thousands, provided the rationale for the new security state. On the collapse of the Turkish parliamentary government, the CIA’s Ankara Station Chief Paul Henze, the coup engineer, answered President Carter’s telephoned query, “Yes, our boys have done it!” Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniev Brzezinski, who shared Casey’s fixation on the Soviet Union, explained that “For Turkey a military government would be the best solution.” This was as nearsightedly stupid as helping to engineer Pakistan’s “Muslim A-Bomb,” another anti-Sovet Brzezinski project which saw us organize and finance Afghanistan’s jihadi heroin gangs, including bin Laden, through Pakistan’s ISI.
Two years before the coup, in 1978, Doğan Öz, a public prosecutor in Ankara, warned, in a widely publicized report to President Ecevit, that the Grey Wolves’ ultimate aim was to turn Turkey into a fascist police state. Within days of issuing this warning, Öz was gunned down in front of his house. Several witnesses identified Ibrahim Çiftçi, a leader of the Wolves, who was arrested and sentenced to death. After the coup, the Military Supreme Court overturned the verdict. The consequences of the coup were catastrophic for Turkish democracy: 650,000 people were arrested, 1.6 million were blacklisted and lost their jobs, 50 people were executed, 400 journalists were imprisoned, 98,000 people were tried on political grounds, 388,000 people were denied a passport, 937 films were banned, and 171 people died by police torture. 3
Reagan’s Hoods
Reagan was as tied to the Syndicate as Nixon. During his Hollywood years as head of the Screen Actors Guild, he enthusiastically worked with Johnny Roselli, who started his career as a Capone hit man. Ronald Reagan’s longtime producer, Bryan Foy, who began his career as a pioneer of sound technology at Warner Brothers, was Johnny Roselli’s partner in Eagle Lion Productions, his lifelong best friend. 1
In 1927, because he couldn’t take the Chicago winters, Roselli, at the age of 23, moved to LA, there to captain a street war, as Jack Dragna’s right-hand man, for control of LA’s booming rackets. The mafiosi pushed out the old crowd, which had been headed by Guy McAfee, former chief of the LAPD vice squad. McAfee had used that position, as so many before and since, to take control of the city’s rackets.
Roselli was Dragna’s key contact with the enormously powerful Capone organization, which didn’t even flinch at the loss of Capone himself. Roselli had been one of Capone’s favorite button-men, sworn into the Mafia by Capone himself, and he knew all the top lieutenants. With California’s rackets as their economic foundation, the Syndicate set its sights on the film industry, which had combined assets throughout the country, including theatres and production facilities, that made it the fourth largest industry in the U.S. 2 3
Old New York street fighter Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Studios, became fast friends throughout the 30s and 40s with Roselli. Their friendship was based not only on their mutual love of horse racing and gambling, but on Roselli’s access to huge amounts of mob cash and his clout with the unions that Cohn had to contend with. Another Roselli friend, Joe Schenck, was head of United Artists. Schenk was originally bankrolled by Arnold Rothstein. Like MGM’s Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner, Schenck was a lover of high-stakes gambling and even higher stakes union-busting.
In 1933 the studios used Roselli’s goons to break a production strike by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, IATSE, which represented Hollywood production technicians and projectionists nationwide. In 1934 Roselli’s Chicago allies took control of IATSE, using Roselli’s intimate knowledge of the Hollywood profit structure to organize the wholesale extortion of the film industry. A beefy gunsel named Willie Bioff became IATSE’s actual head in Hollywood, literally at the point of a gun, but Bioff took orders from Roselli, and Roselli took them from Frank Rio, Frank Nitti, Nick Circella, Lou Campagna, Rocco Fischetti and Paul Ricca.
Willie Bioff; Frank Nitti; Ray Donovan (Wikimedia Commons)
In 1935, during negotiations with the producers, IATSE demonstrated its power by closing down more than 500 Paramount theatres from Chicago to St. Louis. Those theatres were the only distribution apparatus Paramount had. For years thereafter, Hollywood became a virtual IATSE closed shop, leaving both the moguls and the 12,000 studio technicians paying their regular dues to the Syndicate. 4
From the studios’ perspective, this actually made sense. IATSE had the muscle to enforce its sweetheart contracts with the studios, to the great cost of its members, who had to accept nickel-and-dime pay raises when they could have had dollars. Projectionists actually suffered severe pay cuts: between 1933 and 1938, average weekly wages in Philadelphia dropped from $120 to $68. Rival start-up unions never survived the combination of street-muscle and red-baiting that IATSE and the studios were able to bring to bear. 5
The mob-connected studio power structure, the mob-built-and-run production and distribution giant MCA, and the mob-led unions, IATSE and SAG, actively encouraged the House Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC, to come to town. Ronald Reagan, President of the Screen Actors Guild, was a star “friendly witness” in the late forties and early fifties.
Reagan helped to draw up enormous blacklists, some 2,000 names, who were then prevented from organizing independent unions or infecting the airwaves with their idealism. Historian C. Vann Woodward documented this in a 1987 New York Times piece. Reagan “fed the names of suspect people in his organization to the FBI secretly and regularly enough to be assigned an informer’s code number, T- 10.” 6
As President of the Screen Actors Guild, it had been Reagan’s job to negotiate with MCA, which he did by acceding to its every demand and red-baiting his critics. In return for helping to engineer MCA’s virtual monopoly in early television production, Reagan was made part owner of MCA. When the Kennedys went after MCA as a price-fixing monopoly, Reagan went after the Kennedys, attacking “government bureaucracy.” His reward was the statehouse. With his ‘aw-shucks’ Will Rogers impersonation Ronald Reagan was a great political actor.
On assuming the Presidency, Reagan appointed Walter Annenberg’s wife Leonore as White House chief of protocol. Walter Annenberg, publisher of TV Guide, was the son of racing wire kingpin Moe Annenberg, a very major mob figure. Moe was convicted of tax evasion and racketeering in 1939 and died in the Lewisburg Penn. Leonore was the ex-wife of Lewis Rosenstiel of Schenley Distilleries, the anticommunist ex-bootlegger close to J. Edgar Hoover. Like their friend Edgar, Rosenstiel, Annenberg and Reagan were early-50s operatives of CIA Operation Mockingbird’s ‘Crusade for Freedom,’ which raised money to help East European Nazis relocate in the U.S. The Annenbergs were close lifelong friends of Sidney Korshak, Johnny Roselli’s lawyer. 7
Korshak was “often delegated to represent the Chicago mob, usually in some secret capacity,” as a 1942 IRS report put it. Just as Roselli was the Chicago mob’s most trusted street operator in Los Angeles, so Korshak was its most trusted legal eagle. Korshak, who began his career in Chicago as Big Al’s lawyer, was an early, and major, stockholder in Paul ‘Red’ Dorfman’s Union Casualty Company. This is the Chicago company that became the awesome Teamsters’ Central States, Southeast, and Southwest Areas Pension Fund.
Korshak was pursued by Bobby Kennedy on the McClellan Rackets Committee in 1957. The New Jersey Casino Control Commission called Korshak “a key actor in organized crime’s unholy alliances with corrupt union officials and its pernicious efforts to frustrate the rights of working men and women by infecting legitimate unions, to rob their members’ future by stealing the benefits they have earned in the past from honest labor.” 8 9
The very first official stop in Washington of the Reagan-Bush administration, immediately following their 1980 victory, was the headquarters of the Teamsters Union, where they met with Jackie Presser, Roy Williams, Frank Fitzsimmons and Sidney Korshak’s very own Andy Anderson of Los Angeles Teamster Local 986. Reagan asked the Teamster high command to pick his Secretary of Labor and other top administration officials. 10 11
They picked Ray Donovan of Schiavone Construction Company of Secaucus, NJ, accused at his confirmation hearings of being close to ‘Tony Pro’ Provenzano and ‘Sally Bugs’ Briguglio of the Union City Teamsters, top Genovese operatives. Both were indicted for the 1961 killing of Anthony Castellito, which resulted in the Provenzano reign in Union City.
This is the pair, according to Time, that quickly chipped in $500,000 in cash to cover Nixon’s January 1973 covert Watergate expenses. Allen Dorfman, Red Dorfman’s stepson, on Frank Fitzsimmons’ orders, matched the Union City Teamsters with another half million in cash. Provenzano and Briguglio were also accused, in 1978, by Family member Little Ralph Picardo, of killing Jimmy Hoffa. New Jersey State Police concurred. Sally Bugs did not live out the year. 12 13
Donovan was also accused of being close to New York mafioso William Masselli, then under indictment for manufacturing synthetic cocaine and hijacking trucks. Schiavone Construction was accused of being Masselli’s money laundry. Assistant Director of the FBI Bud Mullen successfully prevented the confirmation committee from finding out what the FBI knew about Donovan, and so Donovan was confirmed as Secretary of Labor. Mullen was then rewarded with the leadership of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Donovan was finally forced out of government, in late 1984, after being indicted, along with 9 top New York mafiosi, for murder, grand larceny, fraud, extortion and labor racketeering. 14
The phrase “labor racketeering” conjures up images of hoods bullying workmen for a piece of their wages, but as with IATSE, the scam is much more monumental than that. If 20% of all the meat sold in the U.S. has to pass through the New York City market, and if you control the powerful New York locals of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America, AFL-CIO, with more than half a million members nationwide, then you also control access to every supermarket chain in New York. Since no packer can live without the New York market, you are in a position to demand that every packer in the country give you a regular piece of its action or face bankruptcy.
Iowa Beef Processors, the largest meat packer in the country, was brought to its knees in the late 60s by Syndicate control of the New York market. By the mid-70s Iowa Beef had Syndicate operatives on its Board of Directors, its employees were represented by the Teamsters, its trucks were Syndicate-run and both the price and quality of its product suffered, though certainly not its distribution. Major commercial shippers throughout the country discovered that a few well-placed millions to key members of the Teamster high command could save their outfit tens of millions with a sweetheart exemption from the National Master Freight Agreement. 15
Bud Mullen; Tony Provenzano; Jackie Presser (Wikimedia Commons)
The Teamsters’ Jackie Presser was the son of convicted labor racketeer William Presser, Cleveland associate of Moe Dalitz, Jimmy Licavoli, Allen Dorfman and Sidney Korshak. The Pressers ran the Ohio Teamsters, as well as numerous other Cleveland-based rackets. Reagan made Jackie Presser “senior economic adviser” to his transition team. Asked Senator Sam Nunn: “Is it a violation of fundamental principles of government ethics for Mr. Presser to help organize the very department that has brought suit against him?” You bet. 1718
In the first Reagan budget, for fiscal 1982, he imposed a 33% cutback of the FBI’s ongoing investigations of organized drug-dealing, contract murder, contract arson, organized prostitution and gambling, and eliminated all new undercover investigations of organized and white collar crime. He stressed instead “violent” crime, that is, crime committed by poor kids. He also unsuccessfully went after the Justice Department’s Strike Force Against Organized Crime and the equally effective ATF effort, and succeeded in cutting the DEA budget by 18%. (Trump’s first budget proposed cutting nearly the entire budget for the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), slashing its funding by about 95 percent – also in favor of going after poor kids by funding the likes of the militarized Ferguson, Missouri police department.) In 1984 Reagan cut the Customs Service funding by 50%, thereby getting the government off the smugglers’ backs. As the mob was taking over toxic-waste dumping, Reagan put Las Vegas mob-lawyer James Watt in charge of environmental policy. 19
As cover for these law enforcement cuts, Vice-President George Bush was put in charge of the noisy South Florida Drug Task Force. Bush’s chief of staff was Admiral Dan Murphy, former Sixth Fleet commander and Deputy Director of the CIA. A Coast Guard lieutenant commander in south Florida called the Bush-Murphy effort “an intellectual fraud,” and Florida’s Claude Pepper said “I can’t see a single thing [Bush] has accomplished. The lack of coordination…is disgraceful.” Bush simply rushed down to Florida every time the Coast Guard made a bust to pose for pictures. And it worked! Bush got the image he wanted - and Florida got the dope it wanted. 20
Immediately on taking office, Reagan began the “deregulation” of the savings and loan industry, allowing S&L’s to offer any interest rate they wanted and do anything with the money. Reagan’s administration regularly approved unqualified hoods for federally-insured bank ownership. 21
Hood banks often looted their entire cash reserves, lending them to their own front companies, washing the money out the front companies through various transfer tactics, and then declaring the front companies bankrupt, which in turn forced the bank’s collapse. The money was gone into hood hands, and the FDIC/FSLIC was liable to reimburse depositors, to the tune of hundreds of billions of taxpayer money - some estimates go as high as one trillion dollars - that’s one-seventh the entire annual GNP. 22
These cooperating hoods and businessmen, Marcello, Beebe, Renda, Mischer, Lyon, Khashoggi, Murchison, Helliwell, Hernandez-Cartaya, Charles, Rebozo, the Bushes, etc. were indistinguishable from the intelligence community and from the Republican establishment, although there are certainly plenty of Democrats on the list as well. 23
President Bush’s Federal Housing Administration Commissioner, Catherine Austin Fitts, Assistant Secretary of Housing under HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, got a close-up look at the modus operandi of this establishment. During the Reagan years, Fitts was a Managing Director and Board member of the prestigious Wall Street investment bank Dillon Read & Co. As manager of their huge municipal and government portfolios, she oversaw the financing of multi-billion dollar urban transportation and renewal projects, including the renovation of the NYC subway system. Nicholas Brady, George H.W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary, was her partner and boss at Dillon Read.
Argentina’s José Lopez Rega, 2/1975 (Wikimedia Commons)
In August 1973 Lopez Rega and the U.S. ambassador Robert Hill signed a much-publicized agreement to fight drug trafficking in Argentina. Here’s where CIA control of the DEA happens. Lopez Rega declared absolutely that “Guerrillas are the main users of drugs in Argentina. Therefore, the antidrug campaign will automatically be an antiguerrilla campaign as well.” Gen. Barry McCaffrey, word for word. The U.S. Southern Command that McCaffrey led in the mid-1990s was involved in supplying Lopez Rega’s troops, and García Meza’s troops, with their military equipment and training, in the name of the antidrug effort of course.
One doesn’t rise to lead the U.S. Southern Command without having previously served in it for years, but McCaffrey’s online biographies, all of them, have been professionally scrubbed of the 1980s. Just google his biography online – whichever one you get, you will see that for the entire 1980s Gen. Barry McCaffrey was on the moon, or on vacation. Not one word of his service to the likes of Lopez Rega, García Meza, Fujimori, Montesinos, Rios Montt, Stroessner, Somoza or the Contras. All the biographies skip from the late 70s to the early 90s. 27
Levine was perfectly well aware that his real job was to keep cocaine artificially valuable so Suarez and García Meza could pay for all that ‘antidrug’ military equipment. Of his late 1980s tour with Colombia’s antinarcotics police, the ‘Leopards,’ Levine notes: “[Colombian President] Barco left other, more businesslike drug dealers, like the nonviolent Cali Cartel, to expand and flourish. After all, as he and the behind-the-scenes U.S. policy makers knew, the Colombian economy was far too dependent on drugs to make real war against coca. Besides, drug money was the only thing repaying the huge debts owed by countries like Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru to already nervous U.S. bankers.”
The next year, 1974, a confidential report from Argentine military intelligence declared that Lopez Rega himself, with his death-squad army of AAA irregulars, was one of the largest cocaine traffickers in the world. Although the report caused the political sacrifice of Lopez Rega, who went back to Spain, it had no effect whatever on American policy, which continued to finance, through the DEA and U.S. Southern Command, Lopez Rega’s massive cocaine business, and his Dirty War on the Argentine left, now led by his protégé, Gen. Carlos Guillermo Suárez Mason. 28
Suárez Mason was made head of army intelligence and eventually rose to command the entire Argentine military. In 1980, under the direction of the CIA, he coordinated the overthrow of the socialist coalition that had taken over in neighboring Bolivia from Gen. Hugo Banzer in 1978/79. This was the interim parliamentary government of President Lidia Gueiler that had worked so well with Agent Levine. Gueiler had the support of the nationalist military, including Air Force Gen. Juan Pereda. Suárez Mason used 200 Argentine agents working with Bolivia’s ‘Fiancés of Death’ to pull off the 1980 cocaine coup. 29
Los Novios de la Muerte were originally the private army of the Bolivian cocaine cartel, which was headed by Roberto Suárez, financier of both Hugo Banzer and Suárez Mason. Roberto Suárez, the King of Cocaine, was the primary supplier of coca paste to Colombia’s Medellín cartel, from his vast coca fields in Bolivia’s Alto Beni. He was the grandnephew of Nicolás Suárez, the late-nineteenth century rubber baron who controlled an incredible 16 million acres of tropical forest, an area the size of Ireland. For Roberto Suárez, then, coca paste was just another traditional agricultural commodity. 30
Los Novios, more than 600 of them, were organized and trained by Nazi war criminal and CIA cutout Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo’s ‘Butcher of Lyon.’ Before Lyon, Barbie headed up one of the SS einsatzgruppen extermination squads on the Eastern Front. The nazi killers DEA Agent Levine was hunting literally tortured to death the Bolivian ministers he was working with, with the help of his own agency, which installed General García Meza on July 17, 1980 in the Cocaine Coup. Roberto Suárez, the King of Cocaine, was literally running the country, armed and financed by the CIA, in the name of anticommunism. Levine survived only because his diplomatic position rendered him untouchable. That’s how the enraged Michael Levine, a fierce agent who believed in his work, fell out of love with the CIA. There was, of course, nothing at all he could do about it except pick up a pen. When Levine sank his teeth too deeply into the real dealing structure, he found himself in trouble with his own command structure. 31
Unlike many of her fellow Reaganauts, Fitts was a religiously-motivated idealist, not a money-motivated hustler. As Bush’s manager of the FHA’s gigantic $300 billion mortgage and properties portfolio, she set out to revamp the system from the botton up, whoever’s ox got gored. Secretary Kemp, fearing for his oxen, fired Commissioner Fitts.
After leaving at loggerheads with the corrupt bureaucracy she found at HUD, Catherine Austin Fitts did something really remarkable. She showed new Democratic HUD Secretary Cisneros, in 1993, how to save taxpayers billions by empowering the very people in danger of defaulting on their HUD mortgages or living in HUD-supported housing.
Using a bottom-up rather than top-down model, Fitts’ new Hamilton Securities Group developed a pilot project at a HUD housing project, Edgewood Terrace. Hamilton taught the local women how to use computers to build data bases that tracked the money flowing through their own neighborhood. Since their neighborhood wasn’t particularly different than the other 63,000 neighborhoods in HUD’s database, what Edgewood Technology Services did was help Hamilton Securities create software and money management tools applicable to the whole country.
The women of Edgewood Terrace proved that they could be as computer literate as anyone else, given the sweat-equity subsidy, and were rewarded with stock in their company and a decent income doing highly productive work. The real value of Edgewood Terrace property, of course, rose as its pain level dropped. Edgewood Terrace could no longer be bought for pennies on the dollar for condo conversion. Fitts’ practical tools for dealing with “How the $ Works and How to Reengineer How the $ Works” can be found at her site, www.solari.com.
One of the obvious things Fitts was able to demonstrate was that HUD was often paying its pet contractors $200,000 per housing unit when perfectly good units were available in the neighborhood for $40,000. But, of course, the cheaper local units weren’t owned by HUD-connected contractors.
The politically insubordinate Fitts was viciously, and falsely, attacked by the politicized HUD legal bureaucracy. Her ally, Clinton HUD Secretary Cisneros, found that his sex life somehow became more important than his ideas about structural poverty. The painfully expensive legal infighting, however, didn’t stifle Fitts’ remarkable creativity.
With her ”geo-coded” database she was able to demonstrate that defaulted HUD mortgages were concentrated in areas of structural poverty, and that those were precisely the “drug areas” the Prohibitionists were most up in arms about. “Freeway” Ricky Ross’ Harbor Freeway, running right through the center of South Central L.A., was a concentrated mass of defaulted HUD/FHA single family loans. Fitts’ map of defaults looks quite like a pollution-induced disease cluster centered around the Harbor Freeway.
'Freeway' Ricky Ross (Wikimedia Commons)
Failure to address neighborhood structural poverty results in a pain-filled neighborhood dependent on the default painkiller economy. The resultant anarchic poverty and violence collapses neighborhood property values. Why pay off an apparently worthless mortgage when it makes more sense to move? Prime urban real estate can then be bought for pennies on the dollar.
And who was buying this prime real estate? The HUD contractors - indistinguishable from the intelligence community and the Republican establishment. The same “liquidators” that had made the neighborhood ripe for a “drug epidemic” in the first place, the same military intelligence operatives dealing the drugs, were using their drug money to buy the now devalued neighborhoods for a pittance - for cheap conversion into condos, malls and industrial parks. These were the very same radical Prohibitionists demonizing those using the pain killers and then vying for the resultant prison contracts.
Overcrowding in California State Prison, 7/19/2006; Orleans Parish Prison, 3/28/2012 (Wikimedia Commons)
Fitts: “Let’s look at how the Section 8 owners, managers and tax partnership beneficiaries worked alongside the drug traffickers. Let’s look for patterns of loan brokering, money laundering, cleansing and other relationships between real estate, land, prison growth and privatization and the kind of investors who control CIA and intelligence networks. Then let’s look how this ties in to campaign fundraising.... Support all this by a national media owned by defense contractors and other corporate interests. That way the nightly news has lots of moneymaking incentives to cover HUD OIG sponsored drug raids in black communities rather than doing a story on CIA drug trafficking.” 24
We have a crack ‘epidemic’ or opioid ‘epidemic,’ requiring yet more police raids and yet more public funding of privatized prisons and mandated treatment centers. This was precisely the point made by Malcolm X and Fred Hampton years ago. ‘Crack’ is a fascist red herring, a way of demonizing the symptom rather than the disease. The problem is structural poverty, not too few incarcerated poor. Crack is nothing but a symptom of massive systemic pain. Given the criminalization of the safe herbal painkillers and euphoriants, and the Prohibition-created default pain-killer economy, in the absence of any other work, crack may have become the hustle and euphoriant of choice, but the problem is the pain, not the painkiller.
The Bloods, the Crips, the Cobra Stones, and especially the Gangster Disciples, repeatedly stress that they have the inalienable right to participate in the only economy open to them, rather than rotting in abject poverty in the vast urban ghettos with a youth unemployment rate exceeding 60%. The Disciples call themselves “Brothers of the Struggle,” but their political message is uniformly ignored, even by those supposedly sympathetic to their plight. They’re just “drug dealers.” These pistoleros are perfectly well aware that “drug dealer” is just an updated word for “nigger,” just as the assassinated Fred Hampton said, and just as it was in the old yellow press. The most important point about the drug war, for me, is the point that never gets mentioned - it is an armed rebellion. Most prisoners of the drug war are political prisoners.
Pointing out that the GAO estimates a total annual cost per prison bed of $154,000, Fitts stressed the insanity of not financing business incubation projects that would leave vulnerable people with an alternative other than the underground economy. But such projects are directly contrary to the interests of the powerful “liquidators” Commissioner Fitts found driving HUD policy.
“But if we assume that taxpayers were paying for 1MM in prison and 4MM in the criminal justice pipeline and then 9MM in public, assisted housing or on welfare, we had a total warehousing population that are ‘managed’ by a professional bureaucracy of public and private organizations of approximately 15 MM people.”
“It would appear that the Crime Bill of 1994 [Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994] and related politics coming into the 1996 election had the potential to replace most of the drop off from welfare reform and assisted and public housing. The switch to prisons would be very attractive for the ‘slug’ portion of the business community. We could keep the same 15MM folks out of the market economy in a way that a portion of the business community makes far more dollars. Here is why:
-prisons would mean big construction....
-prisons may mean short term cash benefits to budgets. To the extent that private prison growth occurs through acquisition of state and federal prisons, budget makers may benefit from up front cash proceeds where they do not recognize the cost to the taxpayers of the service contract obligation on a sale-leaseback type of arrangement....
-prisons would mean rural economic development....
-prisons would mean the ability to lock in long term government contracts that could be financed long-term with municipal bonds and the stock market.... Prisons are the one place where the political will exists to do large long-term deals with the private markets, as long as you can keep the media image and the market spin supporting increased sentencing and keep the taxpayers in the dark. Given the ability to do all this off balance sheet, a 1/2 - 1 trillion dollar commitment can be made by the public sector to the private sector and the capital brought in with no public conversation on the overall direction, simply approvals on individual sites once the steamroller is well underway.”
“There are several things the Prison Bed Model would need to be ascendant:
-no place-based financial statements or reengineering....
-the 15MM are hopeless. It is critical that black people, minorities, and even women are considered hopeless in terms of being able to provide productive products and services....
-no online access to education and job opportunity. This game requires that the poor are left behind as much as possible and as long as possible - black and white and city and rural.... This is how we have welfare reform but tremendous opposition to learning centers and business incubation....
-the drug business.... online education and private community investment does not leave lots of folks available to provide a low cost work force and distribution locations for the drug business, who can then provide the population to feed the prisons in a manner that will produce the headlines necessary to prove that the politicians ...are doing something about drugs.
-get tough on the young and Afro-American, minority and older women. To make the numbers work, the American people have to support the young - men and women - heading into prison while the elderly women die off in assisted and public housing....
-prison industries....”
“The various people we talk with about online businesses and venture capital in communities reject our notions that low-income minority urban and white rural populations can be productive in a variety of functions. However, the a-similar group seem to believe that this population can be quite productive when they are working in prisons and their salaries are going to pay for the prison or the state. What is so frightening is that the implications to the taxpayers of not offering education and employment alternatives to drug dealing and criminal activities, means that the whole country will go bankrupt from the drug business twice. Once, from losing potential taxpayers to the criminal justice system. Second, to paying to warehouse them in it. Taxpayers make much more money with folks working from home rather than prison. No one has illuminated the numbers. The political spin is very much based [on the idea] that the promotion of prisons is good for taxpayers.” 25
And the conformist Black leaders, “role models” who stupidly blamed the symptoms for the disease, just like they were supposed to, supported the massive arrest and imprisonment of their own people. They bought into the fascist line that ‘values’ have to be enforced by law. Whose values?
Jesse Jackson commiserated with General McCaffrey on CNN, 1/25/98: “Somehow it seems that our own appetite, maybe our society is so wealthy or so egregious, some kind of values crisis here is driving the demand. But what about the supply? It seems that in a couple of countries that there is some slowing down of the drug supply. But Mexico, it seems to be 70 percent of the drug flow. How can we stop it coming from the greatest source?” This was McCaffrey’s cue to explain that victory is just around the corner if we’ll just keep beefing up the Mexican military and expanding its police function.
What actually happened in the ensuing 20 years, since our Prohibition kept the price up, is that virtually every police department in Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador went into business with the local drug gangs. The actual result of blanket criminalization, in 2020, has been to turn Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador into failed states ruled by the military intelligence drug gangs we, and our Prohibition, finances. In 1990 Mexico had about 17 homicides per 100,000 people. In 2016 it had 25 homicides per 100,000. The U.S., no model of law and order itself, has about 6 homicides per 100,000. El Salvador, anarchically ruled by drug gangs we finance, has a per capita murder rate of 83 people per 100,000 – complete failure of law and order, which produces, of course, hysterical refugees begging for asylum. 26
By not fighting the militarization of American culture, the conformist Black politicos collaborated in the diversion of billions that should have gone into structural sweat-equity antipoverty programs, to which they paid only lip service. Instead, they helped the fascists demonize their own young. They talked about gun control, certainly badly needed, but almost never mentioned the artificial value Prohibition gave the dealing territory the guns are being used to contest.
“Taking drugs is a sin,” said Jesse, a Dope with Hope. “Since the flow of drugs into the U.S. is an act of terrorism, antiterrorist policies must be applied.” That’s just what the KKK’s Hobson said, and that’s just what L.A. police chief Daryl Gates did, telling the Senate that “casual drug users” should “be taken out and shot.” Well, beaten to a pulp with nightsticks, anyway. 2728
But the marijuana policy dam has burst. Both the U.N. and the W.H.O. have called for blanket global decriminalization of all drugs, as has the ACLU. The NAACP has called for blanket decriminalization of marijuana only. Thanks to the rebellion of the states, draconian marijuana enforcement is collapsing in the U.S., but there’s little point in talking about reducing mass imprisonment and street violence if we are not going to collapse the value of drugs other than marijuana with legalization or decriminalization. As long as dealing territory remains worth an artificial fortune, tough young kids are going to gang up to make it. Imprisonment for profit will remain a major industry, as will the hard drugs for arms business. The Drug War fascists, led by the DEA, are fighting blanket national legalization of pot tooth and nail, although it’s obvious they are losing that fight, but they have doubled down on their other pharmacological boogeymen. Absent a demographic sea change, the fascists will never allow decriminalization of all drugs, or an end to mass imprisonment, which continues apace behind the ‘crack epidemic’ and the ‘opioid epidemic.’ It is true, obviously, that the easy availability of pot will go a long way toward reducing the demand for crack and opioids.
Crack is just cocaine stretched and rendered smokable by heating it with baking soda and water. The resultant crystals ‘crack’ when smoked. This simple cutting technique makes it much cheaper than powder, since it is not only diluted in an edible base, but smoked. The lungs absorb vapor far more efficiently than the nose absorbs powder, delivering an immediate, ecstatic painkilling flush.
In December of 1990 Judge Pamela Alexander in Minnesota’s Hennepin County Court threw out the crack possession convictions of five Black defendants as racist. Minnesota’s Office of Drug Policy had officially concluded that there was no pharmacological difference between crack and powder, and therefore, concluded Judge Alexander, the Draconian sentence for miniscule quantities of crack was culturally, or economically, prejudicial. 29
In 2010, the Fair Sentencing Act reduced the crack:powder sentencing disparity from 100:1 to 18:1, not 1:1, hardly ‘fair.’ A 1989 government study of all 193 ”cocaine-related” murders in New York City concluded that 87% grew out of fights over money or dealing territory, and almost all the others were also alcohol-related. In only one case was the perpetrator actually high on coke. Professor Goldstein’s study of New York’s 218 “drug-related” murders during 8 months of 1988 came to exactly the same conclusion. In only one case could cocaine be shown to have actually been a possible pharmacological contributant to a homicidal rage. 30 31
George H.W. Bush’s favorite nark was LAPD Chief Daryl Gates so tolerant of police racism that he sparked the 1992 L.A. riots. Asked to account for the high number of police nightstick choke-hold deaths inflicted during his tenure, Gates explained that “We may be finding that in some Blacks, when [the choke-hold] is applied, the veins or arteries do not open as fast as they do on normal people.” 32
2 gms of Crack and Ingredients (Wikimedia Commons)
Between 1978 and 1988, virtually the entire job base of South Central Los Angeles collapsed as manufacturers and warehouses fled to more stable locations. Unemployment in South Central soared to 60% or more. Ronald Reagan cut CETA, Comprehensive Employment and Training Act funds, and eliminated the Job Corps. Los Angeles itself allocated virtually no funds to South Central’s parks or libraries, and actually eliminated the municipal Summer Job Program. There was almost no legal way for many young people in South Central to make a living. LAPD Chief Gates in April 1988, then announced that the problem was crack cocaine. Trump repeated these policies and pronouncements, as did Republican statehouses all over the country.
Chief Gates institutionalized Operation Hammer, massively funded by the first Bush administration. Gates rousted the young Black men of South Central for virtually anything at all - dress, hairstyle, curfew, possible possession of a joint. The LAPD, between 1988 and 1992, arrested 75% of all the young Black men in LA. 90% of those stopped, frisked and arrested were released without charges, but their names went into the counterinsurgency database. 33
As of early 1994, 1500 Black Americans per 100,000 were behind bars. The figure for Whites was 210 per 100,000. Our imprisonment rate is higher than the world’s worst police states, literally the highest in the world. 20% of all federal and state prisoners are there for non-violent drug offenses. Blacks comprise about 13% of the U.S. population. In 1993, 2.3 million Black men were sent to the slammer while 23,000 received a college degree - that’s a hundred to one. That’s what’s fascistic about all that ‘role model’ propaganda - the 1% are ‘role models’ - the 99% are ‘drug dealers.’ As of 2014, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, Blacks comprise 37% of a total federal state and local inmate population of 2.3 million. Including all people under “correctional control,” probabation, parole and imprisonment, the total is nearly 7 million. 34 35
We leave millions of ghetto kids unemployed, without neighborhood social centers, to fend for themselves amidst Prohibition-created violence and economics, throw their parents in the slammer for medicating their own pain, hunt them like wolves - and then act surprised when they turn into wolf packs. Some Republican from Kansas, working for the contractor lobby, then gets righteously indignant on the floor of Congress and decides that day-care money would be better spent on more new privatized prisons. As the Equal Justice Initiative, eji.org, points out, “The number of private prisons in the United States increased from five in 1998 to a hundred in 2008, and Corrections Corporation of America (now called CoreCivic), the nation’s largest private prison company, has seen its profits increase more than 500 percent in the last 20 years. In 2010, the nation’s two largest private prison companies imprisoned more than 120,000 people and took in nearly $3 billion in revenue.”
Contra Cocaine
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