In July,
1970, John Ehrlichman approved a memorandum by Krogh's
staff that suggested "mounting [a] major operation
with [a] code name against heroin traffickers ... to
create [an] aura of massive attack on [the] most-feared
narcotic." Krogh specifically suggested the code
name -Operation Heroin for the domestic crusade. Such
an operation required, however, the cooperation (and
manpower) of established investigative agencies in the
federal government, especially the Bureau of Narcotics
and Dangerous Drugs in the Justice Department and the
Bureau of Customs in the Treasury Department. This presented
a bureaucratic problem, however, since both agencies
considered themselves to be semi-independent entities
and both attempted to define the narcotics business
in terms that extended the domain of their agency.
When the Nixon administration
assumed office, the effort to control narcotics comprised
only a minute part of the police activities of the federal
government. Although the government first became involved
in narcotics control in 1914, when Congress enacted
the Harrison Narcotics Act, the federal enforcement
efforts tended to be more symbolic than substantial
for at least a half century. Since the Harrison Act
was theoretically a revenue law, which required all
traffickers in opium, cocaine, and their derivatives
to register with the government and pay an excise tax
on their total sales, the responsibility for enforcing
the law was originally assigned to the Treasury Department.
Initially, the handful of agents in the Narcotics Division,
headed by Colonel Levi G. Nutt, focused their attention
on doctors and pharmacists who were dispensing opiates.
(Between 1914 and 1938, some 25,000 doctors were arrested
for supplying opiates, and some 40 heroin-maintenance
clinics were closed.) Most criminal narcotics traffickers
were left to the resources of the local police. In 1930,
however, in what was to become a recurring theme in
federal narcotics enforcement, a grand jury found that
the federal narcotics agents in New York City had falsified
their records to take credit for arrests made by the
New York City Police Department, and that some of the
agents were themselves involved with narcotics traffickers.
In the midst of the scandal Colonel Nutt resigned, and
the Narcotics Division was reorganized into the semi-independent
Bureau of Narcotics. In August, 1930, President Hoover
appointed Harry Jacob Anslinger, a career diplomat,
as the director of the new bureau. For the next three
decades Anslinger was content to wage only a rhetorical
campaign, periodically citing lurid examples of the
crimes of "dope fiends" to arouse public concern
over narcotics and marijuana. Little effort was made
to expand the size of the bureau or its law enforcement
activities. Indeed, until 1968, the Bureau of Narcotics
never had more than 330 agents (most of whom were used
in an administrative capacity), or, for that matter,
an annual budget of more than $3 million.
The ascendancy of the narcotics
agency within the federal government really began only
in the final months of the Johnson administration, when
it was decided to move the Bureau of Narcotics from
the Treasury to the Justice Department. As part of this
belated reorganization the fledgling Bureau of Drug
Abuse Control, which had been created only three years
earlier in the Food and Drug Administration to regulate
amphetamine and hallucinogenic drugs, was merged into
the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, or BNDD,
in the alphabet-soup world of Washington acronyms. The
Johnson administration justified Reorganization Plan
Number One, as the transfer was officially called, in
terms of efficiency: by consolidating the drug police
into a single agency within the Justice Department,
investigators and prosecuting attorneys would be able
to coordinate their work more expeditiously. Since this
same reorganization plan had been resisted earlier by
President Johnson (when Robert Kennedy was attorney
general), and was now being rushed through in an election
year, Eugene Rossides and other officials in the Treasury
Department believed that the move was politically motivated.
"Drugs have always been a political football,"
Rossides commented. "Johnson's main reason for
moving the Bureau [of Narcotics] from Treasury was to
strengthen the crime-busting image of Ramsey Clark."
As it turned out, there was
little political profit for Johnson to gain from this
move. Ramsey Clark selected John M. Ingersoll, a thirty
nine-year-old law-enforcement officer who had helped
him plan the crime-control legislation, as the director
of the new agency, and asked him for a realistic appraisal
of its potential for enforcing the laws. Ingersoll found
that the old Bureau of Narcotics, despite a flamboyant
public image (which derived in large part from television
series such as T-Men), lacked the intelligence-gathering
means and techniques for disrupting the major channels
of heroin distribution in the United States. At most,
its few agents could at times make sensational arrests,
which might satisfy the press and politicians but would
have little effect on the narcotics business that Ingersoll
had a professional interest in curtailing. The other
part of the consolidation, the Bureau of Drug Abuse
Control, had even fewer trained agents, almost no informers,
and little experience outside of tracking down pharmaceutical
products. As impressive as the reorganization might
have looked on paper, it was of little use in launching
the sort of national campaign against drugs required
by the election-year White House.
Far more serious, however,
as Ingersoll and Clark learned to their dismay, agents
of the old bureau were heavily involved in a major drug
scandal which was being investigated by a special group
of Internal Revenue Service agents. Ingersoll immediately
assigned nine special inspectors to the case. As the
evidence unfolded, in 1968, it became clear to him that
a number of federal agents in the New York office were
in the business of selling heroin or protecting drug
dealers, and that the bureau itself had been the major
source of supply and protection of heroin in the United
States. Under interrogation, many of the agents openly
admitted to being "owned" by dealers. All
of this was set forth in the Wurms Report, which was
never released by the government. In December, 1968,
Ramsey Clark disclosed that various agents were indicted
for their part in this illicit activity (most of them
were subsequently convicted). Eventually, almost every
agent in the New York bureau was fired, forced to resign,
or transferred.
In examining more closely
the roots of the corruption, Ingersoll found that the
nefarious working relationship between narcotics agents
and traffickers was deeply ingrained in the system used
by the Bureau of Narcotics to assure a constant number
of arrests every year (which was the agency's main index
of performance). In this system every agent had a quota
of arrests he was supposed to make, and his promotion
and tenure depended on his fulfilling this quota. Agents,
however, could not fulfill their arrest quotas with
any degree of certainty without the active collusion
of persons who were in the narcotics business. Such
illicit help was necessary because the sale of narcotics
is a crime for which there is no complainant to alert
police: both the buyer and seller are willing participants
in the transaction. Nor are federal agents likely to
be in a position to observe such transactions: most
heroin users buy their supply from a relative, friend,
or fellow addict they have known for several years in
extremely private circumstances. (The pusher who lurks
vampire-like in schoolyards and other places, and approaches
strangers with his wares, is largely a television myth.)
And the possibility of searching suspects for heroin
at random is limited by court rulings which require
a search warrant.
Under these circumstances federal
agents found that they could fill their monthly arrest
quotas only with the collusion of an informer, who could
arrange to have street addicts attempt to sell them
heroin. The informers in the best position to make such
an arrangement with a narcotics agent were traffickers
in the heroin business who, in turn, needed the agents'
protection. Like the Athenians who sent a sacrifice
of a set number of youths to the Cretan Minotaur each
year, heroin dealers supplied the quota of arrestees
for federal agents, and, eventually, went into business
with the agents.
State and local narcotics agents
were similarly dependent on the informer. For example,
the chief narcotics officer in Baltimore claimed in
a conference on narcotics informants, sponsored by the
Drug Abuse Council in 1975, that there were 800 active
criminal narcotics informers working with the police
in Baltimore, and most of these informers were in fact
dealers who had a de facto franchise from the police
department which they preserved by turning in "competitors"
not on the police payrolls. If this was the case in
other large cities, as most of the narcotics officers
at the conference suggested, then many, if not most,
of the established narcotics distributors were probably
in the employ of local police departments.
Since street arrests would
always be difficult-if not impossible - without informants
Ingersoll reluctantly came to the conclusion that the
quota system would almost ineluctably tend to corrupt
agents in the field. After studying the problem, Ingersoll
was determined not only to replace all the agents who
had become entangled with their informers but also to
do away with the informer system itself.
When the Nixon administration
came into office, Ingersoll therefore presented the
problem to the new attorney general, John N. Mitchell,
and proposed that the bureau abandon the policy of arresting
street addicts and dealers (which necessitated using
informers) and instead concentrate its efforts on the
major traffickers who smuggled the bulk of the heroin
supply into the United States. Under this strategy the
bureau would change its index of performance from arrests
made to the value of heroin shipments seized. Mitchell,
ever sensitive to the dangers of another scandal in
the Department of Justice, readily approved this approach.
(Subsequently he was able to explain in press conferences
the low level of arrests by t he bureau by saying, "the
Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs ... changed
their mode of operation to concentrate on the large
international and interstate distributors, leaving to
the states and localities the responsibility for the
enforcement of the drug laws with respect to the pushers
on the street.")
Since the new strategy required
deploying American narcotics agents overseas, where
bulk seizures could easily be made, Mitchell sent new
-guidelines (actually drafted by Ingersoll) to the Customs
Service, which traditionally had the responsibility
for interdicting contraband. It designated the BNDD
as the agency that should control narcotics smuggling
abroad, and instructed Customs to support the bureau's
efforts.
By 1970, the bureau was fully
engaged in the business of international narcotics seizures.
With the help of computers and intelligence experts
Ingersoll identified nine "primary systems"
of heroin distribution throughout the world. Scores
of agents, with large amounts of "buy money,"
were dispatched to Marseilles, Naples, Hamburg, Hong
Kong, and Bangkok to make contact with foreign traffickers.
By stationing agents abroad, the bureau was able to
claim credit for "cooperative" arrests that
occurred in these countries (even if they had not participated
in them). Thus the bureau reported in 1970 total worldwide
seizures (the bulk of which took place in France, Italy,
and Thailand) of 1,593 pounds of heroin, morphine, and
opium with a street value of $311 million. The street
value was estimated by calculating the retail price
at which the heroin would have been sold if it had reached
the United States and been fully diluted into the maximum
number of portions that could be sold on the street.
Ingersoll was fully aware that
these seizure statistics were somewhat misleading. Most
of the heroin had actually been confiscated by foreign
police in foreign countries, and it could not be definitely
established that it was ever destined for the American
market. Moreover, the value of the confiscated heroin
was exaggerated manyfold by using the street-level calculus.
For example, a kilogram of heroin seized in France in
1970 could be replaced by the trafficker in France for
about $5,000; yet the Bureau of Narcotics would report
the street value for that same seized kilogram at $210,000,
or roughly forty times what the heroin was actually
worth to the trafficker. Measuring the value of confiscated
heroin in terms of street value is analogous to measuring
the value of rustled cattle in terms of the price per
pound of steak in the finest New York restaurant (in
both cases, the retail price reflects distribution costs
and profits that never actually occurred). Ingersoll
was concerned that inflating the value of heroin could
eventually encourage amateurs to enter the business
as dealers, but when he suggested using a more realistic
measure of the value of seizures, such as replacement
cost, both White House and Bureau of Narcotics press
officers strenuously objected. Any such change, they
claimed, would be disastrous, since the press would
presume that the lower figure indicated a sharp decline
in the bureau's performance. For example, after U.S.
News & World Report revealed in 1970 that only 3
percent of the drugs being seized were "hard drugs,"
as opposed to marijuana (in what appeared to Ingersoll
to be a leak from the Treasury Department in the ongoing
interagency war), Krogh asked Ingersoll in a memorandum,
"How can 'hard drugs' be defined to show that much
more than 25% of the seizures were of hard drugs?"
The problem was that the magazine was defining seizures
in terms of the weight of the seizures. Ingersoll replied
in another memorandum, "Rather than redefine 'hard
drugs' to suit our purposes, perhaps we could approach
the situation by redefining our seizures in terms of
... specific units for each drug.... A unit of hard
drugs could be one injection and a unit of marijuana
could be one cigarette. This method would deflate the
marijuana figure by a factor of 50-100 in relation to
heroin." The ever-present G. Gordon Liddy attempted
to solve this same problem by suggesting the development
of an "Index of successful performance." This
novel criterion would divide the total weight of the
drug seized in the year by the total number of estimated
users in the population. Since there were presumed to
be 100 times as many marijuana users as heroin users,
it would appear that the government was, according to
Liddy's calculus, twenty-five times as successful in
seizing heroin. In any case, Ingersoll continued reporting
the higher street value of seizures.
The strategy also proved quite
successful with Congress. When Ingersoll was questioned
by members of the House Appropriations Committee in
1970 as to why his bureau produced substantially fewer
arrests despite a 50-percent increase in its operating
budget, he cited the hundreds of millions of dollars'
worth of seized heroin (measured by its street value)
as evidence that his agency was becoming increasingly
effective against the higher-level heroin wholesalers.
The committee apparently was persuaded by his argument,
since it recommended a further increase in the bureau's
appropriation for the following year. By 1971 the BNDD
had grown considerably, with a force of 1,500 agents
and budget of some $43 million (which was more than
fourteen times the size of the budget of the former
Bureau of Narcotics).
Although Ingersoll had been
successful in expanding the Bureau of Narcotics from
a minor domestic law-enforcement agency to an international
agency, the White House had some different objectives
for the bureau. Krogh pointed out to Ingersoll that
a series of private polls, commissioned by the White
House staff, indicated that the American electorate
considered heroin "to be a prime problem,"
and believed that the Nixon administration was not doing
enough to control it. In particular, Krogh believed
that this lack of public awareness of the Nixon administration's
efforts-and successes-in reducing narcotics traffic
stemmed from the bureaucratic inertness of Ingersoll's
agency. Not only had the number of arrests made by federal
officers actually decreased during the Nixon administration,
but the BNDD press-relations officers were no longer
emphasizing federal police operations against domestic
drug pushers and "drug fiends." Instead, stories
were being fed to the press about seizures o heroin
in faraway and exotic countries. Even more distressing
to the White House, in 1971 the- BNDD began revising
upward its estimates of the number of heroin addict-users
in the United States: the number escalated from 69,000
In 1969, to 322,000 in 1970, and then to 560,000 in
1971. All three estimates, however, were based on the
same 1969 data, the higher numbers being projected by
using different statistical formulas rather than discovering
new addicts. In Ingersoll's view the inflated estimates
served the bureau's interests by showing Congress a
greater need for appropriations to control the narcotics
business. But with an election only one year away, such
an "escalation" of addicts during the Nixon
tenure was not the publicity the White House wanted.
Geoffrey Sheppard, one of Krogh's young assistants,
complained, "Those guys in the Bureau of Narcotics
were creating hundreds of thousands of addicts on paper
with their phoney statistics." But Ingersoll proved
impervious to a barrage of phone calls from Krogh and
his staff. Krogh then intervened by ordering that all
press statements and public speeches on narcotics be
coordinated and cleared by his office (Richard Harkness,
a former NBC correspondent, was appointed as the White
House press coordinator for matters concerning drug
abuse). Krogh further suggested that a large number
of well-publicized arrests by narcotics agents would
be most helpful in calling public attention to the administration's
new war on drugs. Though Ingersoll agreed to coordinate
his public statements with the White House, he adamantly
refused to change the bureau's policy of deemphasizing
street arrests. He again argued that such "revolving
door" arrests would relieve neither crime nor the
drug problem, and would only serve to lead federal agents
into working again with underworld informers. Krogh
cut the discussion short by saying, "We cannot
accept your thesis." Ingersoll, who was concerned
that his professional reputation might be severely tarnished
if he reverted to the policy of mass-produced arrests
for political purposes, appealed to John Mitchell for
support. Mitchell, who, at least to Ingersoll, seemed
concerned about the "long arm" of John Ehrlichman
bypassing his authority in the Department of Justice,
told Ingersoll that he, "not Krogh, [was] in charge
of the bureau's policy." Since Ingersoll had acquired
supporters both in Congress and in the law-enforcement
establishment, he could not easily be fired. Thus, in
1971 Krogh was stymied, at least temporarily, in his
attempt to control the narcotics police.
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