Just
before he left for his Christmas vacation in 1971, Attorney
General Mitchell turned over to Leo Pellerzi, his assistant
attorney general for administration, a White House plan
for a new narcotics enforcement office. He instructed
Pellerzi that the White House wanted this office to
be administratively incorporated in the Department of
Justice, but actually it would operate out of the executive
office of the president. When Pellerzi, a careerist
in the Department of Justice, read the details of the
plan, he became decidedly alarmed. It called for a series
of special strike forces to be formed around the country,
each staffed with selected agents from the Bureau of
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, the Bureau of Customs,
the Alcohol. Tobacco and Firearms unit, and the Internal
Revenue Service, as well as several state police officers.
Each strike force would be empowered to use court-authorized
wiretaps and no-knock warrants in making arrests of
narcotics pushers around the country. Special grand
juries would then be convened to indict the arrestees.
Both the strike forces and grand juries would be under
the direct control of Myles Ambrose, who would operate
both from the Justice Department and from the president's
executive office and report directly to the president.*
What alarmed Pellerzi most about this new organization
was that it Would temporarily detached from the agency,
employ a group of CIA agents, for domestic-intelligence
purposes, which in his opinion was clearly illegal.
(This was never carried out.) Pellerzi also doubted
the propriety of a provision in the plan which gave
the new office the authority to assign grants from the
Law Enforcement Administration Agency to local police
departments that cooperated with the new federal strike
forces. Pellerzi read the proposal over several times
and then decided to take it to Henry Petersen, who was
then the assistant attorney general for the criminal
division of the Department of Justice, in which the
new office would ostensibly be located.
* In fact, the White House
staff. which was loosely called the Executive Office
of the President and had grown from less than 100 persons
when Nixon was vice-president to more than 1,200 by
the time he had become president, was housed in a number
of buildings, including the old Executive Office Building,
the new Executive Office Building, and a row of brownstones,
restored by Kennedy, on Jackson Street.
Petersen, who had worked his
way up from a messenger boy to an assistant attorney
general, was equally dismayed by this new White House
plan. He told Pellerzi that he suspected it was no more
than "political crap" designed to help the
Nixon administration in the 1972 election, and he suggested
that Pellerzi use his special talents in administrative
procedures to slow down the implementation of this new
office. He also said that he would attempt to select
a deputy director for this new office, if it were finally
approved, who would resist political pressures. As for
the possible illegalities, Petersen assured Pellerzi
that he would take them up with Richard Kleindienst,
then the deputy attorney general, since Mitchell had
left on his Christmas vacation.
Upon hearing the suggestion
that this new office would employ CIA liaisons, Kleindienst
called Richard Helms and told him what the White House
was now proposing. Helms categorically rejected the
proposal as a violation of the Central Intelligence
Agency's charter, as Kleindienst had assumed he would
do, and Kleindlenst then suggested that they work together
to kill this particularly disturbing part of the proposal.
Eventually they succeeded in eliminating CIA agents
from the plan. Meanwhile, Pellerzi and Petersen managed
to restrict the funds that could be used for special
grand juries and to limit the White House takeover of
the drug program was imminent. He immediately called
Attofney General Mitchell, who was vacationing in Florida,
and asked what this televised "presidential meeting"
meant to his agency. Mitchell replied that he had not
been told about any White House actions, but Ingersoll
was not reassured. (The same evening, at the Playboy
Plaza Hotel in Miami, Liddy, who drafted the original
presidential option paper for this new office, and Hunt,
a consultant on the plan, met with Jack Bauman, a former
CIA agent and specialist in surreptitious entries, to
discuss other operations that they claimed would function
under the aegis of the White House.)
In the next month the White
House strategists easily overrode the combined opposition
of Assistant Attorneys General Pellerzi and Petersen,
Ingersoll, and Rossides. In early January, Krogh told
Ingersoll in no uncertain terms that since the BNDD
had refused to intensify its efforts to arrest street
pushers, the White House was creating another agency
to do the job. Moreover, Ingersoll would be ordered
to cooperate by turning over the agents, specialists
in survel illance, and other unspecified resources required
by the new White House agency headed by Ingersoll's
rival, Ambrose. Although Mitchell initially told Ingersoll
that he would work out a compromise plan with the White
House whereby the BNDD would increase the number of
street arrests it was making-at least, until the election
was over-and, in return, the White House would abandon
its plan to create this new investigative agency, he
told Ingersoll in mid-January that the White House plans
were too far advanced to be changed. At about the same
time, Secretary of the Treasury John Connally reported
to Rossides that the White House decision on the new
agency was irreversible. Ingersoll even offered to increase
the mass arrests the White House demanded. He later
explained to me, "I was flexible as far as tactics
were concerned, and if returning to more street arrests
was the only way to save the bureau's programs, I was
willing to do it." His last-minute offer was, however,
rejected by Krogh as "too little, too late."
On January 28, 1972, less than
a month after the director of the BNDD and his counterpart
at the Treasury Department learned of the planned agency,
ODALE was officially created by an executive order of
the president (which, unlike an "executive reorganization
order," need not be submitted to Congress for approval).
President Nixon simply declared:
Each department and agency
of the Federal Government shall, upon request and to
the extent permitted by law, assist the Director of
the Office for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement in the performance
of functions assigned to him or pursuant to this order,
and the Director may, in carrying out those functions,
utilize the services of any other federal and state
agency, as may be available and appropriate.
The president then appointed
Ambrose director of ODALE and, simultaneously special
consultant to the president on narcotics control.
The next day, taking his furniture
and his two secretaries from the Bureau of Customs (Rossides
later billed the White House for the removed furniture),
Ambrose moved into his new offices-one located in the
town-house annex of the White House, on Jackson Street,
the other in the Department of Justice. Ambrose, a shrewd
and outspoken former politician in New York, fully realized
that his new office would be bitterly opposed by the
agencies from which it was commandeering agents and
money. To some degree, he was "doing their job
for them," as he later put it. He thus fully anticipated
the opposition from his rivals and was told by Krogh
that both Ingersoll and Rossides had fought to abort
the creation of his office.
Since there was virtually no
precedent for an agency like the Office of Drug Abuse
Law Enforcement, Ambrose had to proceed step by step,
in assembling his strike forces. The first step was
to appoint regional directors who would superintend
and select the federal agents and local police on each
strike force in each of the thirty-three target cities
he selected. Andrew J. Maloney, an assistant U.S. attomey
in New York, was put in charge of the East Coast from
Maine to New Jersey. Joseph H. Reiter, whom Ambrose
knew from his work in the tax division of the Justice
Department, was given responsibility for the Mid-Atlantic
states. Joseph Martinez, a Miami lawyer with a strong
background in narcotics prosecutions, was assigned the
Southern states. Fifty other lawyers, many of whom Ambrose
knew personally, were deployed in instantly created
field offices of the new organization. Four hundred
investigators were requisitioned from the Bureau of
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the Bureau of Customs,
and Ambrose requested more than a hundred liaisons from
the Internal Revenue Service, as well as specialists
from other agencies of the government. This was all
accomplished during the first thirty days of existence
of this new office, in what Ambrose himself referred
to as a "monumental feat of organization."
However, since the Office of
Drug Abuse Law Enforcement was set up without approval
of Congress, it had little direct access to Congress-appropriated
funds. Though Ambrose succeeded in listing most of the
special prosecutors he hired on the payroll of the Department
of Justice as "temporary consultants," and
managed to requisition funds from various agencies to
pay for his clerical and investigative staff, finding
money for the operating expenses of his strike forces
presented serious difficulties. Finally, Krogh and other
White House advisors decided that these strike forces
could be temporarily financed through grants from LEAA,
although it will be recalled that this fund was specifically
established by Congress to finance local rather than
federal police activities. As expected, some LEAA officials
protested the granting of money to a federal office
as a violation of the spirit of the law: "Congress
never intended for LEAA grants to be used to bypass
the appropriations process," one administrator
warned. So, with White House assistance, the new office
established a series of local organizations, with such
names as "Research Associates," through which
grants could be made by LEAA. The money was then channeled
back to selected strike forces, with these organizations
acting, in effect, as money conduits.
Problems were also encountered
appropriating specialists for the new office. Ingersoll
resisted supplying the wiretapping technicians requested
by the BNDD on the grounds that the strike forces were
supposedly set up to pursue street pushers, "which
did not require a wiretapping capacity." After
Krogh was asked to intervene on the president's behalf,
Ingersoll finally was forced to part with a few wiretapping
technicians. From Rossides, the new office demanded
not only customs agents, who had the unique authority
to conduct searches without warrants under certain circumstances,
but also IRS agents working on the target-selection
program. Rossides provided the strike forces with thirty-five
customs inspectors and twenty-five secretaries, but
drew the line on reassigning IRS agents. Despite White
House pressure, Rossides argued that the strike forces
did not need tax examiners to go after street pushers
and cautioned that such a transfer of authority could
undermine the autonomy of the Internal Revenue Service.
Again, the new agency used its connections with the
White House. This time, John Connally interceded and
persuaded Rossides to allow thirty-five IRS agents to
serve as liaisons on the strike forces. Ingersoll and
Rossides were understandably confused about the objectives
of this office, if only because the new strike forces,
had little resemblance to more conventional law-enforcement
forces. These highly unorthodox units, which were being
controlled from the White House through the president's
special consultant Myles Ambrose, included not only
trained narcotics and customs officers but also Immigration
and Naturalization Service officers; Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms control agents; probation officers; state
troopers; and local police officers. From the beginning
these strike forces were not simply directed to enforce
the narcotics laws but to make arrests by any lawful
means possible, even if it meant bypassing the normal
channels. For example, the guidelines for the Los Angeles
strike force stated:
What [the Office of Drug Abuse
Law Enforcement] is all about is the concept that hitting
the heroin traffic in one manner only, particularly
a manner which relies eventually on prosecutors or judges
to keep heroin dealers out of traffic, must be unsuccessful....
In Los Angeles [we] will rely on many approaches, aimed
at not only prosecuting heroin dealers, but at harassing
and disrupting them by using the many statutes and procedures
available to us.
The guidelines then went on
to suggest such tactics as using probation officers
to revoke the parole of uncooperating suspects, using
grand juries to harass suspects, and employing Immigration
and Naturalization Service officers to deport targets.
It was assumed that very few suspects or uncooperative
witnesses could resist the powers of harassment held
by this eclectic group of police officers. With the
authority of court-authorized no-knock warrants and
wiretaps they could strike at will in any of the target
cities and against virtually anyone selected as a target.
By March, 1972, the strike forces had become operational.
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