The White
House finally succeeded in 1972 in creating a private
police force in the form of the Office of Drug Abuse
Law Enforcement. The office reported directly to the
president through its head, Myles Ambrose, who simultaneously
served as special consultant to the president. ODALE
bypassed most of the traditional bureaucratic restraints
on its operations: nevertheless, the plan to utilize
the intelligence assets of the Central Intelligence
Agency was stymied by the opposition of career officials
at the Department of Justice CIA. This, however, was
only a temporary setback. The struggle at the FBI to
succeed J. Edgar Hoover provided the House strategists
with an opportunity to take over at least part domestic-intelligence
operation at the FBI by playing on the ambitions of
its associate director, William C. Sullivan.
During the Johnson administration
Sullivan had designed the FBI's counterintelligence
program, which among other things harassed Martin Luther
King and civil rights organizations and which gave the
Nixon White House some leverage over him. In the early
years of the Nixon administration he realized that his
rise to Power in the FBI was being blocked by Cartha
"Deke" DeLoach, who was third in command at
the FBI. In light of this opposition Sullivan could
succeed Hoover only if he was the personal candidate
of President Nixon, he thus went to great lengths, according
to his associates in the FBI, "to play ball with
the White House." He worked with John Dean on drafting
the ill-fated Huston Plan, even though Hoover and the
FBI executives opposed it. And when the White House
wanted to wiretap members of the National Security Council
staff and journalists, Sullivan arranged for the FBI
to undertake these "national security" tasks
for the president. The procedures for the FBI required
that such White House requests be routed through the
office of Deke DeLoach and Inspector George Quinn, but
Sullivan arranged it so that the White House requests
would be processed personally by him, and both DeLoach
and Quinn would not have direct knowledge of the very
unorthodox wiretap operations requested by the White
House. DeLoach feared that this arrangement would effectively
give the White House control over Sullivan's domestic-intelligence
division and demanded that Sullivan return to the more
normal procedures of the bureau. Sullivan, who was now
working closely with such White House strategists as
John Dean, then an assistant to Attorney General Mitchell,
and Robert Mardian, the head of the Department of Justice's
internal-security division, managed to get Henry Kissinger
and Alexander Haig to intervene directly and write mernoranda
which supported the special arrangement between Sullivan's
division and the White House. In the wake of these memoranda
Hoover acquiesced and permitted Sullivan to limit the
access to the transcripts and authorizations of wiretaps
to a few highly placed officials in the domestic-intelligence
division, which excluded DeLoach.
In effect, then, Mardian, Dean,
and Sullivan controlled a bureau within a bureau which
could install "national security" wiretaps
for the president. When the White House strategists
feared that Hoover might attempt to use the transcripts
of these wiretaps to blackmail the White House, Mardian
arranged through Sullivan to transfer them from the
FBI to John Ehrlichman's safe in the White House. When
Hoover found out about this maneuver, he locked Sullivan
out of the office (by having his locks changed while
he was on vacation). Realizing that his days with the
FBI were numbered, and believing that the present administration
of the FBI had become inefficient, if not corrupt, Sullivan
pressed Dean and Mardian to create another domestic-intelligence
unit. Dean fully realized that the White House could
use this ambition of Sullivan's for its own purpose.
He later explained to the president, "What Bill
Sullivan's desire in life is, is to set up a domestic
national security intelligence system, a White House
program. He says we are deficient. He says we have never
been efficient, because Hoover lost his guts several
years ago." The problem was simply to find a cover
under which such a White House intelligence system could
be created for Sullivan. The war on heroin conveniently
served this purpose.
The idea of creating a small
intelligence unit as part of the White House's narcotics
program was first suggested by Egil Krogh in the summer
of 1971. Krogh explained to his staff assistants working
on the narcotics problem at the Domestic Council that
the only organization in the government capable of "tracking
the narcotics traffickers" was the CIA, but that
agency was reluctant to become involved in a law-enforcement
problem. Walter Minnick, a young Harvard Business School
graduate who had joined Krogh's staff only two months
before, recalled that Krogh complained to him that the
CIA was the most "bureaucratically closed"
organization in the government, and that in order to
cut the "red tape," Krogh instructed him to
speak to E. Howard Hunt. (Minnick did not know at that
time that Hunt was also working in room 16 as one of
the Plumbers in the special-investigations unit.) Krogh's
young staff assistant soon found Hunt to be extremely
well informed not only about the narcotics trade in
Southeast Asia but also about the bureaucratic politics
of the CIA. Hunt authoritatively told Minnick that it
would be next to impossible "to crank CIA intelligence"
into other federal agencies, since CIA employees would
be extremely wary about trusting their counterparts
at BNDD or at Customs. Instead Hunt recommended establishing
a new unit, under tight White House control, which could
serve as a liaison between all the law-enforcement agencies
involved in suppressing narcotics. He said that he knew
key CIA officers who could be temporarily detached from
the agency and employed in this new liaison group. Krogh
subsequently explained that Hunt had "counseled
me in 1971 as to specifically how we should build into
the CIA operations narcotics control as an important
priority; and he described the priority list which [CIA]
station chiefs maintained for their own agent activity.
. . ." According to Krogh, Hunt further convinced
him that unless he was able "to communicate directly
with [CIA] station chiefs and have that backed up at
their regional level in the CIA that, while they may
say that they are cooperating, in fact [we] would not
get much work on the problem at that regional level."
Specifically, Hunt suggested
Colonel Lucien Conein, a personal friend of his who
had served with the CIA since 1954, as a possible director
for the proposed White House intelligence office. It
was subsequently decided, however, that Conein would
be more useful in the strategic-intelligence office
of the BNDD, where he would be in a position to keep
an eye on Ingersoll's activities (and there he could
supervise the plans approved by the President for clandestine
law enforcement abroad, which possibly would include
assassination). Since Conein was unavailable to head
the new office, Walter Minnick proposed James Ludlurn,
who had been a CIA official responsible for collecting
intelligence on the international heroin trade. Krogh
approved this choice because, as he told me years later,
"After they had assigned Jim Ludlum to be the liaison
in narcotics control, the CIA cooperation increased
terrifically ... and he was a very helpful person."
The White House, however, had other plans for this new
Office of National Narcotics Intelligence (ONNI). To
Minnick's dismay, Ehrlichman ordered him to offer the
new position to Sullivan, who promptly accepted it.
Krogh later explained to Minnick that this was done
in return for Sullivan's cooperation in doing "previous
favors for the White House." Although the implementation
of ONNI was delayed until August, 1972, by the protests
of Ingersoll and Kleindienst-and finally had to be located
'in the Department of Justice rather than in the White
House, to at least partly satisfy the strong objections-Sullivan
had finally gained control of the domestic intelligence
system, which John Dean presumed to be his "life's
desire."
Sullivan Immediately chose
Russell Asch, a deputy of the National Secunity Council
with contacts in the intelligence community, as his
deputy. He also appointed liaisons with the CIA, the
FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and a host of
the lesser-known intelligence agencies scattered throughout
the government. In all, twenty-four liaisons were appointed
to assist Sullivan in his intelligence coordination.
The CIA agents reassigned to this new office could not
entirely resist the temptation of resorting to the sort
of fun and games which they practiced in the CIA. For
example, one former analyst at the Office of National
Narcotics Intelligence recalled that some of these former
CIA agents began working on a plan for disrupting the
cocaine market in the United States "by poisoning
it with methedrene" a domestically manufactured
stimulant that could be made to resemble cocaine in
color and taste. The bogus cocaine, according to this
plan, would cause violent reactions in the cocaine users
(if they survived) and thereby turn them against the
cocaine dealers. After due consideration, however, the
plan for the government to distribute methedrene surreptitiously
in key cities in the United States was rejected, and
eventually all the plans, analyses, and reports of ONNI
dealing with cocaine were shredded and destroyed on
White House orders.
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