The proposal
for a new narcotics superagency was submitted to Congress
on March 28, 1973. Even though the House Committee on
Government Operations noted, "The plan was hastily
formed.... Administration witnesses were able to give
the Sub-Committee only a bare outline of the proposed
new organization and its functions," Congress refused
to block the reorganization plan which purported to
heighten the efficiency of the war against heroin. Accordingly,
Reorganization Plan Number Two automatically became
effective sixty days later, and the Drug Enforcement
Agency (DEA) was created on July 1, 1973. The Bureau
of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, which itself had been
created by Reorganization Plan Number One, in 1967,
was absorbed into the superagency, along with the Office
for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement and the Office of National
Narcotics Intelligence. In the process John Ingersoll's
position as director of the BNDD was abolished, and
the directors of the two other offices-Myles Ambrose
and William Sullivan-resigned. Five hundred special
agents of the Customs Bureau were transferred to this
new agency, which employed. on paper, at least, more
than four thousand agents and analysts and resembled
the FBI as a domestic law-enforcement agency. John R.
Bartels, the son of a federal judge who had been recommended
for ODALE by Henry Petersen, was now named acting director
of this new conglomerate.
If the Watergate burglars had
not been arrested and connected to the White House strategists,
the Drug Enforcement Agency might have served as the
strong Investigative arm for domestic surveillance that
President Nixon had long quested after. It had the authority
to request wiretaps and no-knock warrants, and to submit
targets to the Internal Revenue Service; and, with its
contingent of former CIA and counterintelligence agents,
it had the talent to enter residences surreptitiously,
gather intelligence on the activities of other agencies
of the government, and interrogate suspects. Yet, despite
these potential powers, the efforts of the White House
strategists had been effectively truncated by the Watergate
exposures: Ehrlichman and Krogh were directly implicated.
in the operations of the Plumbers; Sullivan had been
involved in the administration's wiretapping program;
and Liddy and Hunt were in prison. The grand design
could not be realized, and DEA became simply a protean
manifestation of the earlier narcotics agencies.
Bartels soon found, however,
that it was not an easy matter to turn this superagency
into a conventional narcotics police force. For one
thing, when the special offices created by executive
order were collapsed into the new agency, Bartels inherited
some fifty-three former (or detached) CIA agents and
a dozen counterintelligence experts from the military
or other intelligence agencies-all of whom, under the
original game plan, were supposed to work on special
projects designated by the White House strategists.
These high-level intelligence agents and analysts had
a very different approach to narcotics intelligence
from that of the traditional narcotics agent, who operated
mainly by spreading "buy money" among his
contacts in the underworld until someone attempted to
sell him a significant quantity of narcotics. James
Ludlum, a former CIA official who took over-the Office
of Strategic Services of the new drug agency, explained
to me, "My approach was not to arrest a few traffickers
but to build the entire intelligence picture of what
was going on in the drug world.... I wanted to identify
the modus operandi of the major heroin wholesalers,
and this meant acquiring a great deal of information
which the drug agency did not possess about the patterns
of narcotic use." As Ludlum and the other former
CIA agents began to demand more definite data on the
number of addicts in the United States, their daily
consumption habits, the way they routinely contacted
dealers, and the names and profiles of the major narcotics
traffickers in the world, they soon began stepping on
the toes of the traditional narcotics agents. Colonel
Thomas Fox, the former chief of counterintelligence
for the Defense Intelligence Agency, recalled that "they
did not seem to possess any systematic intelligence
about narcotics traffic," and the revelation of
this dearth of information raised embarrassing questions
as to what the narcotics agents had been pursuing over
the last ten years-and it also raised tensions between
the conventional agents and the newer additions. The
older agents fought back: Lucien Conein, for example,
who was supposed to head "clandestine law enforcement"
activities for the new agency, was given a totally isolated
office, without staff, and was named chief of overseas
narcotics intelligence. (As a friend and associate of
E. Howard Hunt's, Conein was also compromised by the
Watergate disclosures.)
The integration of some five
hundred agents from the Customs Bureau into DEA also
raised serious problems for Bartels. Many of the transferred
inspectors had been content working for the Bureau of
Customs and resented being treated as pawns in what
they perceived to be I political game. They had formerly
received a large part of their information about narcotics
smuggling from their counterparts in the customs bureaus
of other nations, according to Eugene Rossides, and
the bureaucratic transfer had deprived them of these
valuable sources of information. Also, they tended to
be confused by the new reporting procedures of the Drug
Enforcement Agency. In order constantly to expand the
reported value of DEA seizures, they were instructed
to participate in as many foreign narcotics operations
as possible, even if it only meant supplying anonymous
tips to the foreign police agencies. In practice, this
meant that whenever a police agency anywhere in the
world announced the seizure of an narcotics, the DEA
agent in that country was queried as to whether he participated
in that operations if he answered affirmatively, the
seizure's street value in the United States was credited
to the total value seized by the DEA. One former customs
inspector, who was stationed in Rome, explained to me:
All they seemed to be interested
in was statistics.... The three of us sat around the
office in Rome all day, looking through the daily newspapers
for any news of narcotics busts.... If there were any,
we simply telexed Washington that we had participated
in the bust by supplying anonymous information to the
Italian police. Washington never questioned any of our
claims, and just kept sending us more and more buy money
which we were supposedly giving to our informants for
the anonymous tips. The whole thing was getting crazier
and crazier, and finally I asked to be transferred back
to the Customs Bureau.
The charges of corruption and
"papering the record" by disgruntled employees,
and their demands to be transferred back to their former
agencies, strained relations within the new agency.
These charges also fueled a war of leaks between DEA
and rival agencies within the administration, which
in turn led to reports widely circulated in the press
that DEA was seizing far less narcotics coming into
the United States than its predecessors-the Bureau of
Customs, the Immigration and Naturalization Service,
and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
In reality, the task of intercepting
narcotics had been unintentionally complicated by the
maneuvers of the White House strategists in 1971. The
temporary suppression of the Turkish poppy fields may
have succeeded in disrupting the normal channels for
distributing heroin, but it also brought many new entrepreneurs
into the heroin business, and it thoroughly confused
the surveillance procedures of the BNDD (which had formerly
focused its attention on a few cities such as Istanbul,
Marseilles, and Montreal). Moreover, when Turkey resumed
the cultivation of poppies, the distribution channels
for heroin had been so dispersed and fragmented that
it was impossible to check or even roughly estimate
the flow of the narcotic into the United States. Mexico
had now become a major supplier of "brown"
heroin (a discoloration caused by the laboratory process
rather than the quality of the opium), and illicit networks
had grown up in Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and Southeast
Asia. DEA could report higher seizures on paper, in
terms of the street value of drugs seized in other countries,
but this had little effect on the narcotics traffic
in the United States.
Furthermore, methadone, the
synthetic variant of heroin, was now freely available
from hundreds of federally financed clinics around the
country. This narcotic was spreading from urban centers
to small towns, which traditionally had no narcotics
problem or narcotics police. Not only was it harder
to police heroin and methadone, but the unfavorable
publicity which had emanated from the illegal raids
conducted by ODALE raised serious questions in the Department
of Justice about how drug agents were to proceed with
searches and arrests. Formerly, narcotics agents had
acted without much inhibition in breaking into a house
or rousing a sleeping informant at four A.M. to question
him roughly-. now they realized that they might be suspended
or indicted for what once had been standard operating
procedure.
As the heroin supply became
more difficult to intercept, DEA officials focused on
heavy users of cocaine and hashish, who for a number
of reasons were more easily identified and arrested.
Cocaine and hashish, however, had not been connected
in the public mind with causing crime or even being
highly addictive, and public interest in the activities
of the new agency waned-at least as it was measured
in the media.
In 1974 dissension within the
superagency reached the boiling point. Bartels had been
unable to name a deputy director for fear that he would
offend the old guard-the agents that had joined the
old Federal Bureau of Narcotics and had been subsequently
transferred to the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous
Drugs, then the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement,
and finally the Drug Enforcement Agency. When Bartels
attempted to introduce some "rationality"
into what was largely a "statistics-jimmying operation,"
according to one of his staff assistants, "the
old guard rebelled." A DEA inspector planted a
story with Jack Anderson accusing Vincent S. Promuto,
a public-relations assistant to Bartels, of associating
with dubious characters. Then other stories were leaked
to the press charging that Promuto had Introduced Bartels
to a cocktail waitress in Las Vegas-a charge which had
no apparent basis in fact. The press campaign against
Bartels and Promuto by the old guard seemed to be little
more than what a decade earlier would have been called
"guilt by association." But in the Watergate
atmosphere that saturated Washington, D.C., in 1974,
the failure by Bartels to investigate these charges
was escalated into the charge of a cover-up. Senator
Henry Jackson then began investigating these charges,
and rebellious officials in the Drug Enforcement Agency
began feeding him new morsels.
When it became abundantly clear
to the Ford White House, in May, 1975, that Bartels
could not control his agency, he was induced to resign
and was replaced by Henry Dogin, a lawyer in the Department
of Justice. Six months later, Dogin was replaced by
Peter B. Bensinger, a political appointee from Chicago.
As one executive in DEA commented, "This was nothing
more than a power play-the bureaucrats in the drug agency
simply destroy anyone who tries to control them, and
they use the press as their messenger boys in the battle."
He then added, "The heroin problem remains more
or less constant-there are no fewer addicts than there
were in 1969-all that changes is the way the information
about them is manipulated."
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