Both sides of the bargain
recognize... the supply of sophisticated weaponry is
allied usually with general trade and ideological and
political links. At what point is the degree of dependence
sufficient to affect the feasibility of the coup?
-Edward Luttwak,
Coup d'Etat
Though
there was little the Nixon administration could do to
bring the law and order it promised to the streets of
America, it soon found opportunities abroad to battle
dramatically foreign drug smugglers. It will be recalled
that Captain Hobson had already prepared the public
for the theme of foreign devils contaminating Americans
with drugs, and that enemy countries were traditionally
identified as the major source of the narcotics traffic
in the United States. Thus "Japanese militarists"
were blamed as narcotics traffickers in World War II;
Iranian nationalists were singled out In 195 1 after
they nationalized the oil concessions in Iran: revolutionary
Cuba was cited as a supplier of American marijuana after
Castro seized power in 1957; Communist China was accused
of "a continuing twenty-year plan to spread addiction
among free people"; the Soviet Union and its satellites
were named in the New York Times at the height of the
Cold War as major smugglers of heroin; and, in 1962,
North Vietnam was added to the list of narcotics offenders
by unnamed administration sources. The charges were
based more on the needs for propaganda against hostile
enemies than on firm evidence of' narcotics traffic.
The Nixon administration. however,
decided to extend the war on drugs to friendly nations.
which made easier opponents. Thus Mexico was chosen
as the first target in the new heroin crusade. Task
Force One, which was created by President Nixon in 1969,
attempted to combine the talents of the Bureau of Narcotics
and Dangerous Drugs and the Customs Bureau for a joint
operation against Mexican smugglers. The operation was
under the dual command of Richard Kleindienst, the deputy
attorney general, and Eugene Rossides, the assistant
secretary of the treasury for enforcement and operations.
Kleindienst, a former campaign director for Barry Goldwater,
reluctantly agreed to the task force to demonstrate
that law-enforcement agencies in rival departments could
jointly solve a problem. Eugene Rossides, who himself
had grand ideas of expanding the Treasury's role in
the drug war, decided that the Treasury Department's
customs bureau should take the lead in the offensive
against Mexico. To this end, he appointed his assistant,
G. Gordon Liddy, the imaginative man of action, to the
task force as his personal aide. In the summer of 1969,
under Liddy's guidance, Task Force One issued a report
submitting that the highest priority should be "an
eradication of the production and refinement in Mexico
of opium poppies and marijuana. . . ." Not only
was Mexico deemed to be a source of heroin entering
the United States, but marijuana was asserted to be
the critical "stepping stone" to one's becoming
a heroin addict. The task force asserted that "85%
of heroin addicts ... started their use of drugs with
marijuana" (no evidence was provided for this assertion,
however).
The plan for direct action,
known as Operation Intercept, was devised by Liddy and
others on the working group drawn from the Treasury
Department and the Department of Justice. It called
for pressures to persuade the Mexican government actively
to suppress the opium and marijuana traffic. (In the
early planning stages it was even hoped that private
American foundations might finance chemical defoliants
to destroy the marijuana and opium crops, -if the Mexican
government would agree to use them.) Accordingly, the
first pressure came on September 8, 1969. The Eleventh
Naval District declared the city of Tijuana, Mexico,
off limits to military personnel. A news story provided
by the task force to the press suggested this would
bring economic disaster to all the bars, brothels, and
other border businesses dependent on the American military.
Egil Krogh, who was sitting in on the task force as
the White House representative, later recalled that
after "it was leaked to the military ... that we
were planning to shut down the border ... a number of
U.S. sailors [were] beaten up in Tijuana [by outraged
Mexicans] a week before the President was to meet President
Diaz [of Mexico] at Friendship Dam." Of course,
this distressed the State Department, but Operation
Intercept continued to unfold.
In September, 1969, two thousand
customs and border-patrol agents were deployed along
the Mexican border for what was officially described
as "the country's largest peacetime search and
seizure operation by civil authorities." Automobiles
and trucks crossing the border were delayed up to six
hours in hundred-degree temperatures; tourists appearing
suspicious or recalcitrant were stripped and bodily
searched. Although more than five million citizens of
the United States and Mexico passed through this dragnet
during the three-week operation, virtually no heroin
or narcotics were intercepted from the tourists. But
as Kleindienst pointed out to reporters, the ultimate
objective of Operation Intercept was not to seize narcotics
but to pressure Mexico to control it at the source by
eradicating the production of marijuana and opium poppies
in Mexico. Privately, Kleindienst explained to the president
and concerned officials of the Department of State that
the real purpose was to make the Mexican government
more cooperative.
However, such crude and overt
pressures caused a furor of indignation in Mexico. Mexican
officials protested that Operation Intercept was undermining
the Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America, and that
the Mexican government would not submit to such harassment
on its borders. Though the State Department looked at
Operation Intercept as dangerously undercutting our
diplomatic efforts in all of Latin America, and Henry
Kissinger's National Security Council became concerned
that the continuing search-and seizure operation on
the Mexican border might interfere with hemisphere defense
arrangements, White House officials, according to Krogh,
were impressed with the wealth of publicity that the
administration's effort was receiving in the nation's
press. The Justice Department's BNDD thus continued
to brief reporters on the tools and techniques that
would be later activated, including a remote sensor
device capable of detecting the presence of marijuana
and opium poppies from planes flying over fields in
inaccessible mountainous regions. The device was to
be further perfected by the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration under an agreement with the Mexican
government. The Associated Press was supplied with aerial
photographs of tens of thousands of cars backed up in
Mexico and customs inspectors searching cars at border
crossings. The Customs Bureau briefed the press on the
operations of its patrol planes and ships as if it were
a wartime operation, and periodic announcements were
made of the seizures of marijuana. The Associated Press
reported, "Pleasure boats, fishing vessels, cargo
ships and ocean liners are being searched." By
the end of September, however, the State Department's
press office counterattacked by briefing reporters on
the damage that Operation Intercept was wreaking on
United States-Mexican relations. Incidents were described,
as later reported in the New York Times, where "delays
as long as six hours have kept outraged motorists waiting
in line in the broiling sun ... some travelers have
been obliged to strip naked ... thousands of Mexican
workers have lost their jobs in the United States because
of the customs inspection delay ... millions of innocent
people have been harassed. Border cities are facing
economic collapse and tempers are wearing thin. . .
." President Diaz was even quoted as saying that
Operation Intercept had created "a wall of suspicion"
between Mexico and America. By mid-October the State
Department had won that battle of the leaks, and the
White House recognized that Operation Intercept was
now generating negative publicity, according to Krogh.
The task force thus was quietly withdrawn from the Mexican
border, and, in return for $1 million in aid for the
purchase of light aircraft, the president of Mexico
agreed to sign some protocols which changed Operation
Intercept in name to Operation Cooperation, which was
then totally abandoned without further fanfare.
Although Egil Krogh later noted
in a White House memorandum (July 23, 1970) that "Operation
Intercept ... received widespread media coverage,"
he did acknowledge to Ehrlichman that it had had no
effect on the drug traffic. Others in the White House
doubted the public-relations value of the Mexican adventure.
To demonstrate the danger of such under-takings, Daniel
Patrick Moynihan cited New York Times stories that suggested
that Operation Intercept, by temporarily interrupting
the marijuana traffic, had caused children to switch
to heroin. Though there was little reason to believe
that children would addict themselves to heroin because
marijuana was temporarily more expensive, Moynihan used
these stories to temper White House enthusiasm for such
foreign adventures. Nevertheless, the inner circle at
the White House continued to recommend the more highly
dramatized crackdowns with code names like Operation
Intercept. A 1970 crime-control memorandum circulated
by the Domestic Council noted that the "feasibility
of mounting major operations with code names against
heroin trafficking [would] create an aura of massive
attack on our most feared narcotic." The memorandum
recommended launching an election-year Operation Heroin
modeled after Intercept. Moynihan, still worried about
more Operation Intercept fiascoes, proceeded to persuade
President Nixon that heroin control should be elevated
to the status of a national security problem. The president
agreed and created the Ad Hoc Cabinet Committee on Narcotics,
which was to be chaired by Henry Kissinger, then his
national security advisor.
The ad hoc committee included
the more illustrious figures of the early Nixon administration:
Pat Moynihan; John Mitchell and his deputy, Kleindienst,
who held that all law-enforcement matters should be
the business of the Justice Department (which would
include IRS as well as narcotics operations); the ambitious
Eugene Rossides; John Ingersoll, the Democratic-appointed
director of the BNDD; Richard Helms, the independent-minded
director of the CIA; and Elhot Richardson, the undersecretary
of state. Myles Ambrose was not a member, but he attended
a couple of the meetings as an observer. Kissinger,
who evidenced little interest in the heroin problem,
rarely attended the committee meetings, which were then
chaired by his deputy, General Alexander, Haig. (On
one typical occasion Kissinger arrived an hour late,
joked about his having to translate the Vietnam peace
negotiations from German to English for the president,
then promptly left.) Though Moynihan at times sparred
with Mitchell, most of these officials, though impressive
in their own spheres of action, had little special knowledge
about heroin and therefore had to rely on working groups
to establish facts-all of which added to the confusion.
Kissinger, Richardson, and
Haig spent most of their efforts dampening the enthusiasm
of White House zealots to launch a new heroin crusade
which might again threaten diplomatic relations with
important allies. Meanwhile, the White House, usually
through John Mitchell, made it known to the ad hoc committee
that it wanted another dramatic effort. The crusaders
thus sought another country in which to crusade.
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