When
Arthur Watson, the former chairman of IBM World Trade
Corporation, became ambassador to France, in May, 1970,
President Nixon told him, "Your job is to clean
up the heroin problem in France.... That is the most
important priority today." Thus Watson left for
Paris,- taking along a copy of the book The French Connection.
He was accompanied by Thomas P. Murphy, a former writer
for Fortune and general aide-de-camp to Watson, who
was to serve as drug coordinator for the embassy in
France. On his arrival in Paris, Watson quickly discovered
that the French were wholly indifferent to heroin addiction,
which they considered "the American disease."
Although American intelligence estimated that the vast
preponderance of heroin reaching the United States passed
through Marseilles, where "labs" converted
morphine base into heroin, the Police Judiciale drug
force, which was charged with policing all illicit drugs
in France, had only thirty-two members, who were doing
mainly administrative work. Watson believed that in
order for any real action to be taken by French officials,
heroin would have to be hyped into a French problem.
Stories were therefore ingeniously planted in French
newspapers about French heroin addicts. (Watson himself
went on walking tours through the place de la Republique
and suspicious bars on the boulevard Saint-Michiel,
looking for addicts.) The United States Information
Service, at Watson's request, had a gory American drug-addiction
film adapted to a French version and put on French television.
The embassy even imported a priest from New York to
lecture on drug abuse. "The public-relations hype
really worked," Murphy later told me. "Heroin
went in French polls from being a nonexistent problem
to being the number-one problem perceived by the French
public."
Although the press campaign
led to a doubling of the drug force in France and more
cooperation from French officials, Washington was demanding
more concrete results. Ambassador Watson received telegram
after telegram from the State Department and the White
House asking when a "major lab Marseilles would
be seized."
Watson gradually learned that
the highly prized labs were in reality "no more
than dirty kitchens" where trays of morphine base
were cooked with acetic anhydride until heroin precipitated
out. Virtually any house in France, or in the world,
with running water could have a lab. Bureau of Narcotics
agents in France were also doubtful of the value of
seizing labs, since the operation could be moved to
another kitchen in a matter of days. Nevertheless, President
Nixon wanted labs seized, congressmen and American journalists
persistently asked to be taken on tours of the seized
labs, and Watson was determined, with or without the
French police, to seize as many "dirty kitchens"
as he could.
A strong believer in the magic
of technology, the ambassador ordered the science attache
at the embassy, Dr. Edgar Piret, to devote his full
time and resources to the problem of detecting labs.
Almost every week, the ambassador, piloting his own
propjet plane, would fly Dr. Piret to Marseilles, where
they would lunch with French police in a restaurant
at the harbor (shown, coincidentally, in the opening
sequence of the film of The French Connection) and discuss
the modus operandi of the mysterious labs. Finally Dr.
Piret came up with the idea for "sniffing out"
the acetic anhydrides used in manufacturing heroin.
A California firm, Varian Associates, which had developed
a technique in Vietnam for chemically detecting the
presence of drugs in urine, was given the contract for
the "heroin sniffer," while Dr. Piret worked
out the anticipated wind plumes and frequency of the
fumes. Then, in 1971, the sniffer, concealed in a brand-new
Volkswagen camper with a snorkel mounted on its roof,
rolled into Marseilles. An American agent drove this
not entirely inconspicuous sniffer through the streets,
while another agent inside charted all the beep signals
on a street map. Unfortunately, the signals given out
by the acetic acid being sought were indistinguishable
from the odor frequency of salad dressing, and when
the map was analyzed, Watson found that they had inadvertently
detected all the restaurants and salad-dressing concentrations
in Marseilles-but no labs. To the great amusement of
the French officials, the sniffer departed, and Dr.
Piret was sent back to the drawing board.
Dr. Piret's next foray was
into the sewers of Marseilles. Since the excess water
used in the production of heroin eventually finds its
way into the sew-age system and contains telltale traces
of the materials used in the process, Dr. Piret reasoned
that a system of scientifically sampling the sewage
might identify the elusive labs. "It was like Les
Miserables; they had men wading in the sewers looking
for clues," Paul Knight, a high-ranking Bureau
of Narcotics official recalled. Since no budget was
provided to the embassy for such underground projects,
Watson, willing to try anything in his quest for the
labs, obtained financing from "secret and unorthodox
channels," which were presumed by some former narcotics
officials to mean the CIA. Though monitoring the sewers
failed to pinpoint the labs (because of a plethora of
effluents and a certain difficulty in keeping agents
in the sewers undetected), it helped convince French
officials of American determination to seize labs. With
the help of informers who seemed to materialize magically,
the French raided a half dozen lab-kitchens in short
order-thus satisfying Washington, or at least touring
congressmen.
Thomas Murphy explained:
We knew we were dealing with
a chain of finite length stretching from Afyon to Harlem:
we first thought we could sever the link between Afyon
and Marseilles by suppressing the poppy, but that proved
hopeless, as there was an infinite amount of opium available
elsewhere or in the pipeline. We next thought we could
sever the link in Marseilles by closing the labs, but
we found that the labs were portable. Then we realized
that the real weak link was the couriers in the smuggling
rings.
By resorting to more or less
standard police procedures and recruiting informers
in those rings, "the Paris task force was able
to hamstring, though not eliminate, the heroin traffickers
in France."
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