This
book is based on the view that the American president
under ordinary circumstances reigns rather than rules
over the government of the United States. To be sure,
the president is nominally in command of the executive
branch of the government, and he has the authority to
fire the officials that in fact control such critical
agencies as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the
Central Intelligence Agency, the Internal Revenue Service,
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the criminal division of
the Department of Justice, etc. (though he does not
in many cases have the authority unilaterally to appoint
a replacement). In practice, however, this presidential
power is severely mitigated, if not entirely counterbalanced,
by the ability of officials in these key agencies to
disclose secrets and private evaluations to the public
that could severely damage the image of the president.
For example, in theory, six
presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon,
had the power to fire J. Edgar Hoover as head of the
FBI, but in each case he had the power to retaliate
by revealing illicit activities that occurred during
their administrations (as well as information about
the private lives of the presidents). This potential
for retribution by government officials is compounded
by the fact that in the vast complexity of the executive
branch a president cannot be sure where embarrassing
secrets exist, and he must assume that most officials
have developed subterranean channels to journalists,
who will both conceal their sources and give wide circulation
to the "leak." A president could seize control
over the various parts of the government only if he
first nullified the threat of disclosures by severing
the conduits through which dissidents might leak scandalous
information to the press. This prerequisite for power
is in fact exactly what President Nixon attempted when
he set up a series of special units which, it was hoped,
would conduct clandestine surveillance of both government
officials and newsmen during his first administration.
If he had succeeded in establishing such an investigative
force, he would have so radically changed the balance
of power within the government that it would have been
tantamount to an American coup d'etat.
A coup d'etat is not the same
as a revolution, where power is seized by those outside
the government, or even necessarily a military putsch,
whereby the military government takes over from the
civilian government; it is, as Edward Luttwak points
out in his book Coup d'Etat, "a seizure of power
within the present system." The technique of the
coup involves the use of one part of the government
to disrupt communications between other parts of the
government, confounding and paralyzing noncooperating
agencies while displacing the dissident cliques from
power. If successful, the organizers of the coup can
gain control over all the levers of real power in the
government, then legitimize the new configuration under
the name of eliminating some great evil in society.
Though it is hard to conceive of the technique of the
coup being applied to American politics, Nixon, realizing
that he securely controlled only the office of the president,
methodically moved to destroy the informal system of
leaks and independent fiefdoms. Under the aegis of a
"war on heroin," a series of new offices were
set up, by executive order, such as the Office of Drug
Abuse Law Enforcement and the Office of National Narcotics
Intelligence,- which, it was hoped, would provide the
president with investigative agencies having the potential
and the wherewithal and personnel to assume the functions
of "the Plumbers" on a far grander scale.
According to the White House scenario, these new investigative
functions would be legitimized by the need to eradicate
the evil of drug addiction.
END NOTES
Prologue The Secret Police
I've argued in my book Between
Fact and Fiction that journalist cannot hope to approach
an accurate rendering of an event without revealing
their sources. Every source who has supplied a journalist
with a part of a story has selected that bit of information,
whether it is true or false, for a particular purpose.
That purpose may be to advance his own career, to advance
the interests of the agency he works for, to discredit
an enemy, or simply to assist a reporter. The bits of
information thus supplied can be properly evaluated
only in light of the circumstances and context in which
it was given. It is not enough simply to present the
assertion of an interested party— even if it can be
shown that it is "accurate," in the trivial sense of
"accuracy" (which simply means correctly specifying
the details touching on the event). One must know who
made the disclosure and, ideally, why he made it to
that particular individual at that particular moment
in history. Concealing such information from the reader
amounts to a deliberate disguising of the event itself,
since such a process hides all the interests that selected,
shape and possibly distorted the disclosures. To be
sure, concealing the interests behind the disclosures
of sources is often in the interest of the journalist,
since it assures that his sources will continue to provide
him with information for public disclosure. This makes
his job much easier, but at the same time it prevents
any independent evaluation of his work.
In describing the efforts
of the Nixon administration to organize fear and develop
an instrument for political control, I shall identify
all my sources in these end notes, and attempt, as far
is possible, to give the circumstances and interests
behind the dis closures. Since the interviews, documents,
and material given to mc constitute only a small part
of the total amount of information on this subject,
I shall also try to specify what I do not know: the
individuals I was unable to interview, the documents
I was unable to obtain, and the issues I was unable
to resolve. What we do not know is. unfortunately, an
important, and perhaps critical, part of the story.
Legend of the Living Dead
In March, 1973, as time drew
near for the publication of my book on television news,
News from Nowhere, in The Nee Yorker magazine, I began
looking for a project that would take me on an adventure
to some of the more remote places of the world. At that
time, the United States' effort to suppress opium production
in Turkey appeared to be successful, and, as I assumed
everyone agreed on the worth of this effort, it seemed
a straightforward reporting vehicle for The New Yorker.
I had accepted the conventional wisdom that heroin caused
crime, and that by reducing the supply of heroin, crime
would be reduced. James Q. Wilson, the professor at
Harvard under whom I had done my doctoral dissertation
in political science, had just been appointed chairman
of the National Council on Drug Abuse Prevention, which
was supposed to chart the strategy of the war on drugs.
In January, 1973, 1 traveled to Cambridge to discuss
how I might report on this "war." Professor Wilson explained
to me that the presumed link between heroin and crime
had not yet been established by either the government
or social science. He said that he was reviewing studies
done on the putative link between heroin and crime and
suggested that, so far, they were inconclusive that
if I went to his office in Washington— a town house
in the new Executive Office Building— I could start
my project by reading a secret report the White House
had commissioned from the Institute for Defense Analysis
(IDA), which is a Rand type think tank.
I flew to Washington and read
the IDA report which, to my surprise, found that there
was no logical relation between the statistics that
the government gave to the public and the actual knowledge
of drug abuse. It concluded that estimates of the number
of crimes committed by drug addicts might well be exaggerated
by 500 times or more, and that the number of drug addicts
was not known. It indicated,, moreover, that most addicts
were not addicted to a single drug such as heroin, but
could change their dependency at will from (it the price
was too high) to barbiturates or to alcohol. I realized
while reading this that if these conclusions were justified,
the entire program of curtailing a single drug, such
as heroin, would not necessarily affect the crime problem,
since addicts could just as easily switch to narcotics
manufactured in the United States, such as barbiturates.
At this point, I reviewed
the history of drug in America-especially, about the
origins of the generally accepted theories about drugs
and crime. Wilson's executive assistant in Washington,
Roger Degilio, gave me access to the nearby library
of the Drug Abuse Council, a private foundation Here
I met Dr. Jerry Mandel, an offbeat sociologist who had
been a fellow at the Drug Abuse Council. When I explained
to him that I was looking for some possible sources
linking \ drugs and crime, he suggested I read the private
papers of Richmond Pearson Hobson. Mandel also recommended
me for a Drug Abuse fellowship, and in 1974 1 received
approximately $30,000 to research the subject for a
book.
the same time, the National
Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse was attempting
to compile all the systematic studies of drug abuse,
to place the problem in perspective. One member of the
commission, Joan Ganz Cooney, also became interested
in my research, and allowed me to read most of the internal
reports of the commission. It became apparent to me
that none of the available data systematically gathered
over a period of fifty years conformed to Captain Hobson's
theories about "heroin fiends." By that time I had reviewed
the literature on the subject and knew that a complete
analysis of the way politicians had used and abused
the drug problem would be the subject of my book.
Nelson Rockefeller
My account of the ways and
means in which the rhetoric of fear was ingeniously
employed by Rockefeller and his staff was heavily based
on the working papers of Rockefeller's staff. These
were provided to me by Rayburne Hesse, who was a member
of Rockefeller's Narcotics Commission and subsequently
Rockefeller's lobbyist in Washington for New York State's
drug program. As I read through these speeches, press
releases, and staff memos, it became manifestly clear
that the heroin issue was more or less rolled out at
election time to excite the public and bait the liberal
opposition, and was then quietly forgotten until the
next time such rhetoric was necessary. Jerry Mandel,
then my associate at the Drug Abuse Council, provided
me with his analysis of the "vocabulary of fear" which
Rockefeller employed. Finally, I developed the general
framework for examining Rockefeller as a master in psychological
warfare by reading through old State Department files
from World War 11, when Rockefeller was coordinator
of information for Latin America. Originally, research
was undertaken for an article on the Rockefeller family
for the Sunday Times of London. Information about Hudson
Institute reports and other private information available
through Rockefeller was provided to me by Mark Moore,
whom I met earlier, when he was studying at Harvard.
Later he became a consultant for the Hudson Institute,
and then for the Drug Enforcement Administration, in
Washington, D.C.
G. Gordon Liddy: The Will
to Power
For two years I tried without
success to interview G. Gordon Liddy.
Many of those who had worked
with him in various undercover enterprises of the Nixon
administration, such as the Fielding or Watergate break-ins,
had attributed their participation to Liddy's all-persuasive
influence. After discussing Liddy with his employer,
Eugene Rossides, and with Charls R. Walker, the deputy
secretary of the treasury, I realized that Liddy had
taken "the drug menace" to its logical conclusion in
terms of law enforcement. If an epidemic was allegedly
threatening to destroy the nation, a national police
force was necessary. I also spoke to those who worked
with Liddy on the working committee of the Ad Hoc Committee
on Narcotics Enforcement, including Jim Ludlum, of the
CIA, and Arthur Downey, of the National Security Council.
Again I was told of Liddy's precise articulation of
the drug issue and his powers of persuasion.
I was not able to interview
Liddy. I arranged with Liddy's law partner, Peter Maouroulis,
for Playboy magazine to pay Liddy for an interview,
which I would conduct. In preparing the interview I
hoped to answer a number of questions that were still
outstanding as to Liddy's articulation of the drug issue.
Playboy offered Liddy $3,000 for the interview, and
his lawyer asked for $5,000. Before the negotiations
could be completed, however, Liddy decided to put the
matter in the hands of a literary agent, Sterling Lord.
Apparently in the hopes of obtaining a much larger contract
from a book publisher, Lord then terminated the negotiations
with Playboy.
Finally, I've quoted from
a very impressive letter that Liddy wrote to his wife
from prison, and which Harper's magazine published in
1974; a television interview with Liddy, which Mike
Wallace did on CBS in 1974; and an article that Liddy
wrote describing his capture of Timothy Leary.
The Education of Richard Nixon
The definitive biography of
Richard Nixon has yet to be written. Although commentators
have focused on either his alleged misdeeds or his presumed
breakthroughs in foreign policy, no one has explained,
at least to my satisfaction, how Nixon rose from being
a penniless naval officer in 1946 to vice-president
of the United States six years later. Although his meteoric
career as congressman, senator, and vice-presidential
nominee may be accounted for simply by the Cold War
rhetoric against the "enemy within" which he articulated
so brilliantly in this period, I do not find this conventional
explanation entirely persuasive. His ascendancy might
also be related to people and factors that have managed
to remain in the background. For example, as a negotiator
for the Navy, he dealt with defense manufacturers and
received early support from Howard Hughes and other
defense suppliers in Southern California. The role these
men and their resources played in his rise has not yet
been fully clarified.
In discussing Nixon's childhood,
I relied very heavily on Theodore H. White's Breach
of Faith. White, an extraordinary historian in his own
right who masquerades in journalist's clothing, has
shown how Nixon was shaped by childhood poverty in a
way perhaps no other modern president has been, and
how one of his main drives in life was to escape that
condition.
I also found useful Joe McGinniss's
The Selling of the President and Evert Clark and Nicholas
Horrock's book Contrabandista!
I never had the opportunity
to interview Nixon himself, but I interviewed three
of his chief speech writers, Patrick J. Buchanan, Raymond
Price, and William Safire. Ray Price, a soft-spoken
man who provided me with some of the more trenchant
analyses of the Nixon administration, had serious doubts
about the practicality of playing with popular fears
for political purposes. Safire, who did not involve
himself in the disputes over how to present law-and-order
issues, argues convincingly that Nixon himself was in
firm control of the rhetoric surrounding the various
domestic issues and used whichever speech writer best
fit his purpose at the moment.
Safire insists that although
Nixon admired Rockefeller's political tactics and skill
in New York State, he didn't entirely trust his judgment
as a politician. (According to Safire, this antipathy
was reflected in Rockefeller's failure to reply to letters
that Nixon personally wrote him.) Yet, Buchanan suggests
that Nixon modeled much of his rhetoric on Rockefeller's.
A comparison of' speeches bears this out.
Nixon also appointed a number
of men who were highly active in the Rockefeller campaign
to superintend his narcotics program in 1969. Most of
the metaphors used by Nixon, such as "growing cancer,"
were, in any case, used earlier by Rockefeller.
The Bete-Noire Strategy
I first encountered the bete-noire
strategy" by accident in 1970. William Shawn, the editor
of The New Yorker, had asked me to investigate the deaths
of twenty-eight Black Panthers, allegedly at the hands
of police officials. I hired one of my students, Gary
Rosenthal, as my research assistant, and asked him to
collect as much information as he could about each of
the twenty-eight cases. Less than a week later he called
me and seemed very distressed. He explained that although
the number twenty-eight had been repeated in the press
for more than a year, even a superficial investigation
showed that no more than ten or twelve Panthers had
died, and even then the circumstances were fairly ambiguous.
We thus wrote a story about reporting rather than about
murder. Later Pat Moynihan explained to me that for
the better part of a year he had attempted to convince
the Justice Department to defend itself against charges
of genocide, but that he was turned down because Mitchell
"didn't see the dangers in being labeled repressive."
In Washington, Moynihan introduced me to Richard Moore,
an advisor to Nixon who had been reassigned to the Department
of Justice to assist Mitchell in gaining more favorable
public relations. Moore explained to me that his problem
was that what was deemed favorable public relations
depended on "what public you were trying to relate to."
And the public that Nixon and Mitchell were seeking
to relate to was the ,'more conservative [element]."
If Attorney General Mitchell appeared to be repressive,
in the sense that he was "repressing" criminals, the
Nixon speech writers considered it to be favorable public
relations. Moore himself disagreed with this bete-noire
strategy and tried to reverse it, although there was
little hope of succeeding.
Much of the history and analysis
that I present on the Justice Department's traditional
war on crime is based on the writings of Victor Navasky,
who spent three years examining the Justice Department
for his book Kennedy Justice. The view I present of
the Justice Department under Nixon is based on interviews
I've had with various members of the department over
a three-year period, including former Attorney General
Richard Kleindienst; Assistant Attorney General Henry
Petersen; Assistant Attorney General for Administration
Leo Pellerzi; Donald Santarelli, former director of
the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration; John
Ingersoll, director of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous
Drugs, and his deputy, Richard Callahan; U.S. Attorney
Myles Ambrose; U.S. Attorney Thomas O'Malley; William
Ryan, a prosecutor in the criminal division; and U.S.
Attorney Earl Silbert, who prosecuted the case involving
the original Watergate burglary. Even though some of
these men were Democrats and opposed the Nixon administration,
they all showed an extraordinary amount of respect and
affection for John Mitchell. Ingersoll, for example,
who was appointed by Ramsey Clark said that he found
Mitchell so "enlightened" when he discussed legal issues
that "at times, when John Mitchell was talking about
the administration of justice, and I closed my eyes,
I thought it was Ramsey Clark talking."
Egil Krogh and Jeffrey Donfeld
were also extremely helpful in reviewing memoranda they
wrote. Pat Moynihan also provided me with a general
overview of what took place in the struggle to fulfill
the politics of law and order. When I first presented
some of these arguments in The Public Interest magazine,
James Q. Wilson raised some objections to my characterization
of the law-and-order issue. He suggested that it wasn't
all " politics" or "image making," but there were serious
men sincerely interested in diminishing crime.
The Krogh File
When files are provided to
a journalist, it must be asked why they were made available.
Since the meaning of files can be altered by excluding
certain documents or including bogus ones, they have
historic value only if one can evaluate the circumstances
in which they were provided. Is the donor attempting
to advance a bureaucratic interest? Is he trying to
glorify his own historical role? Or is he attempting
to denigrate the reputations of others Although journalists
rarely, if ever, identify their sources, or explain
the motives of their sources in providing them with
information, such contextual information is vital if
anyone is to make a reasonable evaluation of the truthfulness
or value of the source.
This chapter is based heavily
on files provided to me by Egil Krogh, Jr. I first attempted
to interview Krogh before his role in the break-in of
Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office was revealed, but Krogh
refused to see me, saying, "I'm writing a book myself."
After he was indicted, pleaded guilty, and served six
months in prison, I called him again. His fortunes had
changed drastically: in less than a year he had gone
from being undersecretary of transportation to an unemployed
former convict. Any of those whom he had known in government,
and who had deferred to his judgment, now shunned him.
Although he worked at home, he was desperately trying
to get back into public life and agreed to appear on
any talk show or give any lecture available. I was then
affiliated with the Drug Abuse Council, with whom I
discussed the possibility of obtaining a grant or possibly
a fellowship for Krogh to write his intended book on
drug policies. He said that although he thought it was
extremely important to make public his experiences in
drug policy, he was too exhausted by his recent experiences
to write a book. I then suggested doing a long interview
with him for The Public Interest magazine in which he
could discuss fully his role in formulating the drug
policy of the Nixon administration. Since he was flat
broke, and had little prospect of earning any money
to support himself or his family, I mentioned that perhaps
I could arrange a grant from The Public Interest for
his cooperation in this interview. I spoke to the editor,
Irving Kristol, who made $2,000 available to Krogh for
cooperating in the interview.
Krogh's motive was only partly
mercenary. He was genuinely elated at the prospect of
working with Irving Kristol, whom he greatly admired,
as well as at the prospect of earning the money.
We began meeting for breakfast
on a regular basis in the fall of 1974 and prepared
the general outlines of the interview. To help familiarize
me with his role in the drug program, he gave me ten
cases of files, internal documents, notes written for
the president's attention, analyses of the drug problem,
Domestic Council issue papers, and correspondence. The
"Krogh File," as I called it, was not complete. These
were only the files that he had brought home to use
in working on the book that was never completed, and
the files of his assistant, Jeffrey Donfeld, who had
sent him material to help in his research. The rest
of his files had been seized by the government when
he became involved in the Watergate affair and were
not available, even to him. I thus worked for several
weeks attempting to fill in the files and note the gaps.
I cannot be sure, of course, how honest he was in recollecting
information that would damage his reputation or that
of his associates, though he did not seem to hesitate
in providing me with embarrassing documents and insights.
In any case, this was supposed to be Krogh's version
of the event, and I intended to do a great deal of research
on other versions.
The article for The Public
Interest never turned out to be an interview with Egil
Krogh. Irving Kristol's co-editor, Daniel Bell, was
concerned that a straight interview might appear to
be a defense of the Nixon administration, and we were
all concerned about the serious gaps in the Krogh file.
I therefore agreed to write an article which would be
heavily based on the Krogh interview, but not limited
to it. The article, "The Krogh File-The Politics of
'Law and Order,' " finally published in the spring,
1975, issue of The Public Interest. It understandably
disappointed Krogh, since it was my point of view on
the issue rather than his.
By basing research on the
available files of one person, or even of a group of
persons, one naturally tends to focus and perhaps exaggerate
that person's role to the neglect of the roles played
by others (whose files are not available). Certainly
the administration's law-and-order policy did not spring
full grown from the head of a small cabal of Nixon strategists;
like most other government programs, it gradually emerged
from a series of proposals, critiques, counterproposals,
and reformulations drafted and redrafted by a multitude
of hands representing diverse interests
. One level of ideas came from
scholars, both inside and outside the administration,
who had a non-political interest in the substantive
problem of controlling crime. Another level of suggestions
(and objections) came from the heads of bureaus within
the executive branch interested in expanding their activity
in the realm of law enforcement. Finally, as might be
expected in the wake of any successful presidential
campaign, a third layer of ideas came from political
advisors to the president interested in maintaining
a favorable image of him in the public mind. Krogh,
however, became the funnel through which these ideas
passed to the Domestic Council and then to the president,
and eventually, through his analysis and his choice
of staff, Krogh played a heavy role in the formulation
of the drug policy.
Operation Intercept
One interesting way of studying
an event, at least one that takes place in the American
media, is to study the various press briefings (which
are available under the Freedom of Information Act)
and the resulting stories. In this case the disparity
between the briefings coming from the Departments of
Justice and the Treasury (Task Force One) and those
from the State Department illuminated the sharp bureaucratic
conflict of interest and the resulting battle of the
leaks. Further information about the State Department's
effort to counterbalance the favorable publicity which
Operation Intercept was receiving came from Juan DeOnis,
a resourceful New York Times reporter whom I met in
Ankara, Turkey, while we were both stranded by the war
in Cyprus in July, 1974.
Egil Krogh's files were again
useful for reviewing Operation Intercept memoranda.
Arthur Downey, who was with the National Security Council
and worked as a staff person on the ad hoc committee,
described the internal conflicts to me after he left
government service. Pat Moynihan described the earlier
heroin crusades from a different point of view.
In February, 1975, 1 interviewed
a number of the Mexican officials in Mexico City on
the diplomatic ramifications of Operation Intercept.
They were all grateful to
the State Department for reversing the direction of
favorable publicity which Task Force One was then providing
for Operation Intercept.
The War of the Poppies
In June, 1974, 1 met with
Arthur Downey and Ambassador William Handley in the
restaurant of the Mayflower Hotel. Four years earlier,
Downey had been on the ad hoc working group for suppressing
the Turkish opium supply, and Handley was ambassador
to Turkey. After the initial victory in the Turkish
heroin crusade, Handley was transferred to Washington,
where he replaced Nelson Gross (who was on the verge
of being indicted for criminal offenses) as senior advisor
to the secretary of state on narcotics control. Downey
returned to private law practice in Washington. Less
than a month before our meeting, Handley had been abruptly
fired from his position because he opposed a White House
plan to begin the cultivation of poppies in the United
States. The White House, under increasing pressure from
pharmaceutical manufacturers to provide them with a
source of codeine, decided that the most feasible source
for future codeine would be American poppies. Handley,
who had persuaded the Turks to stop growing poppies
in their country, believed that the Turks would never
stand for Americans' replacing Turkish poppies with
American poppies, and would return to cultivating opium
themselves. He brought the issue to Melvin Laird, who
was then advising President Nixon. Laird decided in
favor of the White House decision, and Handley retired
from government.
Under these circumstances,
Handley was willing to talk about the pressures brought
upon him when he was ambassador to Turkey. He understood
the Turks better than most of the newcomers such as
Egil Krogh, Gordon Liddy and Eugene Rossides, who had
been issuing curt and often ridiculous negotiating instructions
to his embassy. As Downey was at the time in the White
House, he was able to add some details which even Handley
didn't know.
After that meeting I decided
to go to Turkey, to see how American aid and diplomatic
pressure were being put to use. Esquire magazine agreed
to pay for the trip in return for an article (which
it later published under the title "The Incredible War
Against the Poppies" [December, 19741). Soon after I
reached Ankara, Handley's prediction came true, and
the Turks suspended the ban on opium production. I thus
was able to hear the Turkish account of the diplomatic
pressure from various foreign-ministry officials who
were anxious to explain the reasons for the Turkish
decision. The new American ambassador, William Macomber,
and the director of the United States Information Agency
bureau in Ankara, Edward Harper, also briefed me on
this situation, and pointed out the strategic importance
of American radar bases in Turkey.
The French Connection
Arthur Watson was not a diplomat
by profession: his father had founded the IBM Corporation
and was one of its largest stockholders. He had always
sought a public purpose in life. While he was ambassador
to France, unfortunately, he developed a drinking problem,
which was widely reported after an incident with a stewardess
on a transatlantic flight. As it turned out, a number
of the leading crusaders in the heroin war were themselves
victims of alcohol but, like Watson, steadfastly refused
to recognize it as drug addiction.
My meeting with Ambassador
Watson in June, 1974, was arranged by Thomas P. Murphy,
who still served Watson as aide-de-camp and friend.
The three of us drove from the offices of Watson's investment
company in Connecticut to a roadhouse for lunch. I offered
to pay on my expense account, but Watson answered wryly,
"One of the few ways I have of spending my wealth is
buying others lunch." It was a thoroughly enjoyable
meal. Murphy, a clever and amusing journalist, described
many of the adventures that he and the ambassador had
during their drug crusade in France. Watson had then
piloted his own private plane, and together, a curious
team, they had flown back and forth between Marseilles
and Paris. Watson recalled one embarrassing moment,
when a French official in Marseilles gave them a packet
of heroin to fly back to police officials in Paris.
During the flight Ambassador Watson realized-and joked
about the predicament that might arise if the plane
crashed on the return flight, and heroin was discovered
on their persons. During this lunch Ambassador Watson
also described with great humor and insight the episode
of the "sniffer" and the descent into the Marseilles
sewers.
Two weeks later I went to
Paris and visited the science attache, Edgar Piret,
in the United States embassy. Piret, a former university
professor, gave me the usual briefing that officials
give to the press, describing the routes from Turkey
to Marseilles and then to America. When I told him that
I was more interested in the sniffer that he had invented,
he looked at me with horror. "That's highly classified
information.... Only about twenty people in the world
know about the sniffer." Then he warned me that if I
published information about it, I would destroy the
entire "sniffing operation." I told him that I had heard
that the sniffer had already been dismantled and returned
to the United States. He looked sad for a moment, as
if recollecting a deceased pet, then told me that someday
it might be revived, and that it was best not to give
out the modus operandi. He then reached into his desk
and produced photographic albums, with hundreds of nostalgic
pictures of himself, Thomas Murphy, and Ambassador Watson
in Marseilles. He had gone there every weekend with
the "team" to chart out the smoke plumes and the wind
directions that various odors might take. He suggested
that designing the sniffer had been "an unusual adventure."
Just as I was leaving, I mentioned
the efforts to detect heroin in the sewers of Marseilles.
The look of horror returned in his face, and he said,
"No one knows about that ... perhaps only three people
in the world." To reassure him, I told him that Ambassador
Watson had mentioned it to me. As I walked him to his
car in the embassy parking lot, he again tried to swear
me to secrecy.
I next saw Paul Knight, the
director of the regional office of the Bureau of Narcotics
and Dangerous Drugs in France. He was one of the few
BNDD agents who graduated from Harvard, and I found
in general that those who viewed themselves as part
of an "Ivy League network" were more prone to talk to
journalists. When I mentioned the secret sewers of Marseilles
to Knight he described the adventure as "completely
ridiculous." He then offered to allow me to interview
his agents, who, he said, would provide me with "some
exciting gangbuster stories."
The Panama Canal
One of the most enjoyable
parts of this investigation was interviewing American
ambassadors in a trip around the world. I spoke to Moynihan
in India, William Cargo in Nepal, William Macomber in
Turkey, Richard Helms in Iran, and, when I returned
to the United States, Ambassadors Arthur Watson, Robert
Sayre, William Handley, and Loy Henderson. These men
all gave precise and extremely perceptive descriptions
of the effects of White House narcotics policy on foreign
policy. They could not help but be persuasive since
they were extremely well briefed on the countries in
which they represented the United States, and because
they had no political interest at stake. They also seemed
to have a healthy detachment from the situations they
described. However, the ability of ambassadors to present
a skillful case may in itself obscure the fact that
they see the world from one particular vantage point,
which may tend to diminish the importance of domestic
trends and policies
. Consider, for example, the
case of Moynihan. When he served in the White House
as an assistant to the president for domestic affairs
he pressed relentlessly to implement a narcotics-control
program in Turkey, and when our ambassador there, William
Handley, seemed to be moving too slowly in implementing
the president's policy, Moynihan suggested that the
White House take a more direct role in the treaty negotiations
in Turkey, even if it meant superseding or recalling
the ambassador. After Moynihan resigned from the White
House in 1971, he was appointed ambassador to India.
When, however, the White House pressed him for immediate
action in controlling the production of opium in India
(in this case they wanted to expand it, not contract
it), Moynihan objected to such White House interference,
and pointed out in telegrams that the authority of the
embassy should not be undermined for purposes of carrying
out a domestic policy at home. As one White House staff
assistant noted, "What we have here is a case of role
reversal." The effect of the location of ambassadors
on their perspectives of problems obviously cannot be
discounted. Later, as ambassador to the UN, Moynihan
espoused an entirely different position.
The description of the episode
in Panama is based mainly on interviews with John Ingersoll
and Robert Sayre (who was then an inspector general
in the State Department). I also relied heavily on Evert
Clark and Nicholas Horrock's book Contrabandista! and
John Finlator's book The Drugged Nation. The White House
pressures were described for me by Egil Krogh.
The Narcotics Business: John
Ingersoll's Version
One serious problem in reporting
an event is that witnesses tend to see it, Rashomen-like,
from their own vantage point. This is especially true
when dealing with government officials, each of whom
tends to reconstruct an event or policy from the perspective
of the agency with which he has, or has had, an involvement.
Even if one interviews all the actors concerned in a
particular drama, their versions of it do not necessarily
fit together; nor do the parts equal the whole. It is
not a question of who is telling the truth and who is
lying; it is a question of what one tends to emphasize
or de-emphasize in rendering an explanation. John Ingersoll,
Eugene Rossides, and Egil Krogh spent considerable time
with me attempting an account of the "narcotics business"
that was consistent with their particular hierarchy
of values. There were no glaring discrepancies or contradictions
in the three accounts; nevertheless, each blamed the
others for the continuing bureaucratic strife in the
early days of the drug program. When I discussed this
problem early in my research with James Q. Wilson, he
suggested that the only way one could give an honest
rendering of the event was to tell in sequence the various
stories without attempting to pass judgment. Readers,
however, expect some narrative guidance or resolution.
I had over the course of writing
this book fifteen interviews with John Ingersoll, and
nine lunches with him. I first met him in the spring
of 1973 after he was abruptly and cruelly fired from
the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs by President
Nixon. We first had lunch at the Italian Pavilion in
New York City, and we discussed his ideas for writing
a book about his experiences in the "narcotics business."
Unlike Egil Krogh, Ingersoll was a discreet man__ a
professional policeman who knew what to say and what
not to say. He was willing to relate his ideas about
narcotics and some opinions about the Nixon administration
and his tenure in it, but for a long time-our first
five lunches- he resisted revealing any specific information
to me. After Egil Krogh gave me his memoranda and files,
the situation changed with Ingersoll. I now had information
he wanted, and as I began revealing it piecemeal, he
began to explain the intricacies of the "business" he
was involved in for six formative years. When we began
our interviews, Ingersoll believed that he had been
fired simply because he was not helping the Nixon administration
in its efforts in the 1972 election. As I revealed more
and more of the Krogh file, and especially how the White
House intended to infiltrate and use Ingersoll's BNDD,
he began theorizing that there may have been a more
sinister motive in his removal. He suggested an attempt
to set up a White House investigative agency which would
do the bidding of John Ehrlichman and Richard Nixon.
He referred to Egil Krogh and his young assistants as
the "Boy Scouts," and had little respect for them because
they knew almost nothing about narcotics or crime. On
the other hand, he respected those in the Department
of Justice-especially John Mitchell.
After he left Washington,
Ingersoll went to work for IBM in New York, in charge
of security, and I occasionally met with him in the
offices of that corporation. As I would go over documents
with him from the Krogh file, he would often break out
in laughter-shocked or amused at what the "Boy Scouts"
were planning for him. I never believed that Ingersoll
gave me the full story. He usually gave me as little
information as he could, but whatever be told me was
never controverted by other evidence I found.
Most of the books written
about the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, or
about its predecessor, the Bureau of Narcotics, tend
to be a string of anecdotes of the adventures of gang-busting
drug agents. In this genre are the books The Protectors
and The Murderers, by Harry J. Anslinger, written mainly
to glorify the work of agents and possibly to build
their morale. The only account to date that I am aware
of which deals with the inner workings of the drug bureaucracies
is John Finlator's book The Drugged Nation. For the
history of the narcotics program I relied heavily on
Dr. David Musto's book The American Disease.
The Border War: Eugene Rossides's
Version
A large portion of the news
about law enforcement is authored by agencies within
the government, whose agents intentionally leak (or
perhaps, more accurately, plant) their stories to newsmen
in order to advance an interest of their particular
agency or block that of a competing agency. Such news
planting may be done in "seminars," in which newsmen
are briefed about the exciting exploits of an agency;
in news releases, which usually single out one event;
or in the private briefing of a newsman. Eugene Rossides
was a master in the last of these techniques.
Even after he left the government
to join former Secretary of State William Rogers in
private law practice, he continued his skirmishes on
behalf of the Treasury Department. When he briefed me
on the narcotics policies of the Nixon administration,
I was impressed with his precision and shrewdness. I
knew that as a Greek-Cypriot American, and as former
public-relations advisor to Prime Minister Makarios,
of Cyprus, Rossides had been waging a campaign to penalize
Turkey. I, of course, also knew from my interviews with
John Ingersoll that Rossides was an "enemy" of Ingersoll
and the BNDD. Nevertheless, I was impressed with his
arguments for not centralizing the law-enforcement agencies
of the government under the Department of Justice, and
admired the skills with which he mobilized support in
Congress and the press for his position. At one point
in early 1974, after I had prepared an article for The
New Yorker magazine which he (wrongly) assumed was favorable
to the Treasury Department, he called me at my office
at The New Yorker to persuade me to rush the article
into publication. He said, "Ed, you're a key man on
my team, but I have to call the plays, and we have to
get the story out." When I replied that I had no power
over the publication schedule of The New Yorker, he
suggested that he might himself speak to the editor
and warn him of the "impending dangers to civil liberties"
that he argued would arise unless the Treasury Department
maintained its role in the war on drugs. While I dissuaded
him from speaking to the editor, I appreciated his manipulative
skills: he knew which levers to press with The New Yorker,
such as endangered civil liberties.
Rossides also arranged for
me to see Vernon "Mike" Acree, who replaced Myles Ambrose
as commissioner of customs. Acree in turn arranged at
Rossides's suggestion for me to interview some former
employees of the BNDD who are now working for the Customs
Bureau. The former employees, no doubt under instructions
from Commissioner Acree, provided me with vivid and
dramatic details of the inefficiency of the BNDD (which
I listened to but reserved judgment on).
In order to pierce the party
line at the Treasury Department, I also interviewed
several civil servants who participated in the "border
war" with Customs, including Mort Bach and Robert Esterland.
Like Rossides, these men did not deviate from the perspective
of the Treasury Department.
Conflict of Interests :Egil
Krogh's Version
One serious problem with the
technique of interviewing participants in the government
process-or in any other event, for that matter-is that
in retrospect they tend to assign rational motives to
their actions. They know what resulted from their deeds,
and they reconstruct the chain of happenings so that
all connects logically. Motives that might be deemed
in hindsight to be irrational are often neglected. Krogh
thus reconstructed the struggle against the bureaucracy
so that it all seemed to proceed from a logical motive
of putting into effect a more efficient and unified
program.
Yet, in reading over Krogh's
own file, it appears that there were many instances
of irrationality. Members of the White House staff showed
anger at outsiders and at moments became preoccupied
with demonstrating their power-apparently for no other
sake than the demonstration. For example, at one point
Krogh told a Chicago psychiatrist, Daniel Freedman,
that he would "destroy him" if he stood in the way of
one of his programs. Jeffrey Donfeld threatened to "put
away" in an insane asylum one prominent New York psychiatrist,
Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber, for advocating drug-free
therapy. Such displays of anger and power are all too
human and occur in almost any administration; they are
not the moments, however, that one remembers, or considers
relevant, when being interviewed by a journalist.
The White House staff saw
all other members of the government outside their circle
as bureaucrats who usually failed to respond, or who
responded too slowly, to their orders. In such circumstances
many of the actions later attributed by the participants
to a struggle against a recalcitrant bureaucracy might
well have been instances of the exertion of personal
power, or even misunderstandings revolving around such
exertions of power by men in their late twenties or
early thirties (most of the "bureaucrats" were in their
early fifties).
In relating the versions of
this struggle rendered by John Ingersoll, Eugene Rossides,
and Egil Krogh, it is important to keep in mind that
each focused on the more logical explanations of his
actions and neglected others. Such a defect in reconstructing
an event cannot be remedied by collating one interview
with another, since each participant is biased in the
same direction of "rational explanation."
As far as I know, only one
periodical covered this particular war within the Nixon
administration, and that was the National Journal, which
reports on federal-policy-making. In presenting Krogh's
version I relied on the series of interviews I did with
him in the fall of 1974 ( end note for Chapter 6).
The Magic-bullet Solution
In reporting on any medical
or scientific controversy, one is confounded by the
tendencies of scientists to produce simultaneously both
a "hard" and a "soft" explanation for their experiments
or programs. In the case of methadone the hard claim
was that the drug reduced crime. Doctors operating methadone
clinics thus told politicians and journalists that each
program was saving the city millions of dollars, since
without the programs their patients would be stealing
that amount (Dr. Dole actually put the total saved in
the billions of dollars). Journalists reported, as in
Look magazine, that methadone was a "Cinderella drug"
that once swallowed by a criminal addict transformed
him into a decent, law-abiding citizen.
However, when some methadone
programs began to show that when addicts substituted
methadone for heroin they actually increased the amount
of violent crime they committed-since methadone made
them more "effective" and gave them more time to pursue
their "business" (for example, muggings, robberies,
etc.)-methadone doctors redefined their explanations
in "soft" terms. The soft claim of methadone treatment
was that it brought isolated individuals into a social
context. By forcing them to report several times a week
for their daily dosages of methadone, to which they
were now addicted, it maintained them on a sort of "chemical
parole." And once on this chemical parole, they could
be counseled, guided, and rehabilitated by doctors and
other employees of the treatment centers. In the soft
explanation methadone did not have any sort of blockade
effect to prevent the addict from using heroin. Rather,
since his urine was examined daily, there were strong
incentives for him to use the addictive drug provided
by the government-methadone-rather than the illicit
drug provided by the pushers-heroin. Since heroin addicts
were commonly arrested for crimes against persons or
property. When other doctors attempted to replicate
the methadone experiments, they found that the great
majority of their patients used heroin as well as methadone,
and that there was no blockade effect.
Finally, it turned out that
most of the doctors involved in the methadone program
did not themselves believe in the Dole-Nyswander definition
of heroin addiction as a "metabolic disease," and the
evidence seemed far stronger that addicts returned to
heroin not because of any irreversible change in their
chemistry but because their environment (poverty, discrimination,
etc.) stayed essentially the same when they returned
from their treatment program. When the article in The
Public Interest, now entitled "Methadone: The Forlorn
Hope," was finally published in the summer issue in
1974, almost all the serious critics of the article,
such as Dr. DuPont, readily admitted that these three
findings were correct-i.e., that methadone by itself
did not reduce crime, that it did not blockade addicts
against heroin, and that heroin addiction was not a
"metabolic disease"-but they then resorted to the soft
defense. They stated that all the responsible doctors
and social scientists involved in the program viewed
methadone simply as a lure to entice addicts into treatment
programs, where the real "rehabilitation effort" would
take place. They also suggested that I had reviewed
only the early results of Dole and Nyswander, which
they acknowledged were seriously flawed, and argued
that the newer programs had better statistical methods
of evaluation. In any case, other programs had made
their data less vulnerable to investigations by outsiders.
Eventually, the doctors operating
methadone programs became far more sophisticated and
hired public-relations firms to answer criticisms and
to work behind the scenes to prevent the publication
of critical analyses. At one point, Dinitia McCarthy,
a young NBC television producer who had won an Emmy
award, produced a half hour documentary criticizing
methadone clinics in New York for various reasons, pointing
to the disparity between their hard claims of crime
reduction and the actual crime statistics, which were
rising in New York. The public-relations firm representing
several methadone clinics hired private investigators
to find out about her private life, and wrote intimidating
letters to her executive producers at NBC.
The documents I quote from
in reviewing how the Nixon administration became involved
in methadone all come from Egil Krogh's file. After
I obtained this file, which was the year after I had
written my original article on methadone, I went to
California to interview Jeffrey Donfeld.
At the time of Watergate,
Donfeld was the deputy director of the special-action
office, and in line for a very high position in the
Department of the Interior. After Krogh and Ehrlichman
fell from power, however, the Civil Service Commission
held up his appointment, and he took a long trip to
Israel to "rethink" his service in government. He then
resigned from the special-action office and returned
to Los Angeles, where he took a job with a law firm
in Century City.
As we reviewed the documents,
which included handwritten notes that he had taken at
cabinet-level meetings, he recalled with great enthusiasm
his days of power in the White House. For one thing,
he had been earning three times as much as he was now
earning as a junior lawyer in California. For another,
people had deferred to his judgments. Because of his
change in station, I think he was a good deal more open
in reviewing these documents, and he himself still believed
in the efficacy of the methadone program. After our
final meeting I arranged with a friend of mine who was
a professor at UCLA to have a graduate seminar, with
Jeffrey Donfeld, in the political-science department.
Upon reflection, I believe that Donfeld had more insights
about the real nature of White House politics than most
professors.
The June Scenario
I found the June, 1971, scenario
for the creation of a heroin crusade among the thousands
of memoranda that Egil Krogh gave me for preparing an
interview with him in The Public Interest magazine.
The actual scenario was scribbled in pen on legal-size
yellow pages by his staff assistant, Jeffrey Donfeld.
Some of the most interesting
documents in the Krogh file were the various drafts
of President Nixon's June 17, 1971, speech, and the
comments on it by various staff assistants. The speech
writers had tried to specify the number of addicts in
America (300,000), the nature of heroin addiction (a
fatal, irreversible disease), and the amount of crime
which could be attributed to heroin addiction ($10 billion
per year). As the war of memos and counter-memos proceeded
in the drafting of the speech, it became painfully clear
that the government had not really established any of
these facts. Various estimates had put the number of
addicts between 50,000 and 600,000 but without any consensus
as to the correct number; there was considerable doubt
about the nature of heroin addiction (whether addicts
could be detoxified or had to be maintained on heroin
for the rest of their lives); and no agency had any
firm idea of how much crime was committed by addicts
(although $10 billion was an obvious exaggeration).
One early draft of the speech
claimed that all organized crime in the world was based
on the heroin traffic, but that again proved to be a
completely unsubstantiated claim which was deleted from
the final draft. As non-facts were winnowed out of the
final draft, and as speech writers glossed over the
glaring gaps in the state of the knowledge about drugs,
it became clear that the crusade was based on very little
hard information on drugs.
The strategists at the White
House were primarily concerned that the president, and
not Congress, receive credit for these "initiatives."
In pasting together the vampire metaphors from old speeches
of Rockefeller's and Nixon's, the speech writers tried
not to make it appear that the "epidemic" began in the
Nixon administration. A good deal of rewriting was necessary
to collapse periods of time and numbers.
The embarrassment of John
Ingersoll, the director of the BNDD, over his inability
to pin down statistics for the president was a vital
part of this scenario. Ingersoll recalls that his isolation
from the White House began after the president publicly
humiliated him, at the cabinet meeting televised by
ABC, by asking him "hard questions." Donfeld acknowledged
that he had briefed the president on these "gaps" in
what was known about narcotics addicts. Meanwhile, Krogh
had complained to Ehrlichman that Ingersoll was avoiding
the "difficult tasks" and not cooperating with the White
House.
My main sources for this chapter,
other than the Krogh file and Jeffrey Donfeld's elaboration
of it, were interviews with Egil Krogh, Donald Santarelli
(who told me about the showing of Triumph of the Will),
and John Ingersoll.
Bureau of Assassinations
The assassination bureau was
not a subject that any of the former employees of BNDD
or the White House desired to discuss. The mention of
a "$100 million clandestine law enforcement fund" came
quite unexpectedly from the files provided by Egil Krogh.
Until then, I doubted the various stories I had heard
circulating about assassinations. Krogh, when I called
his attention to these documents, was at first abashed,
and then explained that most of the activities had taken
place in the ungovernable regions of Southeast Asia.
Jeffrey Donfeld admitted sheepishly,
when I pressed him as to what type of law enforcement
could possibly be clandestine, that its main purpose
was "assassinations." Walter Minnick, who supervised
the international activities of the narcotics program
for Krogh, said that although the program was then not
Put into effect, the plan involved assassinations. And
Nelson Gross's administrative assistant, Roger Degilio,
also confirmed that "clandestine law enforcement" was
a euphemism for assassination, but he could add no details
of the specific program. Arthur Downey, Kissinger's
National Security Council aide assigned to the drug
program, said that the "black stuff" had been discussed
and even expedited, but he refused to be specific. I
then went back to John Ingersoll, who had been extremely
cooperative and candid with me, and showed him the outline
of the discussion with the president. Ingersoll asserted
that his agency had never received $ 100 million, but
he suggested that perhaps it was retained under White
House control for their own purposes. Mark Moore, who
was director of planning for the drug agency in 1973-74,
told me that there had been an appropriation of discretionary
money which wasn't "accountable," but he had no idea
what it was supposed to be used for.
I was first told about Howard
Hunt's attempt to recruit a team of Cuban hit men by
Martin Dardis, the assistant state's attorney in Miami.
He had an affidavit from Eugenio R. Martinez describing
Hunt's request. I was unfortunately not able to identify
the Cubans whom Hunt was trying to recruit for this
program.
The briefing on the possibility
of assassinations which the National Commission on Marijuana
and Drug Abuse received on its "heroin trip" was provided
to me by Joan Cooney, a member of the commission, who
was extremely helpful in providing all the files Of
the commission for my original study of the link between
heroin and crime.
Colonel Conein's dealings
in assassination equipment were brought to light by
Lowell P. Weicker, Jr., Republican senator from Connecticut,
who had been conducting an investigation of CIA involvement
with other government agencies, and had obtained a catalogue
of the equipment described to Colonel Conein (see the
New York Times, January 23, 1975).
Missing pieces still remained
to be found in the puzzle. Although I attempted to trace
the 1972 supplemental appropriation for the assassination
fund, it seemed literally to disappear somewhere in
the Office of Management and Budget. About $50 million
was given to the BNDD, but this supposedly was for recruiting
new agents and buying equipment. Since this money was
to be "unaccountable," it Is possible that a portion
of the $50 million was in fact the first payment into
the assassination fund.
The Screw Worm
The "screw worm- never surfaced
in the press and proved an elusive research project.
The first hint of biological warfare came from Myles
J. Ambrose, the burly former consultant to the president
and head of the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement.
In the course of our discussing various unorthodox proposals
that came up in the ad hoc cabinet committee, he mentioned
that at one time it was contemplated that some sort
of "bug" might be dropped on Turkey. I next asked Arthur
Downey, who recalled some talk of developing a poppy
weevil and was familiar with the plan for surveillance
from U2s, Phantom reconnaissance planes, and the outer
space satellite. He pointed out to me the tension that
existed between the Department of Agriculture and the
National Security Council over Henry Kissinger's attempt
to achieve detente with China. He suggested that Nelson
Gross would be the person most familiar with the poppy-
eradication program. Gross, however, had just been convicted
of tax evasion and was unavailable.
I consulted his executive
assistant, Roger Degilio, a former Pentagon analyst
who understood the bureaucracy in Washington perhaps
better than anyone else I had interviewed, Degilio explained
to me the Department of Agriculture's role in developing
the weevil, but thought I should also speak directly
with Quentin Jones, Agriculture's man in charge of the
weevil. I visited Dr. Jones at the Department of Agriculture's
vast complex— hundreds of buildings identified by number
only. Although he refused to show me pictures of the
weevil, he told me why the crash program had been rejected
by the National Security Council.
I found the memo in which
Dr. Jaffe suggested the "insect" to President Nixon,
and thus the origins of the screw-worm program, in Krogh's
files.. This memorandum was drafted on July 2 by Jeffrey
Donfeld, who attended the June meeting along with H.
R. Haldeman; Arnold Weber, from the Office of Management
and Budget; John Ehrlichman; Jaffe; and, of course,
President Nixon. Krogh and Donfeld also supplied handwritten
verbatim notes of the meeting. Donfeld recalled the
president's continually using the term, "Screw Worm"
and that he was hysterically funny, whether he intended
to be or not.
The Celebrity File
The "celebrity file" was begun
by Jeb Stuart Magruder, who, before he went on to engineer
the Watergate "intelligence operation," had been a public-relations
advisor to the president. His main accomplishment had
been suggesting the idea of a Drug Abuse Prevention
Week, which President Nixon proclaimed on April 28,1970.
Jeffrey Donfeld inherited
the task of recruiting celebrities, and succeeded in
putting together an impressive roster of sports figures
who endorsed President Nixon's stance against drugs.
The memoranda on which this
chapter is based-the outlines of discussions with the
president; the option paper on the creation of a National
Drug Foundation; memoranda of the meeting , with Sammy
Davis, Jr.,.and the president; the memoranda on Sammy
Davis, Jr.'s Programming-all come from the files of
Egil Krogh.
Krogh and Donfeld took great
delight in explaining this public-relations side of
the drug issue to me.
World War III
Nelson Gross was responsible
for originally interesting me in the "heroin crusade."
Soon after Nixon won reelection, in 1972, 1 was in search
of an investigative topic for The New Yorker. Hearing
about Nelson Gross's adventures on the opium trail,
I arranged to interview Gross at his New Jersey estate
to see if he would make a suitable Profile for The New
Yorker. Not mentioning his impending indictment, he
said that he was about to resign, but would arrange
for his secretary and former assistant to provide me
with his public papers and statements. I next went to
the State Department, where his successors, Harvey Wellington
and William Handley, gave me some insight into the disruptive
nature of Gross's brief crusade. Later, at the encouragement
of Pat Moynihan, I visited a number of embassies around
the world, where ambassadors further clarified the unorthodox
tactics employed by Gross. The briefing papers I quote
from are part of the Egil Krogh file, and they gave
me some appreciation of the national-security considerations.
Finally, Gross's executive assistant, Roger Degilio,
a man I came to admire for his shrewd wit, completed
the record of the global war.
Manipulation of the Media
The intentions that political
actors have at any moment in history cannot be ascertained
by journalists and are subject to a form of Journalistic
indeterminacy. It works so that the closer a journalist
comes to a political actor, the more the political actor
tends to fashion retrospectively his version to win
the approval of the journalist. Since any action can
be justified in terms of a public rather than a private
interest, it is not surprising that actions often tend
to be explained in terms of the former rather than the
latter. Jeb Stuart Magruder, Egil Krogh, and Jeffrey
Donfeld all explained the staging of these media events
in terms of the greater good accomplished in warning
American youth of the evils drugs. Ronald Howard Glass,
a student of mine in at UCLA, found that ten of the
eleven participants at the television conference assumed
that Nixon, Ehrlichman, and Magruder had no political
motive in staging the conference and that their intentions
were selfless and sincere. That was a functional assumption.
If they had assume these participants had a political
motive, they would have had to admit to themselves,
and to their colleagues, that they had been the objects
of purposeful-and successful-manipulation.
My conclusion was that they
had a political motive on their part comes not from
my interviews with the White House staff but from documents
in the Krogh's files, especially a hundred pages of
scenarios, plans, interoffice notes, and memoranda providing
step-by-step outlines of the conferences and "media
hype," which had been executed with the precision of
a military maneuver.
Of course, in the search for
motives, even such profuse and specific documentation
can be discounted. For example, as Jeffrey Donfeld explained
to me, "To get anything past Haldeman and Ehrlichman,
we had to describe whatever we were doing in the most
cynical political terms." According to this rationale,
"cynical" documents could be part of a deception used
to accomplish altruistic aims. As it not possible to
prove the intent in reporting an event, I can only adopt
a tone that dovetails with both my evaluation of the
interviews and the prevailing themes that appear in
the documents written contemporaneously with the events.
In reconstructing the manipulation
of the media I attempted to match the press releases
from the White House or from federal agencies with the
stories that appeared in the nation's press. In the
preponderance of cases, the news that Americans read-or
saw on television-had been manufactured by government
officials interested in intensifying fear and concern
in the American public. In most instances the press
release was printed almost verbatim-or at least in an
abridged form.
In this chapter I relied heavily
on the files of Krogh and Donfeld, and in their retrospective
analyses of the "media hype," as Donfeld called it.
I also quoted from \ Magruder's autobiography, An American
Life: One Man's Road to Watergate (written in collaboration
with Patrick Anderson), which provides some perspective
on the public-relations operations of the Nixon administration.
The Tagged Fish Epidemic
Journalists are often themselves
responsible for much of the statistical exaggeration
and hyperbole produced by federal agencies. John Ingersoll
explained to me that it was not only the White House
that wanted to manufacture a crisis but also journalists
who covered narcotics. Whenever he presented reporters
with a "reasonable" estimate of the number of addicts
or of the value of seized narcotics, they would invariably
press him as to whether a more "dramatic" figure could
be given in the press. Ingersoll would accommodate them
to assure that his bureau was favorably covered in newspaper
accounts. Added to this consideration, congressmen on
key appropriations subcommittees always wanted the narcotics
problem to be presented on a grand scale, so that they
could justify appropriations. Other agencies of the
federal government were under similar pressure to produce
dramatic numbers.
The fault was not entirely
with the government statisticians. In order to make
assumptions about the number of addicts in the United
States, it was first necessary to establish some definition
of what constituted an addict as opposed to an occasional
or even moderate user of heroin If a addict was simply
defined as someone who regularly used a drug that was
injurious to his health and suffered withdrawal pain
if he ceased using that drug, then not only heroin users
but cigarette users could be classified as addicts.
On the other hand, if addicts were defined as individuals
who could not voluntarily stop using a given drug, then
only a small percentage of heroin users even of those
classified as addicts by local police departments, would
qualify as addicts. The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous
Drugs statisticians, lacking any real definition of
addiction, simply lumped both categories together in
an "addict-user' category. However, the fundamental
assumption they used in projecting "unknown addicts"
was that once an individual was addicted to heroin,
he would continue his addiction for life. While this
assumption fit the latter group of addicts, it did not
fit the former group, who had occasional "runs" on heroin,
"matured out" or simply used heroin when it was in fashionable
or available. The statistician who applied the "tagged-fish"
formula, Dr. Joseph Greenwood, was not engaged in any
statistical flim flam game; he was simply working on
assumptions given to him by the BNDD. That his projections
of 559,000 addicts were used in political speeches by
figures in the Nixon administration to increase the
atmosphere of fear were reported as fact suggested a
weakness in journalists for dramatic numbers.
I relied here on data provided
to me mainly by John Ingersoll on the methods the BNDD
used to project estimates. The briefings of President
Nixon and Myles Ambrose were supplied to me by Richard
Harkness, the press officer of the special- action office.
The Crime Nexus
One of the most deleterious
effects that social science has had on journalism come
from substituting "rational" models of behavior for
descriptive reporting of what has been known to happen.
Such models tend to focus attention on logical explanations
and, in doing so, often neglects irrational factors.
Crime in America is transformed
by the application of such models from a complex picture
of law breaking into an economically logical one. Although
such models may provide interesting results when they
rely on well-established data (for example, when economists
examine the relation between taxation and inflation),
they do not work where the data are problematic. The
crime nexus that was applied to heroin users blurred
many important distinctions, such as the between heroin
users and addicts.
Journalists were not entirely
unwilling dupes in reporting the crime-nexus. They could
have pressed government officials on the method they
used for estimating the number of addicts in America,
or the cost of their daily habit. They then would have
quickly found out that the government had no way of
knowing the number of addicts, had made no distinction
between addicts and occasional users of heroin, and
had deduced the cost of their daily habit from stories
told by ex-addicts-stories which were not necessarily
even believable. But since the multibillion-dollar numbers
provided dramatic news, and the paucity of statistical
data was impossible to write about, journalists usually
avoided asking embarrassing questions of their government
briefing officer.
I first became interested
in the credibility of the crime estimates reported in
the press when William Whitworth, an editor at The New
Yorker magazine, suggested that ex-addicts in treatment
centers had a strong incentive to exaggerate , and that
the operators of these treatment centers had no incentive
to dispute their claims. If an addict claimed that he
had to steal $100 or $200 a day before he came in for
treatment, society was presumably being saved that amount
by paying for the treatment of this addict. Most of
the conventional wisdom on drugs was supplied either
by ex-addicts or by treatment centers, and as the. Domestic
Council staff paper quoted in the chapter points out,
treatment centers themselves frequently exaggerate,
or even quintuple, the amount of reported crime, to
justify their expansion. The first question I asked
of government officials in drug-abuse programs was,
What systematic surveys have been made of the number
of addicts or of the relation between addiction and
crime? Few such studies existed. Mark Moore developed
a typology of heroin users, in New York State for the
Hudson Institute study on the economics of heroin distribution.
Heather L. Ruth also wrote a thesis, "The Street-level
Economics of Heroin Addiction in New York City," which
explored the modes in which addicts earn their living.
The Department of compiled a study correlating drug
usage and arrest charges in six metropolitan areas in
December, 1971, but this study dealt only with the group
of addicts who were arrested by the police. In exploring
the types of crimes which addicts did and did not tend
to commit, I relied heavily on materials supplied to
me by Joseph D. McNamara, who was then a captain in
the New York City police department in charge of the
analysis of crime records. The profile that McNamara
provided me of the "robbery offender" and "muggers"
did not conform to that of the heroin addicts— for example,
most muggings were the work of teenagers returning home
from school.
The Uniform Crime Reports
that I cite present a problem. They are compilations
of local crime reports, and generally underestimate
the number of crimes, especially in poorer areas.
The Domestic Council staff
papers cited were all given to me by Krogh. The "briefing
book" and other press handouts were given to me by Richard
Harkness, the information coordinator for the drug-abuse
program.
Private Knowledge
The ability of individuals
to discount information that contradicts their beliefs
cannot be underestimated. When they receive such dissonant
information, they often make ad hoc assumption that
allows that information to be integrated with their
beliefs. For example, if a study contradicts a theory
that one particularly believes in, one can simply assume
that the sample was inadequate, that the techniques
for evaluating the sample were flawed, or that the evaluator
was biased or dishonest. Moreover, since most evidence
is incomplete, it can be interpreted in a number of
ways to dovetail with the longer-held, more cherished
beliefs.
When the White House strategists
on the Domestic Council realized that most of the theories
they were publicly promoting about drug addiction were
not supported by evidence, they made such ad hoc assumptions.
When I discussed the IDA report with Krogh, he said,
"To say that they Institute for Defense Analysis could
not prove that there was a connection between drugs
and crime does not mean that there isn't a link." Even
though Krogh readily admitted that most of the assumptions
were shaken by these studies-that it was impossible
to say that most heroin users were heroin addicts; that
addicts were compelled to steal a given amount of goods
every day, or for that matter consume a given amount
of heroin-he was still able to cling to the belief that
drug addiction was a major factor in crime.
Because of this ability to
dismiss dissonant evidence, the policy implications
of the IDA report were never fully articulated to President
Nixon, according to Egil Krogh. If indeed other drugs
could be substituted for heroin, then the policy of
destroying poppy crops in Turkey and other places in
the world made little sense without first confronting
the question of which drug was the most socially desirable
to have consumed by American drug users. A study of
drug enforcement by the New York police actually suggested
that "some of the alternate drugs (especially barbiturates
and amphetamines] may actually be more socially damaging
than heroin, since they induce violent behavior. Moreover,
if heroin was not as totally addictive as it had been
presumed, then the massive methadone programs, where
addicts would be given large dosages of a heroin substitute,
would have to be reconsidered or at least rationalized
in different terms. Similarly, the expansion of the
drug-police agencies would have to be explained in terms
other than crime reduction-none of which White House
strategists were interested in doing.
I was given access to the
IDA report by James Q. Wilson, who a the time was chairman
of the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse Prevention,
a unit of the federal government established by Congress
to evaluate the various federal strategies on drug abuse
When I discussed it with several officials in the drug-enforcement
field, including John Ingersoll and Myles Ambrose, they
said they had no knowledge of the report. Evidently.
it had not been immediately circulated to the bureaus
of government.
The ARTC study that I cite
was given to me by Professor Irving F. Luckoff, of Columbia
University, who was co-director of the evaluation team,
and I discussed the implications and reasons for the
high crime rate in this project in my article on methadone
in The Public Interest magazine (Summer, 1974). Richard
Wilbur, then an assistant Secretary of the Army, provided
me with data on the findings of the Department of Defense
on drug addiction when I interviewed him in 1973.
The Liddy Plan
In some journalistic investigations
the tracks of one project (or plot) crosses those of
another. At that point it becomes unclear whether one
is following two separate undertakings that converge
by coincidence or a single conspiracy. Thus, while I
began by tracking the efforts to deal with a drug emergency,
I found a new conspiracy developing concerning the Watergate
cover- up in 1973. The Administration's much publicized
heroin crusade now took on new dimensions. John Caulfield,
who had been working as a liaison on drugs, and who
had proposed the privately financed White House detective
agency, was identified as a White House wiretapper,
Egil Krogh, who superintended the drug program, admitted
to heading the "special investigative unit," or Plumbers,
who broke into a psychiatrist's office on behalf of
the White House. Meanwhile, it also turned out that
G. Gordon Liddy, the convicted leader of the Watergate
break-in, had drawn up the plan which evolved into ODALE;
E. Howard Hunt, Liddy's partner in the Watergate crime,
turned out to be a consultant to the Domestic Council
on the drug program; and Vernon Acree, who replaced
Myles Ambrose as commissioner of customs had been offered
the job as a vice-president of the proposed agency.
In short, the same names kept reappearing. While Liddy,
Krogh, and Caulfield prepared to take over the drug
program, they were also included in covert operations
on behalf of the White House. This seemed like possibly
more than a simple coincidence. On the other hand, it
is not clear to what extent these converging investigative
operations were planned with a single objective.
The Watergate investigations
have produced documents that otherwise would be unavailable
to journalists writing about an event. Almost all of
the account I give of the attempt of the Nixon administration
to gain some control over the Internal Revenue Service
comes from the investigations of the Senate Select Committee
on Presidential Campaign Activities (the Ervin Committee).
(The balance comes from Victor Navasky's book Kennedy
Justice and from a research paper by Michael Himmel
on the Internal Revenue Service done at UCLA in 1975.)
My account of how Caulfield attempted to set up a privately
financed detective agency comes mainly from Caulfield's
testimony before an executive session of the Senate
committee on March 23, 1974, and documents he supplied
to the committee. I interviewed Ambrose and Krogh on
the subject, but not Caulfield.
My account of Nixon's long-standing
antagonism with the Central Intelligence Agency comes
mainly from my conversations with Richard Helms, the
former director of the agency, when I visited Iran in
1974. My description of the White House strategists'
views of recalcitrant "bureaucrats" is derived mainly
from interviews I had with Egil Krogh,Walter Minnick,
Geoffrey Sheppard, Jeffrey Donfeld, Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
William Safire, Patrick Buchanan, and Ray Price. I also
got perspective from "enemies," such as John Ingersoll
and Eugene Rossides.
I also drew from two insightful
books about the Nixon administration: William Safire's
Before the Fall (which I quote from), and Theodore H.
White's Breach of Faith.
The Secret -Room 16
Though few admit it, journalists
do not have the requisite power to uncover crimes in
high places (or even in low places). They of course
cannot subpoena witnesses or their records. They cannot
force individuals to be truthful, or, for that matter,
even to grant them an interview. Under such circumstances
it would be unreasonable to expect anyone voluntarily
to divulge his or her criminal liability to a newsman.
It is prosecutors who produce evidence of criminal conspiracies,
since they have the power to compel testimony, penalize
perjury with prison sentences, and offer inducements
to reluctant witnesses to testify. The revelations of
the operations of the Plumbers and the break-in of Dr.
Fielding's office did not come from enterprising newsmen
(although this is commonly misstated in the press);
they came from John Dean, the counsel to President Nixon,
who provided this information to federal prosecutors
in 1973 in return for a promise of lenient treatment.
The prosecutors provided this information to Attorney
General Elliot Richardson, who transmitted it to Judge
Matt Byrne, then presiding over the Ellsberg trial,
who in turn revealed it to the press.
The account I give of the
Plumbers similarly comes from the prosecutors, although
I also had extensive interviews with Egil Krogh after
he was released from prison, and I incorporate part
of his version with that of the prosecutors. The arrest
of the narcotics addict for the crime of the White House
crew came from Steve Trott, a district attorney in Los
Angeles I knew from an earlier reporting assignment
on the Black Panthers.
For the backgrounds of E.
Howard Hunt and Bernard Barker I relied on Hunt's autobiography,
Undercover, and Tad Szulc's book, Compulsive Spy. Since
Hunt and Liddy are still in prison, I was not able to
interviews them.
Executive Order
In 1973 1 had discussed the
creation of the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement
with John Ingersoll, Eugene Rossides, and Myles Ambrose
(Egil Krogh at that time refused to see me). Each had
seen the creation of this office from his own bureaucratic
perspective, and had described it only in terms of how
it injured or advanced his particular agency. I had
more or less given up on the possibility of finding
an overall perspective on ODALE when by chance I asked
Ingersoll if the creation of this office had some sort
of code name (like "Clean Sweep") which might be useful
in describing it in the article I was then writing for
The New Yorker. Ingersoll was unable to recall such
a code name, but he suggested that the only person who
would know was Leo Pellerzi, who had just been dismissed
as the assistant attorney general for administration
in the Department of Justice. When I called Pellerzi
to find out the code name, he told me that he himself
had fought the implementation of this particular White
House program-unsuccessfully-and would be glad to describe
all the stages through which it evolved. I flew to Washington
and had lunch with him at the Ramada Inn, and he described
to me the attempts to insert "CIA liaisons" and "granting
authorities" in the original plan. Armed with this information,
I used the journalistic equivalent of the camel's nose-
under-the-tent technique: I called upon Henry Petersen
at the Department of Justice, Richard Kleindienst, and
Richard Helms and asked for their comments on this attempt
to use the CIA for domestic intelligence purposes. Since
I had already been informed of the development by Pellerzi,
all three had reason to comment on what had happened
in the establishing of this office. At this time I was
also able to speak to Egil Krogh, who had just got out
of jail. Krogh then explained that the White House wanted
"to do everything in that final year prior to the election
that would support a presidential platform of accomplishment
in drug abuse and crime control. The Office of Drug
Abuse Law Enforcement [ODALE] was presented in that
context, that this could enable us to show so me direct
successes and seizures and arrests that otherwise could
not be made. This gets into a political dimension as
well.... There was a great deal of interest that an
ODALE program could provide an awareness at the local
level of a direct federal activity in narcotics law
enforcement."
When I told Krogh that Petersen
claimed there was a political motive behind the formation
of this office, Krogh replied, "Mr. Petersen's right
in saying that there was a political motive behind it,
as there is a political motive behind practically everything
that was undertaken, in addition to a substantive desire
to reduce a problem area." Some of the participants
thus agreed that ODALE was not strictly for law enforcement-but
each put a different emphasis on the importance of the
political motive. One problem I was not able to resolve
was Attorney General John Mitchell's role in the formation
of ODALE. Ingersoll had told me that Mitchell did not
know of the plan. Walter Minnick, one of Krogh's staff
assistants, also said that the White House staff was
instructed not to tell either Mitchell or Secretary
of the Treasury Connally about the development of this
plan, at least in its early stages. Krogh, however,
insisted that Mitchell was directly told about the plan
by Ehrlichman. Although the information was kept away
from Mitchell's staff, and of course from Ingersoll
and Rossides, Krogh subsequently explained, "In fact,
the Attorney General knew why the president wanted ODALE-and
supported his decision." When I told Ingersoll about
what Krogh had said, Ingersoll still doubted that Mitchell
ever really realized the extent of the plan. Since I
was not able to interview John Mitchell, I was never
satisfied with an explanation of exactly what role he
was playing in the administration in late 1971.
Dangerous Liaisons
Walter Minnick was one of
the many young and highly intelligent analysts who were
more interested in rational policies than power politics.
He had left Harvard in 1969, after his commission as
a reserve officer in the Army had been activated, and
served in the Pentagon as a systems analyst in the office
of the secretary of defense. His work had brought him
in contact with the new "White House Whiz Kids," and
he became especially close friends with Geoffrey Sheppard,
an assistant to Krogh whom he had known earlier. When
Minnick's two-year tour of active duty was completed,
in July, 1971, Krogh offered him a position on the Domestic
Council, working in the area of international narcotics
control. Minnick thus joined Sheppard, Donfeld, Liddy,
and three others on the Domestic Council staff. His
first assignment was to travel to Southeast Asia with
Nelson Gross', the newly appointed State Department
coordinator for international narcotics matters. Afterward,
he worked briefly with E. Howard Hunt on the creation
of the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence, and
was then assigned assistant to Krogh for coordinating
the Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control.
I had known Minnick through
mutual friends at Harvard, and when I interviewed him
in 1974 on the creation of these new White House offices,
he was unusually candid on most issues. For example,
when I asked him why the White House had created ODALE,
he replied without hesitation, "It was an election-year
stunt." When I asked him about ONNI, he explained its
origins, as well as the real problem of "coordinating
intelligence "-that despite some good intentions, the
office had gone astray under the ambitions of William
Sullivan. In the months that followed I always found
him both accurate and lucid; he seemed much more interested
in carefully and rationally explaining the considerations
of a decision than in protecting any of the individuals
involved in making that decision. In 1972, after Watergate,
Minnick was appointed director of a unit in the Office
of Management and Budget (OMB) which superintended all
the drug policies of the various federal agencies. A
year later Minnick resigned and took a job with a construction
company in Idaho. The fact that so many young analysts
like Minnick were part of the Nixon administration (as
well as of preceding administrations, no doubt), made
it extremely difficult for the political operators in
the administration to accomplish their purposes with
complete secrecy.
The Heroin Hotline
It is often easier to obtain
information from government agencies than it is from
private agencies. Though Grey Advertising steadfastly
refused to allow me to see the commercials it prepared
for the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement, claiming
a "privileged relation" between its client and itself,
the Government Accounting Office, a congressional agency
which monitors the expenditures of the executive branch,
provided me with the audits of the heroin hotline. Eugene
Abston, who was then working for this agency, helped
in locating this material for my study. Public-relations
officers of the Department of Justice Robert Feldtkamp
and Con Dougherty, provided me all the political speeches
and briefings of Myles Ambrose. Geoffrey Sheppard, who
joined EgIl Krogh's staff after graduating from Harvard
Law School, gave me a hilarious description of the location
of the hotline's intelligence center in the fortified
mine shaft in Virginia.
Even though everyone I spoke
to who was involved in the heroin hotline-Egil Krogh,
John Ingersoll, his deputy, Richard Callahan Myles Ambrose,
his successor, John Bartels, and Walter Minnick agreed
that the heroin hotline yielded few results other than
the publicity campaign for the Nixon administration,
the press, including the New York Times, continued to
report about it as if it were a major and successful
law enforcement mechanism. As Krogh pointed out to me,
this was further proof that a government briefing officer
could create the sort of news his agency desired, no
matter what the obvious facts of the situation were.
Finally, after three years of reporting its successes,
the Associated Press carried the story on September
27, 1975, which noted:
Posters may still be found
here and around the nation urging calls to a toll- free
number to turn in a drug pusher. But quietly, the national
heroin hotline has turned cold. It went out of service
two weeks ago and with it went the $123,000 hotline
advertising campaign that started in 1972 in the Nixon
Administration's anti-crime drive. There were posters
inside buses and subways. Radio and television granted
free time to promote it.... Today if a call is made
to that number a recording suggests calling another
number. At the second number a second recording says
that the number is out of service.
Justice in Philadelphia
In discussing the Nixon administration
journalists tend to add to the fiction that many of
the political actions undertaken by it were an abrupt
departure from American politics. Because more documents
are available from the Nixon administration than from
any other, and in a sense more "defectors" (like John
Dean) are willing to dramatize the excesses of this
administration (in return for book rights or to keep
out of prison), it is easy to create the illusion that
the actions of the Nixon administration were not replicated
by a previous administration. There were simply more
sources available during this Nixon administration,
not to mention extraordinary discovery processes, such
as the work of the Senate committees and special prosecutors.
There is no way of saying that previous administrations
could not be similarly indicted for giving federal funds
to local politicians to aid with re-election campaigns;
the fallout of the Watergate investigations is that
it is fairly easy to document dramatic examples such
as what happened in Philadelphia.
The Philadelphia story was
told mainly by Egil Krogh in the tape-recorded interviews
I did with him for The Public Interest. Jeffrey Donfeld
also told me of his part in the story. Donald J. Santarelli
gave me a perspective on LEAA after he resigned, in
1974; and Thomas Whitehead, who also worked at LEAA
during this period, told me of some of the internal
debates when he became a fellow of the Drug Abuse Council.
The Consolidation of Power
One of the most important
areas of the government which is not covered by journalists
is the constant effort of those in power to "reorganize"
the bureaucracy, and the equally constant resistance
of those in the agencies of the government toward such
actions. While this constant struggle generates the
embarrassing leaks about individual politicians and
bureau heads and provides much of the grist for its
rumor mill, the actual interests which are at stake
in these struggles are usually neglected by cooperative
journalists (who depend on the leaks for their titillating
news stories about the individuals involved). For its
part, the administration uses the rhetoric of efficiency.
It represented reorganization in terms of concentrating
its resources more effectively to accomplish its purpose.
The bureaucracy uses the rhetoric
of "integrity" to resist these changes. It depicts each
reorganization in terms of abolishing checks and balances
or restraints which had previously existed. Whereas
the administration represents fragmentation as being
an unmitigated evil that diffuses responsibility, the
bureaucracy represents it as a safeguard that diffuses
power. The same reorganization can thus be represented
in two different rhetorical manners. At the same time,
the real interest that is at stake can be concealed
by both forms of rhetoric. In attempting to reconstruct
any reorganization in the government by interviewing
the participants concerned, the journalist inevitably
runs into this dual rhetoric.
Reorganization Plan Number
Two was thus depicted to me by Krogh, Minnick, Donfeld,
and other members of the Domestic Council as an attempt
to achieve efficiency in the narcotics program and the
consolidation of agencies would certainly be more efficient
in terms of using the available resources. At the same
time, Ingersoll, in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous
Drugs, Rossides, in the Treasury Department, and other
members of the bureaucracy with interests at stake represented
the reorganization as an attempt to set Lip a "national
police force," as Rossides put it-an attack on the integrity
or autonomy of individual agencies. With two sets of
participants using different vocabularies to describe
the same phenomenon there is no simple way to resolve
conflicts. One simply has to decide on a standard rhetoric
that will be used in interviewing participants. In this
case, in the context of my investigation of the entire
narcotics program, I decided that the quest for power,
and especially the desire of the White House strategists
to control an investigative agency, was the dominant
purpose (even though a subsidiary purpose may well have
been increased efficiency). I therefore chose to represent
the struggle to consolidate agencies in the White House
in terms of power rather than efficiency.
The Revolt of the Bureaucrats
A novel can often approach
a major truth about a subject which journalism, restrained
by certain conventions, may miss entirely. John Ehrlichman's
book, The Company, although it is fictive illuminates
a major part of the so-called Watergate affair that
had been almost totally neglected by the press: the
power struggle between Nixon and the agencies of his
own government. Ehrlichman begins his novel by showing
the Machiavellian amorality of presidents: one president
is involved in assassination plots, while another assists
in the cover-ups and uses the investigative agencies
of his government for surveillance in the 1968 convention;
ind a third president attempts to usurp power within
the government.
When journalists hide their
sources, they often also hide the power struggle within
the American government in which the participants use
the journalists to embarrass their opponents.
Consider, for example, the
problem of Woodward and Bernstein, of the Washington
Post. Woodward was receiving information from Robert
Foster Bennett, of Robert R. Mullen and Company, that
focused the blame for Watergate on Charles Colson. If
he had assumed that Bennett was providing him with this
information for anything more than a disinterested purpose,
he would have had to ask whom Bennett worked for, what
the true business of Mullen and Company was, and why
Bennett wanted him to steer his investigation away from
the CIA and toward Charles Colson. He then would have
found that Mullen and Company was a CIA front organization
and was aware that Bennett was giving information to
Woodward; and that the CIA was trying to divert attention
from itself (and succeeding, in the Washington Post)
because a number of the conspirators involved in the
Watergate burglary had also been involved in operations
that the CIA had directly supported, such as the Plumbers.
Moreover, the very fact that a CIA front group was providing
information that was undermining the Nixon administration
pointed to a conflict between Nixon and the CIA. Woodward
and Bernstein, however, could not have reported these
implications and thus could not have depicted the power
struggle between the president and the CIA without revealing
one of their prime sources.
For the same reason, the reporters
who received Nixon's tax returns from officials of the
Internal Revenue Service could not have revealed this
as evidence of a struggle between disgruntled members
of the Treasury Department and the president without
also revealing that they were no more than messengers
for insurgents struggling against the president. By
not revealing their sources, they received the Pulitzer
Prize.
In terms of sources, this
section on the CIA is based mainly on interviews I had
with Richard Helms, Egil Krogh, and Charles Colson.
I also depended heavily on the book At That Point in
Time by Fred D. Thompson, the chief minority counsel
of the Senate Watergate Committee, which clarified the
"CIA connection" better than any other book I know of
on the subject. Richard P. Nathan, the assistant director
of the Office of Management and Budget from 1969 to
1971, offers the same theme in his book The Plot that
Failed.- Nixon and the Administrative Presidency.
The section on the FBI is
heavily based on interviews with Cartha D. DeLoach,
the ormer associate director of the FBI. Seymour Glanzer
and Earl Silbert, of the Department of Justice. Eugene
Rossides and John Ingersoll traced out the leaks between
the Department of the Treasury and the Bureau of Narcotics
and Dangerous Drugs, respectively. All he quotes from
President Nixon are taken from the White House transcripts,
as republished by the New York Times.
The Coughing Crisis Walter
Minnick explained in his testimony before the Subcommittee
to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in March, 1975,
that the White House engineered ban on opium cultivation
in Turkey was never intended to be the final solution
to the heroin problem in the United States. Furthermore,
the White House knew that the Turkish opium would be
replaced by opium from other corners of the world. Senator
Birch Bayh, who chaired the hearings, replied that he
had been misled by the press into believing that the
Turkish opium ban, if it had been maintained, would
have significantly diminished the drug problem in the
United States. He was in fact quite right: the press,
in the summer of 1971, had readily reported that most
American addicts were supplied with Turkish opium, and
that if this supply were suppressed, they would be forced
into giving up their addictive habit or undergoing treatment.
The press, in turn, had been misled by the White House
strategists, who in numerous private briefings had persuaded
journalists that the crime problem in America could
be greatly alleviated if Turkey took action against
its opium growers. For example, Egil Krogh intensively
briefed Stewart Alsop, who then wrote three columns
in Newsweek magazine on this subject. Krogh also spent
the better part of a month priming an ABC television
crew that was doing a program on international narcotics,
stressing the importance of the Turkish connection.
Literally scores of reporters were taken along the "trail
of heroin," which led from Istanbul to Marseilles to
New York, by agents and public-relations men from the
BNDD. The White House strategists, in turn, misled themselves
by wishful thinking: they realized it was possible to
put enough pressure on Turkey to have it at least temporarily
suspend opium production. They then hoped that such
a concerted effort would have some effect. But the press
reports which they generated no doubt reinforced this
hope.
This chapter is largely based
on interviews with Walter C. Minnick after he had left
the government and gone to work with a construction
firm in Boise, Idaho. Raymond M. Asher, the general
counsel of Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, which manufactures
a large amount of the codeine base in America, provided
me with a good deal of material on the "opium shortage."
He, of course, was attempting to stimulate interest
in the "coughing crisis" so that the government would
take action to provide his company with more opium for
its products. Ambassador William Macomber provided me
with background information on the importance of the
surveillance bases in Turkey maintained by the United
States (and I subsequently used this information for
an article I wrote in the Wall Street Journal on this
subject on August 29, 1975).
Herman Kirby, the State Department
desk officer for Turkey, also provided me with a background
briefing. While I was in India, Daniel Patrick Moynihan
provided me with his telegrams on the narcotics problem.
The Drugging of America
There is no practical way
in which a journalist can penetrate by himself the mask
of statistics which organizations generate to protect
their interests. And, as the methadone program proves,
if organizations are given enough time, they will sometimes
develop statistical systems to produce the results which
are acceptable to the federal agencies. For example,
a number of programs originally used ex-addicts from
their programs as paid counselors to determine whether
the patients were also using illicit drugs, such as
heroin. These counselors, of course, had an interest
in showing that methadone was effective, thereby protecting
their jobs. In examining one such reporting system in
Philadelphia, Chambers and Taylor analyzed the urine
of patients in that program for illicit drugs without
telling the counselors. It was found that almost 80
percent of those in the program were taking heroin.
Since doctors administer these
programs, they can themselves decide what sort of data
should be considered evidence of "cheating" or "antisocial
behavior," and what sort of data should be excluded.
The computer programs they used for their data reflected
these original decisions, and therefore it is not unexpected
that the computer print-outs which they sent to their
evaluators eventually showed that they were achieving
their stated objectives. In a sense, the computer print-out
cannot be questioned.
This ability to control statistics
through computer print-outs explains the discrepancy
between crime statistics on a societal scale and those
generated by the treatment centers. Most treatment centers
now show that their patients have greatly diminished
their criminal activity; yet, the cities in which they
are located showed a marked increase in crime between
1972 and 1975. What are generally considered to be addict-related
crimes, such as minor burglaries, have increased by
more than 40 percent. Since methadone is now available
io any addict who wants it at no cost, and since most
addicts are presumably enrolled in methadone programs,
why has crime increased? One answer obviously is that
the only addicts who enroll in programs with serious
controls are those who are not interested in committing
crimes. Dr. Avram Goldstein, the highly respected director
of the Addiction Research Laboratory at Stanford, demonstrated
through "double blind" tests that "the dose of methadone
is largely irrelevant," and concluded, "Methadone cannot
magically prevent heroin use in a patient who wants
to use heroin; it can only facilitate a behavioral change
in people who have made a conscious decision to change."
This chapter is based on interviews
with Dr. Jerome Jaffe, Egil Krogh, Jeffrey Donfeld,
and Robert DuPont (who replaced Jaffe as the director
of the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention).
The best analysis to date of the effect of methadone
treatment on crime and criminal narcotics addicts is
the mimeographed report by Irving F. Luckoff and Paula
Holzman Kleinman entitled "Methadone Maintenance- Modest
Help for a Few" (1975). The Drug Enforcement Agency
report that I quote on the extent of leakage of methadone
in 1973 was given to me by Con Dougherty, a public-relations
officer at that agency. Before it could be released,
however, officials of the special-action office proposed
to the White House that it be suppressed. Paul Perito,
a former official of the Special-action office, also
provided some information for this chapter. The footnote
on the methadone-treatment center in Washington ,D.C.,
comes from a memorandum (October 16, 197 1) provided
to me by Egil Krogh. The National Commission on Marijuana
and Drug Abuse has included in the appendixes of its
1973 report the best analysis of why the evaluations
done by the various treatment programs have been deficient.
Lost Horizons
A number of alternative ways
of describing the activities of a government agency
are available to a journalist. In the most conventional
model of reporting on the government the journalist
simply describes the changes in the top executives of
the agency, changes in its performance as reported by
these executives, or charges of misbehavior on the part
of members of this agency. This form of reporting mainly
involves rewriting press releases from the bureau itself-
or possibly from other bureaus in the position to criticize
it. Most newspaper reporting of the BNDD and its successors
falls into his category.
A second model of government
reporting involves chronicling the exploits of a particular
agency. In this model the journalist reconstructs a
particular operation-the seizure of a large quantity
of heroin, the arrest of top figures in a crime ring,
or even an adventure story on the part of agents. Journalists
who wish to use this form simply report the excesses
of drug agents and the way that they violated the rights
of citizens, such as in the Collinsville raid. Public-relations
officials at the drug agency would spend considerable
time reconstructing the exploits of drug agents for
the benefit of reporters interested in publicizing them
(the more critical reports came from rival agencies
interested in discrediting ODALE). Such reporting was
found in Time and Newsweek, and in such books as The
Heroin Trail, an extensive leak by the BNDD and its
agents to reporters for Newsday,- Contrabandista!, a
leak to Evert Clark and Nicholas Horrock by inspectors
in the Bureau of Customs; The Secret War Against Dope,
a leak to Andrew Tully, again by the Bureau; and Heroes
and Heroin, a leak directly provided to NBC News by
Egil Krogh and the White House staff. An article on
DEA by Frank Browning in Playboy magazine, and some
excellent ,porting in Rolling Stone magazine on the
world of "narks," provide ne examples of "negative"
adventures or exploits in this style of reporting.
A third way of organizing
information about a government agency is the power-struggle
model, and involves the reporter's delineating the various
bureaucratic interests which were at stake. This is
the model that I use in this book. It assumes that much
of the activity of government agencies results from
the actions of those in the organization attempting
to maintain their position or power. As is necessary
in this mode of reporting, I relied heavily on disgruntled
officials in the various drug agencies and their rivals
in the government. For example, Vernon Acree, then the
commissioner of customs, provided me with names of a
number of customs agents who had then transferred to
DEA and then, because they were dissatisfied, transferred
back to the Customs Bureau. Acree knew that these repatriated
agents would provide me with negative anecdotes of how
the Drug Enforcement Agency went about hyping statistics-and
possibly with accounts of corruption within that agency.
The sources also included John Ingersoll, after he was
rudely fired from his directorship of the Bureau of
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs; Myles Ambrose; Eugene
Rossides; John Bartels; Mark Moore, who became a staff
assistant to Bartels and was a former colleague of mine
at Harvard; Colonel Thomas Fox; Jim Ludlum; Mort Bach,
of the Treasury Department; Richard Callahan, an executive
in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs; Roger
Degilio, who was executive director of the National
Council on Drug Abuse Prevention; Egil Krogh and his
staff at the White House; Bob Esterland, of the Treasury
Department; Thomas O'Malley and William Ryan, of the
Justice Department's enforcement division; and field
agents of DEA in England, France, Turkey, India, Lebanon,
and Iran. (The funds to interview these agents abroad
came in part from a grant from the Drug Abuse Council)
Other examples of this power-struggle
model as applied to the drug agencies can be found in
Ron Rosenbaum's article "The Decline and Fall of Nixon's
Drug Czar," in New Times magazine (September, 1975),
and John Finlator's book The Drugged Nation.
Finally, there is a model
of reporting which is more difficult to employ in the
time frame available to a journalist and which would
attempt to correlate the actions of an agency with the
changes in the environment in which it exists. This
is the natural-history model. It might be possible,
for example, to understand the evolution of what began
as the unit in the Alcohol Tax Division and turned into
the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in the Justice
Department, and so on, if one could also chart the psychological
and political changes in the population to which the
government was reacting.
Decline and Fall
A journalist acts either as
a messenger or as a spy in acquiring information. In
either case, when reporting on the government, he is
almost totally dependent on his sources within the administration.
Yet the very fact that his sources have disclosed information
to him may be an integral part of the story. In this
case, over a four-year period I dealt with a number
of high officials in the White House and in the executive
branch of the government. See Personal Sources for a
complete listing. In many cases it was obvious to me
that these officials were not completely disinterested
in the information they gave to me and, to be more specific,
were trying to use me as a messenger to deliver a bombshell
that would embarrass their opponents. To conceal this
would be to conceal the power struggle which is the
subject of this book.
One problem in reporting on
an event over an extended period of time (and spies
everywhere must have the same problem) is that one often
accepts the involved individuals as likable human beings.
I found Egil Krogh to be intelligent, shrewd, thoughtful,
humorous, ironic, and a model family man. I enjoyed
the analytic minds of Walter Minnick, Jeff Donfeld,
and Geoff Sheppard, and found that many of their skeptical
insights about government paralleled my own. I have
no doubt that Jerry Jaffe, Nelson Gross, and many others
were sincerely motivated in their personal wars against
heroin. I also admired Gene Rossides, John Ingersoll,
Leo Pellerzi, and Richard Kleindienst for resisting
White House pressures. Richard Helms was extremely articulate,
insightful, and, I believe, frank in his description
of events. I also enjoyed the colorful metaphors Myles
Ambrose used in describing the various aspects of his
career as a narcotics fighter. John Bartels always seemed
to me to be a thoughtful, candid, and thoroughly decent
administrator. It is of course difficult not to like
those involved in a long-term reportage, if only because
they are providing one with the needed information.
The journalist is thus faced
with a dilemma: how can likable and presumably decent
individuals be coordinated with such disastrous policies?
The only answer I can suggest is that many individual
characteristics are lost in an organization. When Liddy
and Hunt joined together, they had a certain binary
effect on each other: both became more daring and more
ambitious. To a lesser degree, I suspect that members
of the in-group in the White House affected each other
in such a way that their actions were not restrained
by the reservations of the individuals involved. The
defining characteristic of the White House strategists
was ambition. When they thought they had power within
their grasp, they acted so as to gain it. When I interviewed
them after Watergate, when power was no longer within
reach, other traits no doubt surfaced. Dr. Jaffe later
suggested in his article in Psychiatric News that the
White House strategists were flawed in other ways:
Dissent and disloyalty were
concepts that were never sufficiently differentiated
in their minds.... [They] admired people who could be
cold and dispassionate in making personal decisions....
They deeply distrusted the motives of other people and
weren't able to believe that people could rise above
selfish motives.
Whether or not this is a fair
characterization of the White House strategists, they
were young and inexperienced in the ways of either government
or private organizations, and seemed to suspect anyone
who tried to dilute or diffuse their claim of power.
I am not sure, however, that even if one started with
a completely different cast of characters (as long as
they were of the same general age and inexperience),
and if they worked for a president who sought control
over an investigative agency of the government in order
to plug leaks and control the bureaucracy, that they
would have acted very differently. In short, I believe
that "personalities" can be overestimated as a factor
in explaining policy. In this case the quest for power
by the president and his principal advisors simply overwhelmed
all those young men serving him-at least, that is the
way that I resolved this particular dilemma.
In describing the operations
of the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence, I
also relied on interviews with Russell Asch, the deputy
director, and Sybil Cline, who served as an assistant
to William Sullivan in the ' new agency. I found Col.
Thomas Fox, who put the intelligence operations in perspective,
totally by accident. In January, 1976, 1 was reinvestigating
the Kennedy assassination for the Reader's Digest and
wanted to discuss Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union
with someone from the Defense Intelligence Agency. Thomas
Fox was recommended to me by John Barron, an editor
at the Digest. When I finally had lunch with him, he
told me, by way of his personal history, of his involvement
with the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence.
Acknowledgments
The research for this book
was financed in large part by the Drug Abuse Council,
Inc., a privately financed foundation which was established
to provide another perspective on problems of drug abuse.
Assistance was also provided by National Affairs, Inc.,
the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Police Foundation.
Esquire helped subsidize my reportage of poppy-growing
in Turkey, and The Public Interest magazine supported
my investigation of methadone clinics and helped me
obtain the Krogh file.
Research on various parts of
the book was done for me by Hillary Mayer, Suzanna Duncan,
Elizabeth Guthrie, and Deborah Gieringer, to all of
whom I am grateful.
I am also indebted to Edward
Banfield, Daniel Bell, Allan Bloom, Edward Chase, Nathan
Glazer, Erving Goffman, Andrew Hacker, William Haddad,
Paul Halpern, Bruce Kovner, Irving Kristol, Edward Luttwak,
Jerry Mandel, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Victor Navasky,
Bruce Page, Norman Podhoretz, Mark Platner, John Rubenstein,
William Shawn, Jonathan Shell, Leslie Steinau, Edward
Thompson, Lionel Tiger, Paul Weaver, William Whitworth,
and James Q. Wilson.
The original book was
published in 1978 by Putnam. The cyberbook was designed
by June Eng, to whom I am also indebted.
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