Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (68 page)

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James Schlesinger, former CIA director and Secretary of Defense, is a senior strategic analyst at Rand. Henry Rowen, former Rand president, previously served as head of the CIA’s National Intelligence Command.

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A well-known futurist, Kahn coauthored a book called
The Year 2000
with Anthony Wiener, a professor at MIT’s Center for International Studies. Wiener had previously received a $12,000 grant from the Human Ecology Fund, which served as a cutout for funding numerous CIA behavior control studies under Operation MK-ULTRA.

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The FBI never arrived at a precise definition of the New Left. “It’s more or less an attitude, I would think,” an FBI official told a senate committee in 1975.

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Another FBI informant named Horace J. Packer infiltrated SDS and the Weathermen at the University of Washington. Packer later testified that he supplied campus radicals with drugs, weapons and materials for making Molotov cocktails. He also admitted that while posing as a leftwing activist he used acid, speed, mescaline and cocaine.

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At one point Cornfeld imagined a critical cash shortage at IOS when there really was none. This set the stage for one of the largest frauds in the history of money. In 1971 an estimated $224,000,000 was siphoned from IOS into the coffers of Robert Vesco, a heroin trafficker and financial contributor to Richard Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign. William Spector, a former OSS operative, claimed that Vesco’s tangled web of corporations served as fronts for various CIA activities and provided cover for CIA agents.

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Eddie Cellini, the brother of a longtime associate of Meyer Lansky, served as the casino manager for Resorts International. Louis Chesler, another Lansky crony, and Wallace Groves, who allegedly had CIA connections, were both partners in a gambling venture with Mary Carter/Resorts. In 1970 Resorts International formed a private intelligence corporation called Intertel, which was staffed largely by ex-CIA, NSA, BNDD, Interpol, and Justice Department officials. Intertel rented its services to a wide range of corporate clients, including ITT, McDonald’s, and Howard Hughes’s Summa Corporation.

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Castle Bank was founded and controlled by Paul Helhwell, a Miami lawyer with long-standing ties to American intelligence. Helliwell’s career as a spook dates back to World War II, when he served as chief of special intelligence in China with the OSS. He stayed in the Far East when the CIA was formed and bossed a bevy of spies, including E. Howard Hunt of Watergate fame. In the early 1950s Helliwell organized Sea Supply, a CIA proprietary company that furnished weapons and other material to anti-Communist guerrillas in the hills of Burma, Laos, and Thailand. Based in the Golden Triangle, this mercenary army cultivated fields of opium poppies, and the CIA was drawn immediately into the drug connection. Helliwell also served as paymaster for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs operation in 1961. A few years later he set up Castle Bank, serving in a dual capacity as CIA banker and legal counsel for the Cuban Mafia, which prospered by selling Southeast Asian heroin in the US. Helliwell’s law firm also represented Louis Chesler and Wallace Groves, both partners in Resorts International.

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New York Times
foreign affairs columnist C. L. Sulzberger was indignant when Allen Ginsberg accused the CIA of trafficking in heroin. But Sulzberger later acknowledged his mistake in a letter to Ginsberg dated April 11, 1978. ”I fear I owe you an apology,” he told Ginsberg. ”I have been reading a succession of pieces about CIA involvement in the dope trade in Southeast Asia and I remember when you first suggested I look into this I thought you were full of beans. Indeed you were right.”

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The CIA’s continuing interest in the illicit drug trade is indicated in a once classified document dated March 24, 1969—a few months before Stark joined the Brotherhood. The document refers to the CIA’s liaison with the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs: ”It appears that the activities of the BNDD, ongoing and planned, could under the appropriate arrangements provide valuable information to the Agency in new drug effects, drug abuse and drug traffic areas. For this reason they will be followed very closely.”