The Strength of the Wolf (70 page)

For his part, George Gaffney claims to have met with the CIA on only two occasions: when he signed nondisclosure statements in New York and Washington. He does acknowledge that the CIA was involved in the Cotroni and Pardo Bolland cases, but he won't say how. “I only sent one piece of information to them about an associate of a dope pusher we seized,” Gaffney claims. “I never went to CIA headquarters, and the CIA passed along only useless information to me.”

CIA officer Jim Ludlum begs to differ. After transferring to the CIA from the FBI in 1955, Ludlum served as a desk officer, then joined headmaster Angleton's counterintelligence staff as a planner, working with the Pentagon, FBI, State Department, and White House to plan operations around the world. In 1962, he became Angleton's deputy chief of liaison, handling the CIA's relations with domestic law enforcement agencies. “Jane Roman was the boss,” Ludlum recalls. “She personally handled liaison with the FBI through Sam Papich, and I had everything else, including the FBN. About once a month I met with Giordano or Gaffney just to keep it alive, though there wasn't much to report. I also worked with Larry Fleischmann at Customs. In any case, there was no narcotic coordination before I got the job.”

“Listen,” Gaffney says, changing the subject when confronted with Ludlum's statements. “It got so bad after Valachi that I applied for the San Francisco job. White was getting ready to retire, and I asked Henry to be transferred there as district supervisor. Henry said the job was Fred Dick's.” Gaffney grimaces. “Then Belk said I was leaning on him, so Henry banned me from New York. From 1966 until 1968, I was a fifth wheel. I had no authority, except over import-export documents, and I couldn't make any personnel appointments. But Andy Tartaglino did.”

Gaffney was not the FBN's only fading light, and Tartaglino was not its only rising star. “Fred Dick was a Giordano man,” Enright explains, “and on a trip to Los Angeles to investigate an illegal wiretap that Fred had authorized, I met with George White and his wife Albertine in San Francisco. White was a fire marshal then, and very ill; he had gone down from about 225 pounds to about 175. Somehow White knew about the wiretap and was glad to talk about it, because he hated Fred Dick. He actually threw his badge on the floor in front of Fred on the day Fred took over the office. White said in disgust: ‘Here! You've always been after this.' ”

Ironically, soon after White retired, the specter of MKULTRA threatened to surface publicly for the first time when New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison decided to investigate the Kennedy assassination. According to an FBI teletype, Garrison's inspiration was David Copeland, an attorney from Waco, Texas.
²³
As stated in a book he wrote on the JFK assassination, Copeland's source of information was a report written jointly by an FBN agent and a Customs agent tracking Kennedy's assassins to a group of Texas ultras.
²⁴

Knowing that the investigation might lead to MKULTRA assassination plots, the CIA galvanized its forces, and in its 1967 IG Report, there is even a section titled, “Should we try to silence those who are talking or might later.”
²⁵
After Garrison arrested Clay Shaw and charged him with the murder of JFK in March 1967, the Agency began to discredit Garrison by linking him to Carlos Marcello in an 8 September 1967
Life Magazine
article titled “Brazen Empire of Crime.” Texas Governor John Connally helped as well by preventing Sergio Arcacha Smith's extradition to New Orleans as a witness in Clay Shaw's trial. If the reader will recall, Smith was identified as having traveled to Dallas with Rose Cheramie, who was murdered on 4 September 1965.
²⁶

Seeking protection, John Roselli dutifully fed Washington attorney Ed Morgan a tall tale, fabricated by James Angleton, which Morgan in turn passed to columnist Jack Anderson. Printed in the
Washington Post
in March 1967, the story claimed that three Cubans, captured in a raid on Cuba in 1963, were turned by Castro and sent back to kill Kennedy out of revenge.
²⁷

This concerted effort to deceive the public tracks back to the FBN's involvement in the MKULTRA Program, and the CIA's overarching need to keep that a secret. It also concerns Andy Tartaglino's integrity investigation, which in 1967 included Ike Feldman and some strange things that were happening at his CIA-funded safehouse at 212 East 18th Street. Unlike the other FBN agents Tartaglino targeted, Ike Feldman, then leader of Group One, had an ace up his sleeve, and he allegedly threatened to expose the FBN's involvement in the CIA's assassination and sexual blackmail plots, unless Tartaglino backed off. Such an admission would lead the inquisitive to the CIA's use of the MKULTRA safehouses to move drugs on behalf of its Kuomintang and Burmese clients. Just to prove his point, Feldman, according to George Gaffney, leaked some tantalizing tidbits about MKULTRA to certain congressmen and to Walter Sheridan, a former FBI agent serving as a consultant to NBC on the Garrison disinformation case. Having got his message across, Feldman accepted a transfer to Boston, and two years later he retired.

Roselli was spared for the time being, as was Robert Maheu, whose boss, Howard Hughes, had sold his shares in TWA for a cool $546 million and had bought the Desert Inn in Las Vegas from a group that included Meyer Lansky's close associate Moe Dalitz. Hughes terminated Maheu's services and replaced him with the CIA-backed Robert Mullen security firm. Hughes's move on Las Vegas, and his hiring of the Mullen firm, reflected the CIA's realignment with organized crime on behalf of an evolving Establishment. A major player in this southwestern element of the espionage Establishment, Hughes had been working with the CIA since 1953, when his Houston-based aircraft manufacturing company started making spy planes and satellites for the Air Force. From 1960 to 1963, he let the CIA use his Caribbean island to launch raids against Castro. In return for these and other services, Hughes's helicopter business would make millions off the Vietnam War.
²⁸

At this critical juncture, the CIA dispensed with another liability. After spending a year in jail for refusing to testify to a grand jury, Sam Giancana was released in late May 1966 and fled to Cuernavaca, Mexico. According to his son, in the book
Double Cross
, Giancana managed the CIA's narcotics operations through Santo Trafficante in Asia, Carlos Marcello in Latin America, and Carlo Gambino in Europe.
²⁹
This seems an outrageous claim; and yet, upon his return to America in June 1975, Giancana was shot in the head, CIA execution-style, while eating a bowl of sausage and peppers, just a few short weeks before he was due to testify to Congress about the Kennedy assassination. One month later, Jimmy Hoffa disappeared. A year
after that, following a meeting with Santo Trafficante in August 1976, John Roselli was murdered, dismembered, stuffed in a 55-gallon drum, and dumped in the Miami River.

In 1967, the protectors were working overtime. After Senator Long proposed a bill to limit electronic surveillance, he was accused by
Life Magazine
of having taken a $160,000 bribe from Jimmy Hoffa. Though exonerated, Long was soundly defeated in his next election.
³⁰

Plugging the last hole in the national security safety net, LBJ signed the FBN's death warrant. The process began in January 1967, when Johnny Thompson testified at Bobby Baker's trial. In an effort to get Thompson out of the line of fire, Giordano had transferred him in 1966 to Albuquerque, New Mexico. But that wasn't far enough away.

As Thompson recalls, “I was visiting with an informant in Gallop, and I called the office just to let them know I was there. Well, a few minutes later the phone rings. Gaffney's on the line. ‘Don't get excited,' he says, ‘but we're going to have a conference call. Where will you be?' I asked him to call me back at my motel. The moment I get there the phone rings; it's General Counsel Smith at Treasury, and he wants to know what happened with Bobby Baker. I tell the truth and forget about it. A few days later, I'm called back to DC to meet a Justice Department attorney, who says he's going to put me on the stand for the Baker trial.

“Well, the reports from the wiretaps were never written up, and I'm worried. But it didn't get that far. The first question the defense asked me was, ‘When did you join the FBI?' Not the FBN, the FBI. They thought I was an FBI agent! At which point the truth about the FBN came tumbling out.”

Thompson shrugs. “A few years later, when I was acting chief inspector at the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, the chief counsel, Don Miller, took me aside and said, ‘You know, LBJ tried to fire you over the Bobby Baker thing.' ”

“Thompson testified in the afternoon,” George Gaffney recalls, “and within an hour, two White House aides had come over to Bureau headquarters and picked up my and Thompson's personnel files. It was late afternoon, and I had to go to Secretary Barr to explain. He was livid, and wanted to know why I got the FBN involved in a non-narcotic case. Hoover had turned it down. So why did I do it?”

Gaffney stiffens. “I told him, ‘I'm not J. Edgar Hoover. I don't have the weight to say “No” to the Attorney General.' Then I referred him to the letter issued by Bobby Kennedy directing that all Treasury heads cooperate with Justice. When Barr said he'd never seen the letter, I suggested that he have his secretary dig it out of the files. Then I got up and walked out.”

With immense sadness, Gaffney says, “After our role in the Baker affair came to light, we incurred the wrath of LBJ and the Bureau was abolished out of revenge.”

John Enright had been around the block: as a street agent in New York in the early 1950s; spearheading the Genovese case at the Court House Squad in 1958; as district supervisor in Atlanta; as acting district supervisor in New York prior to George Belk's arrival; as a consultant to the McClellan Committee; and, after attending the Industrial War College, as the FBN's assistant for enforcement, the number three position in the organization.

“By the mid-1960s,” Enright recalls, “the big problem was drugs other than heroin. But Anslinger had refused to accept responsibility for them, so Congress created BDAC, which led to bitter jurisdictional fights. We were also fighting with Customs, and we were mad as hell at the FBI. Within the organization there was an incredible amount of tension between Giordano and Gaffney, and I was right in the middle of that too. As you know, George was my close friend, and my first wife came from his home town. But none of his friends were getting the big jobs, and there was all this tension. So finally Henry calls me in one day and asks, ‘Where does your loyalty lie?'

“I told him: ‘With the Bureau of Narcotics.' ”

Enright chuckles. “The Vietnam War was another big concern. The military was afraid that drugs would break down discipline among the troops, so I worked with the Pentagon on that. But my primary focus was on domestic cases, which meant lots of inter-district work. I knew all the
documented informants and if a case was important, I might get personally involved in it. When it came to overseas cases, Jack Cusack ran the show: no one else knew what was going on in that respect. He read all the teletypes and functioned as a one-man intelligence squad. Then Giordano sent Cusack to Australia, where the Mafia was making inroads through the produce business, and John Evans stepped in until Hank Manfredi, who'd had a heart attack, came back to headquarters to take over foreign operations in 1967.”
¹

FBN headquarters was not closely monitoring foreign operations in 1966 and 1967. By default, much of the oversight passed to Lenny Schrier's International Group in New York. Apart from that, the individual overseas agent was responsible for managing his affairs, which in every case presented unique and often enormous challenges.

Having been swept up in the corruption scandal surrounding Gene Marshall in Miami, Rick Dunagan found himself, in the fall of 1965, faced with an interesting choice: he'd been officially transferred to Los Angeles; but, being fluent in Spanish and eager for adventure, he'd also been selected to become the FBN's third agent in Mexico. As Dunagan recalls, “Before I went to Mexico, I was sent to teach technical investigative techniques at the Public Safety School in Caracas, Venezuela. It was a test to see how well the Latinos would receive me. I was there for two weeks and everything went okay, then Cusack sent me back to Venezuela to pick up a Cuban fugitive from Miami. That was another test, which I also passed, and a few weeks later I was sent to Los Angeles, where the agent in charge, Ben Theisen, told me to call District Supervisor Fred Dick in San Francisco. Dick said I had an hour to make my decision about the transfer to Mexico. I called my wife in Miami, described the smog in LA, and we decided to go.”

Dunagan shrugs. “I spent the next five months flying back and forth to Miami, cleaning up old cases and testifying at Marshall's trial, which was excruciating. Gene acted crazy and claimed he was innocent, but wound up doing two years. Then in February 1966, I drove down to Mexico City with my wife and seven kids, and when I got there, Bill Durkin told me, ‘Make a case, get a grade.' And I believed him. But I quickly learned that Durkin didn't need me around. He relied totally on Ray Maduro. They did things together, while I did everything alone.”

Being ignored by his boss was not the only thing that contributed to Dunagan's sense of isolation. “Our office was in the Embassy basement,” he explains, “where the lower echelon State Department people
might
hang out with us, if they weren't afraid of being shunned by their senior colleagues. The FBI had an agent there as its chief of foreign counter-intelligence, and the CIA had a huge contingent of case officers with loads of cash. The CIA would provide us with flash rolls, but they never shared informers. And Durkin never pushed them. Customs still considered Mexico its turf, and Customs Attaché Mario Padilla was Durkin's archenemy – which didn't help. Mario's primary job was as liaison to a group that was in charge of security for the major Mexican banks. IRS was working with Customs, and the Secret Service was investigating counterfeiting and gold trafficking by the number two man in the Mexican Federal Police.”