The Strength of the Wolf (20 page)

At the same time, as Anslinger knew, opium from Iran, Thailand, Laos, and Burma was flooding the East Asian market, and not only the Nationalists were profiting from it. After a visit to Saigon in early 1948, Agent Bill Tollenger reported that opium was “the greatest single source of revenue” for the French.
⁸

This politically incorrect but honest assessment reinforced Anslinger's strategy of defensive avoidance, and with the start of the Korean War and covert CIA assaults on mainland China from Taiwan, Speer and Tollenger were withdrawn from the region. No news being good news, ten years would elapse before an FBN agent would return on a permanent tour of duty.

With Iran and the Far East having been declared off limits by the espionage Establishment, the FBN turned its attention to an operation, allegedly controlled by Lucky Luciano in Rome, in which Turkish morphine base and opium were smuggled through Yugoslavia to Italy, and through Lebanon to France. To gather information about this operation and to see what could be done about it, Anslinger decided to send George White and Garland Williams to several nations in Europe and the Middle East. His unstated motive was to turn the probe into a pretext for establishing a permanent office in Europe by showing that an FBN agent (White) could make undercover cases in Europe, and that an FBN agent (Williams) could convince Public Health officials and the police forces of opium-producing nations to crack down on smugglers and not supply Russia. In March 1948, the House Appropriations Committee authorized the necessary funds, and Anslinger sent White and, a few months later, Williams on their missions.

White's continental caper began in New York, where, posing as a merchant seaman, he paid opium smugglers Ivan and Catina Dodig to connect him with their Turkish supplier, Sev Dalgarkiran. White then set sail for Istanbul.

The flaw in White's plan was revealed to Howard Chappell a few years later by Jesse Johnson, a professional pickpocket and FBN informant. Jesse had been White's contact with the Dodigs. She didn't know that White was an undercover agent, but after he got drunk and passed out on her floor, she rifled through his pockets and found his badge. Jesse alerted the Dodigs, and just for the fun of it, they decided to set White up. They made the usual arrangements, but told Dalgarkiran that White was a federal agent, and at a prearranged meeting in Istanbul, Dalgarkiran stole White's flash roll and took him hostage. But White magically escaped, returned with a squad of Istanbul policemen, captured the villains and seized their narcotics. At least, that's how the caper was described, based on White's account, in the
New York Times.
⁹
He then traveled to Bahrain “to get the facts” about the emerging Middle East conspiracy, then to Marseilles where, according to reporter Al Ostrow of the
St. Louis Post Dispatch
, “he hobnobbed about the waterfront dives until he learned some sources of dope being smuggled into America. He told the French police of his finds, and they made the requested arrests.”
¹⁰

In a telegram to Anslinger dated 22 June 1948, White, in clipped phrases, said that he was working with French Narcotic Agent Robert Pasquier, and that he had purchased a “quarter kilo [of] heroin from three Indochinese and [a] white woman and [had] apprehended them.” White said
the situation was “opening up,” and that the Indochinese in Marseilles were handling a “large quantity [of] Turkish opium [and] selling [it through] Chinese seamen.”
¹¹

A few days later in Trieste, White conferred with CID Agent Henry L. Manfredi about Lucky Luciano's drug operation in Italy. Manfredi subsequently launched his own investigation and in October 1948 he located a cache of opium, morphine, and cocaine near Bad Ischl, Austria. In all likelihood this cache had originated in Garmisch. Fascinated by the intelligence angle of international narcotics trafficking, Manfredi would soon join the FBN and (if he hadn't already) the CIA.
¹²

From Trieste, White traveled to Rome where he met William Donovan. His mission was to gather intelligence on Luciano's drug smuggling activities, and through Donovan's contacts at the local CIA station, White penetrated Luciano's entourage and negotiated a twenty-kilogram heroin deal with Nick DiMarzo, a Genovese family member with connections in Texas, Chicago, and California.
¹³
Through DiMarzo, White also learned that Paul Gambino was Luciano's source in Palermo, and he made plans to go to Sicily to investigate. But DiMarzo knew that White was an FBN agent and blew his cover. So White traveled instead with an Italian police informant to Genoa, carrying a pistol he'd borrowed from a “CIA man.”
¹⁴

According to journalist Michael Stern (a friend of William Donovan's), White and the informant tailed the Italian representative of “a Wall Street trading firm” from a meeting with Luciano in Rome to Genoa, where narcotics were being smuggled from China “as goods in transit.”
¹⁵
Although White was unable to make a case on anyone, the Italian mission was a propaganda success: Stern reported that the Luciano ring was receiving narcotics from Chinese communists, and leads from the case enabled White to implicate sailors in the leftist National Maritime Union in drug smuggling.

Upon arriving back home in San Francisco, White bought $600 worth of opium from some drug smugglers, then spent a week with their associates in Los Angeles, where he contracted to buy a quantity of opium from Francisco Lavat, “an important official of the Mexican Civil Aeronautics Administration.”
¹⁶
White entered Mexico to help make the arrest, and then settled into a cushy job as San Francisco's district supervisor.

White's antics in Turkey, France, Italy, and Mexico generated favorable publicity for him and the FBN, and for his efforts, he received the Exceptional Civilian Service Award from Treasury Secretary John W. Snyder in late 1948. But much of the publicity was based on fabrications, and though reporter Al Ostrow portrayed him as a “lone wolf,” White in reality had relied upon foreign policemen, or the CIA, in every case. This
essential need for external assistance factored heavily in Anslinger's decision to send Garland Williams
*
on his survey of Europe and the Near East as a prelude to establishing a permanent office in Italy.

In the autumn of 1948 and in early 1949, Williams toured Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy, and France, to identify sources and drug-smuggling routes, and to establish relations with each nation's narcotic law enforcement officials. This was not an easy task. In Italy, Williams informed Anslinger, “Narcotic law enforcement is actually non-existent.”
¹⁷
In Egypt he met with Arab League representatives regarding the illicit trade in hashish, and in Syria and Lebanon he conferred with officials about hashish production. His most urgent business was conducted in Iran, however, which was flooding French Indochina with opium, despite US appeals made through diplomatic channels.
¹⁸

Williams's reports about Iran painted a bleak picture. The country's great families had made fortunes from opium, they deliberately kept the anti-drug laws weak, and there were more than a million addicts. But the espionage Establishment was more concerned with keeping the Shah in power than in reforming its narcotic policies, and in April 1949, following on Garland Williams's heels, a small delegation of American economic and engineering experts, and its legal spokesman, Allen W. Dulles, advised the Shah to ignore “uninformed political or public clamor.”
¹⁹
The Shah followed Dulles's advice, but the Iranian people did not, and in 1951 a coalition led by Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a European-educated lawyer hoping to reform Iran's narcotic laws, toppled the Shah and began to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company's holdings.

To say the least, it was not the sort of anti-narcotic action that Anslinger appreciated, and in 1953, Mossadegh would himself be ousted in a bloody coup engineered by the British and the CIA.

Italy by 1950 had emerged as the logical choice for locating the FBN's first overseas office, not only because it was Luciano's base of operations, but
for political reasons as well. Unlike the French, the Italians were solicitous of US intervention. Anxious industrialists in Milan petitioned Wall Street for economic assistance, and the Vatican beseeched its friends in America for protection from encroaching communists in Yugoslavia, Greece, and Albania.

Another reason for opening an FBN office in Italy was the Bureau's ability to facilitate the CIA's covert activities. Occupied by American and British forces, Trieste was both a transit point in drug traffic and a base for CIA spies using refugee relief programs and proprietary trading companies to filter agents through the Iron Curtain. Ever in need of cutouts and deniability, CIA officers suborned American businessmen and government employees who had legitimate reasons for being in foreign countries. At the same time, international criminals and enemy spies were diverting massive amounts of Marshall Plan largesse to the Soviet Bloc, so Congress, in an effort to protect its investment, allowed the FBN to establish an office in Italy as a front for military and CIA counterintelligence operations. The one condition was that they did not embarrass the State Department.

To help avoid the State Department, Anslinger relied on friends in industry, especially Pan Am executive Sam Pryor. In 1940 and 1941, Pryor had built fifty air bases in South America as a deterrent to a rumored Axis invasion, and during the war he managed the Pan Am subsidiary that flew Lend-Lease supplies from India to Nationalist forces in Chungking. In 1949, he helped the Nationalists relocate to Taiwan, and in return for his patriotic endeavors, he obtained government-awarded franchises for Pan Am in Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Africa, Italy, and France. Thereafter Pryor provided logistical support and cover for FBN and CIA agents overseas.
²⁰

Pryor was only one of the Establishment scions Anslinger relied upon, and the FBN was fortunate to have a Commissioner so intimately connected to the espionage Establishment – people like Bill Donovan and David Bruce – who conspired with their British cousins to create tax-exempt foundations to fund surveys abroad and to promulgate unstated policy through journalists, academics, and businessmen attached to the Council on Foreign Relations and the Foreign Policy Association.

Keeping big business and the CIA content were key to Anslinger's success, as was his decision to send Charlie Siragusa to open the FBN's first overseas office in Rome. With his black-rimmed glasses and large Sicilian features, chain-smoking, restless Charlie Siragusa resembled a frenetic Groucho Marx, and for that reason may have seemed an unlikely choice to represent the US government overseas. But Siragusa was a man of substance, charisma, and deep commitment to national security as well as drug
law enforcement. His fervor was deeply personal. One of his relatives had returned to Sicily as a result of anti-Italian prejudice, and another had been killed by a Mafia shotgun blast. Consequently, his avowed, sacred mission was to eradicate the Mafia and restore the tarnished Italian image to its Classical brilliance.

A college graduate from a middle-class family in the Bronx, Siragusa had worked as a stenographer for the Immigration Service from 1934 until 1939. Bored with mundane clerical duties, he joined the FBN and began making cases in Chinatown and Little Italy with his group leader and mentor George White. As White's protégé, Siragusa learned how to spot drug addicts, exploit informers, pose undercover as a seaman, and raid opium dens. He learned quickly and was rewarded with special assignments. He traveled to Canada and worked undercover cases with the Mounties, and then toured the Southern states with an informer named Kenny, arresting marijuana farmers. When Kenny stole a necklace in Dallas, Siragusa, as he explained in his autobiography, chose to look the other way. He was fervent, yes, but as a disciple of George White he knew that an agent never let a minor transgression jeopardize a major investigation.

Siragusa's aptitude and friendship with White brought him to the attention of the espionage Establishment, and in 1944 he was recruited into the counterintelligence branch of the OSS. As a cover for his spy work he was commissioned as a Navy ensign, then assigned to Italy where he worked with White's friend James Angleton. In late 1944, his spy and narcotics missions dovetailed when he interrogated Vito Genovese at Bari Prison at the request of Andrew Berding, the OSS counterintelligence chief in Italy. Siragusa recalled that “being a civilian cop I couldn't resist pushing the hood on his New York City rackets. It was known that he still pulled the strings back there.”
²¹

By Siragusa's account the interview was a waste of time, but shortly after his chat with Genovese, he found himself on the trail of Annabella Von Hodenburg, a director of Nazi stay-behind agents in Italy. Siragusa caught the baroness ten miles from the Brenner Pass, and in March 1946 returned to New York an authentic war hero.

Under the tutelage of Garland Williams, Siragusa was promoted to group leader and joined the crusade to link the American Mafia's drug syndicate with Lucky Luciano in Italy, communists in general, and the labor movement in New York. Williams also instructed Siragusa in the fine art of disinformation. During a press conference in 1948, Williams announced the FBN's successful investigation of Puerto Rican seamen smuggling heroin to New York. Naming Luciano as their source, Williams called it
“the most important” case ever.
²²
When Customs inspectors found heroin on seamen in January and May 1949, Williams blamed Luciano; and when a New York taxi driver was arrested in Italy with nine pounds of heroin in June, Williams again claimed that Luciano was responsible. As Siragusa learned, it didn't matter that there was never enough evidence to indict Luciano, the idea was to feed sensational headlines to the press – headlines that Anslinger could use to pressure the Italians at the UN.