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The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA
Through interviews with former narcotics agents, politicians, and bureaucrats, this exposé documents previously unknown aspects of the history of federal drug law enforcement, from the formation of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) up until the present day. Written in an easily accessible style, the narrative examines how successive administrations expanded federal enforcement operations at home and abroad; investigates how the CIA compromised the war on drugs; analyzes the Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and second Bush administrations’ failed attempts to alter the DEA’s course; and traces the agency’s evolution into its current stage of “narco-terrorism.”
Doug Valentine belongs to that precious remnant of journalists and historians with the wisdom to see our time, the integrity and courage to write about it, and the literary grace to bring it all chillingly alive. This indispensable book may quite well be the best yet in the author’s already singular body of work. He takes us again into that dark inner reality of policy and politics that Americans so tragically deny and evade, and gives us back a reflection there is no denying, no escaping. If there is hope for America at this moment of so many reckonings, it is out of pages like these.
— Roger Morris, a member of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, who resigned in protest over the invasion of Cambodia, is the author of bestselling biographies of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the Clintons
— Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of The War Conspiracy; Cocaine Politics (co-author); Deep Politics and the Death of JFK; Drugs Oil and War
Many books have focused on the public policy aspects of federal drug law enforcement. But no book to date has plumbed as deeply into the secret policies, or taken as comprehensive a view of them, as this one.
With complete objectivity, author Douglas Valentine maps out in documented detail the secret history of federal drug enforcement from 1968 until the present. More than that, he shows how that secret history dovetails into a myriad of seemingly unrelated national security matters around the world.
With the declaration of a War on Drugs in 1971, the Nixon administration set the stage for the massive projection of American drug enforcement overseas. But the drug agencies involved were, from the start, deflected from their law enforcement mission by over-arching political and espionage intrigues.
Valentine explains how a small handful of American drug enforcement agents and their operatives, under the direction of top CIA officials and politicians, have helped further the secret agenda of the national security state: from the Bay of Pigs, to Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and Afghanistan.
In many important legal and extra-legal respects, the techniques of the current War on Terror are seen to have their origins in the War on Drugs. Indeed, the modern technique of “rendition” was ripped right out of the drug war’s playbook.
Time after time, as honest DEA agents were about to pounce on a large-scale dealer, higher authorities told them to walk away, explaining that the culprit was an “asset” in their clandestine operations.
In other cases, in the name of “controlled delivery”, DEA agents were made to “look the other way” as shipments flowed into the US, supposedly to follow them up the food chain and hook the Big Fish.
And so the streets of the world are still flooded with a sea of misery.
In the words of a former agent, “I used to think we were fighting the drug business, but after they formed the BNDD [the DEA’s predecessor], I realized we were feeding it.”
Valentine traces the CIA’s hi-jacking of federal drug law enforcement back to the early ’50s, when a handful of Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents, at the behest of the CIA, through its MKULTRA Program, set up safe houses for illegal drug-testing experiments on unwitting US civilians in San Francisco and New York City. Equipped with two-way mirrors, the drug agents were used to observe unsuspecting dupes, including US congressmen, under the influence of LSD. Over the next decade, federal drug agents helped sprinkle so much acid in the Bay Area “that it spawned the psychedelic generation.”
The cast of The Strength Of The Pack includes many colorful characters, such as George Belk, a hard-drinking, bible thumping New York City district supervisor in the mid-’60s. A participant in the MKULTRA Program, Belk later became the DEA’s first chief of intelligence. Known for his dry sense of humor, Belk once asked the New York agent at a group meeting: “Don’t you ever think of giving these people a chance to surrender?”
After 40 years, the War On Drugs is about to become the longest continuous war in history. Between the outright mayhem and the wasted lives, it may also be one of the most deadly.
If you subscribe to the notion that peace is preferable, all wars must have a resolution.
However, in The Strength of the Pack, Douglas Valentine explains why dismantling the $44 billion a year DEA behemoth is unlikely to happen, as long as America strives to maintain a world empire.