SEARCH AND DESTROY - THE WAR ON DRUGS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP74B00415R000400030066-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 16
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 10, 2005
• Sequence Number: 66
• Publication Date: September 4, 1972
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

TIME
4 FP
Approved For Release 00S6/222
19 CIA-RDP74B00415R000400030066-9
T a third-floor window of a Lower
Manhattan hospital, a team of fed-
eral agents. huddled behind a battery of
cameras. Below them, other agents
strolled along the sidewalks, or cruised
down Gold Street in unmarked cars.
roup waited in a windowless mini-
One
g
bus parked across the street. Not far
away, another group, posing as an emer-
gency crew, sat under a yellow canvas
work tent over the open manhole in
which they had set up a communica-
tions center. Precisely-at 8:40 p.m., two
undercover agents drove up Gold Street
in a green 1970 Cadillac. They pulled
to a stop in the No Parking zone in front
of the hospital-and waited.
Minutes later the hidden agents
-there were 40 in all-got the word
over.ttheir short-wave radios: "Suspects
are proceeding down Spruce Street,
headed for Gold." In the third-floor ob-
serva.ti.on. post, one age-Tt cracked to
,TIME Correspondent James Willwerth,
"The Chinese are very punctual." So
they were-right on time for the most
important narcotics bust this summer..
At 9 p.m., two wary men walked
up to the green Cadillac: Kenneth Kan-
kit ? Huie, 60, self-styled "unofficial
mayor of Chinatown," and Tim Lok,
35, known to federal agents as "the
General" for his ramrod-stiff posture.
The four men--two undercover narcot-
ics agents, and the two "connections"
whom they had been trying to nail for
four. months--wasted no time. The
agents opened the trunk of the Cadil-
lac and showed the Chinese the con-
tents of an olive-drab attache case in-
side: $200,000 in $50 and $100 bills.
amalcu'yr p+-
Martinique
PANAMA IN`1Bogota
(Staging and COLOMt31A.:,
storage area) . _.,.,,
DC)? _ Cocaine producers
ECU
" gkAT-it.
Mau Mau pilofs_- e
PERU\ ESOUVIA
Buenos
Bureau of Narcotics N
S
HO - U
N
,
.
.
ew
in South km erica. f+RGENTINA_
W-4 -
000 IN TRUNK
HUIE 111 $200
,
UNDERCOVER AGENTS SHOW
In hollowed-out heels, false-bottomed suitcases, cars, girdles and boa constrictors,
Then the General led one of the agents
off on a meandering excursion that end-
ed up in a Chinatown sportswear shop.
There it was the agent's turn to inspect
the wares: a cardboard box packed with
14 plastic bags containing 20 lbs. of
pure No. 4 white heroin from South-
cast Asia. Street value: S 10 million..
The agent and the General then
went back toward Gold Street in a taxi,
followed in a gray Dodge station wag-
on by a third Chinese, Guan Chow-
tok, bringing the heroin. But Guan,
owner of the sportswear shop, doubled
morphine
hose ',.'
SOUTHEAST AS(AN SQURCE
&'TI!AILANU
(Gpiun' producers)
back and dropped the heroin in a va-
cant lot, arriving empty-handed. He
seemed worried about police. The agent
and Guan argued in the street in front
of Beckman Hospital for several min-
utes, and finally the hesitant Chinese
agreed to.makc the deal. The four men
piled into the green Cadillac and fol-
lowed the gray. Dodge station wagon to
a dark, deserted street, under the shad-
ow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Following
the General's directions,. one undercov-
er agent walked through . waist-high
grass into the vacant lot. Suddenly, he
knelt down and said loudly: "This is the
package; this is the package"
On that signal, the night fairly ex-
ploded ' with armed men and flashing
lights. Two unmarked cars squealed to
a stop at opposite ends of the street,
blocking the escape routes. Agents wav-
ing pistols and shotguns sprinted out of
the shadows from all directions. Huie,
theGcneral and a fourth Chinese acconT-
plice surrendered immediately. Guan
jumped into his gray Dodge-and found
himself staring into the muzzle of a .45
automatic in the hands of an agent who
was leaning through an open window.
Though last week's Chinatown bust
was motion-picture perfect, to U.S. nar-
cotics experts it was another bittersweet
element in an increasingly frustrating,
not to say disastrous situation. True, the
raid was the latest in a number of suc-
cessfYl skirmishes in what President
Nixon describes, more and more plau-
sibly, as a global "wear on drugs." In
Montreal and Saigon, narcotics officers
have recently nabbed some of the big-
ger . holesalers. Washington, mean
Approved For Release 2005/06/22 : CIA-RDP74B00415R000400030066-9
Continued
 Approved For Release 2005/06/22: CIA-RDp74800415R00Q40003QQ66-9
w!IIIC, IJ atwu,w.s u~ u~ unuw~ U.u, n- - '"L v~
di ion by Paraguay of Auguste Joseph y,,'-~ # 'p
Ricord, French-born boss of a Latin
American connection that is alleged to
have piped heroin worth $1.2 billion
into the U.S. over a five-year period
(TIME, Aug. 28).
But the bad news about narcotics
far overshadows such success. The
"skag" seized at the Brooklyn Bridge
last week was the second large shipment
of Asian heroin to be intercepted in
New York. The first seizure came last
November when a Philippine diplomat
and his Chinese partner were arrested
at Manhattan's Lexington Hotel with
38'lbs. of heroin in their luggage. The
two busts tend to confirm the gloomy
forecasts of U.S. narcotics experts that
as some of the old drug trade routes
from Europe become more dangerous,
new ones will open up from Asia. The
emergence of Asia, with its immense
opitom production, as a major exporter
of narcotics, promises to make the drug
trade a truly global prpbtem.
New Routes. Through most of the
postwar years, drugs had flowed from
the poppy"field's'of Turkey and the labs
of Marseille direct to the U.S. via. the
famed "French connection." In the past
two or three years, more and more her-
t'-en routed through Latin
-lid the Caribbean, where law
cement is spotty and protection
cheap. But as the Latin connection be-
gins to feel more and more heat, and if
Turkey phases out remaining opium
production under pressure from Wash-
ington, the drug trade is expected to
swing increasingly to Asia, drawing on
the vast surpluses of opium grown in
the remote, misty hills ,of Burma, Thai-
land and. Laos, source of 58% of the
1,200 tons of illicit opium the world pro-
duced last year. State Department nar-
cotics experts already see several routes
developing, including one to the U.S.
via Hong Kong and Britain.
The present flow of narcotics to the
West is capable of supporting a savage
rise in consumption-and with it, sav-
age rises in crime, in crippled lives and
in deaths. Hard statistics are hard to
'come by, but the best Government es-
timates put the U.S. heroin-addict pop-
ulation at 560,000-ten times tl;e level
of 1960 and almost double what it was
only two years ago. On the average, a
U.S. addict spends $8,000 a year to sup-
port his habit; in New York City, with
an addict population of more than 300,-
000, as much as 50% of all crime is re-
lated to-addiction. The U.S. has become
a heroin market worth $5 billion a year
to the international drug trade.
As other countries are discovering
to their horror, it is an expanding near- ff
ket. In Canada, recent estimates place
ing. Turkey now has a small heroin-ad- - stalling new extra-low-level radar at
,
p
diet population-a development that sites in Texas and New Mexico, where to tear u i the major international drug
defies Moslem strictuApprmved1FRQtr Retle+aseb2Q05iO6/22,t Ckk-RtUP 4E3OQ4Ll4PZ QQQ,1P?06seWashington
and the powerful conviction among smugglers who scoot across the Mcxi- "war room" of the Bureau of Narcot-
Turks that narcotics reduce seat:,.: o- can border in tight planes, avoiding de- ics and Dangerous Drugs, magnetic
tency.Ileroinis snreadinr*amor . trrrinn h.. 2! 14--! Air 4,; r rt I.i .--
picked up a taste for hard
drugs from the departing
American soldiers. All over
Western Europe, which once
idly'clismissed hard drugs as
"an American problem," of-
ficials now reckon that they
have a growing addict pop-
ulation of about 100,000.
Says a U.S. State Department
official: "They're real scared
about what the late .1970s
will bring."
So is Washington. One
day last January, John E. In-
gersoll, blunt-spoken chief of
the Justice Department's Ru-
reau of Narcotics and Dan-
gerous Drugs, went to the
White House to report per-
sonally that an "astonishing
variety" of drugs-heroin,
cocaine, amphetamines, hashish, mar-
ijuana-was continuing to pour into the
U.S. Nixon, by all accounts, was in a
rage. "But dall mtt," he said at one
point, "there must be something we can
do to stop this."
The result has been a dramatic
change in the U.S. approach to drugs.
Only two years ago, U.S. narcotics agen-
cies operated on a miserly $78 million
budget. Now the White House is ask-
ing Congress for.$729 million next year
for a flock of new agencies.
The agencies are charged with what
is essentially a broad-gauged search-
and-destroy mission. In the U.S. the Jus-
tice Department's eight-month-old Of-
ficr. for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement
has 300 investigators tracking down
street pushers, while the Internal. Rev-
enue Service has 410 special agents
checking distributors' tax records.
The Bureau of Customs, charged
with policing thousands of miles of
wide-open frontier, is clue to add 330
new men to its hard-pressed 532-man
border patrol force. Last month Nixon
ordered the Air Force to help out by in-
MARIJUANA PICKUP IN JAMAICA
And diplomatic couriers.
Force and Air Guard squadrons have
been ordered to maintain their F-102
and supersonic F-106 interceptors on
alert status, ready. to scramble in five
minutes. Besides the heroin smugglers,
their targets will also include the light
planes that deliver something like a ton
of Jamaican marijuana daily, mostly at
airfields in Florida.
The heart of the strategy is a U.S. ef-
fort one with no
recedent in histor
 Approved For Release 2005/06/22: ,CIA-RDP74BOO415R000400030066-9
THE WORLD
dicate the location of the bureau's 1,610
agents-up from 884 two years ago. In
each of the, key drug-traffic countries,
such as France, Mexico, Turkey and
Thailand, eight to 15 BNDD men act as
advisers to their local counterparts,
gather intelligence on their own, and,
when necessary, engage in what is
known in CIA argot as "dirty tricks."
BNDD men talk as if their job is to
tear up the Ho Chi tvlinh Trail, not the
international drug trade. "We'll never
d'ry up the supply lines," Ingersoll tells
war-room visitors. "But we can disrupt
the lines and reduce the flow to a tol-
erable irritant. That's our goal."
The Administration's boast that
"the tide has turned" is vastly exagger-
ated, but there are encouraging signs.
American agents in and out of the U.S.
so far this year have helped seize 3,966
lbs. of heroin, a sixfold increase over
three years ago. The amount represents
less than 20% of the ostinlated 1 i)' tons
of heroin that U.S. addicts used last year
-a measure of hciw far the war is from
being Avon. But the effect is being felt on-
the street.
Evidently because of recent busis in
Canada, France and New York, addicts
are shuddering through the third month
of a major heroin drought. In Montre-
al, a major port of entry for French her-
oin, one dealer complained last week
that "the stuff is scarce as hell. I can
pay but my man can't deliver." In Mar-
seille, the price of a kilo of heroin has
risen in past weeks from $2,500 to
$5,000, partly as a result of the short-
age, partly because the heat is on.
Another sign of hard times is slip-
ping quality. Even after being cut with
sugar and powdered milk, retail heroin
used to be about 10% pure; now the
range is from 3% to 7f;'%. So low is the
potency nowadays that the "good stuff,"
when it is available, may kill an unwary
addict. San Antonio has had twelve
overdose deaths in the past nine weeks
because someone-perhaps an inexpe-
rienced pusher-has been peddling her-
oin that is 53% pure.
To Myles J. Ambrose, a hard-bit-
ten former federal prosecutor and Cus-
toms Bureau chief who heads the do-
mestic side of the Justice Department's
SLASHING POPPY BULB FOR GUM
drug effort, the shortage proves that the
Administration strategy is'on the right
track. "The name of the game for the
big-time pushers is moving the stuff into
the U.S.," he says. "We belt 'em at one
place, and they move someplace else.
When we catch the stuff, that's when
they lose their money." '
Of late, the big-time pushers and
traffickers have been losing their mon-
ey, goods and sometimes their freedom
at an encouraging rate. Some of the big-
ger catches over the past year:
SAIGON: South Vietnamese police
and BNDD agents nabbed Joseph Ber-
ger, 66, a pudgy, balding American who
arrived in Southeast Asia 16 years ago
and skillfully worked his way up to the
top of the drug-smuggling heap. Nar-
cotics agents believe he is the only
American to have had face-to-face deal-
ings with "the Phantom," the ubiquitous
Chinese who until recently reigned su-
preme over drug traffic out of Indochi-
na. Four months ago, Berger hauled a
400-lb. load of opium down Thai coun-
try roads, bullying his way past police
checkpoints into Cambodia. He arrived
in Saigon in June for a scheduled meet-
ing with the Phantom, but was arrest-
ed. When the Phantom arrived at Tan
Son Nhut airport, Berger fingered him.
Ile 'turned out to be one Wan Pen Phen,
a middle-aged Chinese with both Tai-
wanese and Thai papers. Police say
Phen routed 4,500 lbs. of opium month-
ly through the area. In July, the cops ar-
rested Luu Phuc Ngu, a prominent Sai-
gon hotel owner, his son Luu Se Hon,
and Phen's No. 2 man, Am Nui. The?
three organized the South Viet Nam end
of the opium trade for the Phantom.
Under interrogation last week, both
Phen and Nui denied any. knowledge
of any drug dealings.
MARSEILLE: The shrimp boat Caprice
des Temps (Whim of Time) attracted
the attention of French customs agents
last March when its captain refused an
order to cut his engines. The captain,
Marcel Boucan, 58, Was already being
watched for his dealings with cigarette
smugglers. The agents also noticed that
though the 60-ton boat had made two
trips to Miami, it never ventured near
the shrimp-fishing grounds. After cus-
Approved For Release 2005/06/22: CIA-RDP74B00415R000400030066-9 continued
 Approved For Release 2005/06/22: CIA-RDP74B00415R000400030066-9
BERGER (LEFT) & PHEN IN SAIGON POLICE HEADQUARTERS
"We bell 'm at one place, and they move some place else."
-toms agents forced'the Caprice back to seph Ricord. Their mission: to set up a
port; Boucan dived overboard. lie was new route for getting drugs into the U.S.
picked up the next morning, exhausted, Agents moved in on them after two
near Marseilie's harbor fortress. Find- months' surveillance. Angeletti, ' who
ing nothing illegal, police were-about was nude in bud when agents kicked in
to release Boucan when they noticed the door, surrendered and was extra-
that the concrete'ballast was slightly dited to France. Sarti shot it out and
awry. On investigation, they discovered was killed. In his possession were ten
937,lhs. Of pure heroin hidden in the bat- stolen passports from four countries,
last. It was the largest narcotics haul in which enabled him to pose at will as a
history, worth up to S-100 million on Uruguayan diplomat, it Panamanian
the New York streets. student or an Italian businessman.
NEW YORK Louis Cirillo, 48, posed ANKARA: 'l urkish Senator Kudret
as a Bronx bagel.baker making 5200 a Bayhan told friends in Ankara last Feb-
week. In fact, police say, he was one of ruary that he was going to France to
thet~iggest narcotics distributors'in the buy a dress for his daughter. Nothing
U.S., supplying a ton a year to street unusual about that. The high-living Sen-
pushers. Cirillo got. his heroin from it ator was well off, and he had made fre-
French ring that snuggled it into,.New quent trips to France in the past. This
York concealed in expensive automo- time Bayhan failed to reckon with the
Hiles, After intercepting a heroin-laden newly coordinated French and Turkish
car that had been shipped to the U.S. narcotics enf