The Strength of the Wolf (57 page)

Extrapolating on the fascinating information presented in this chapter, one can hypothesize that an assassin used Paul Mondoloni's protected drug route in Mexico to enter Texas through Laredo, and to exit through Houston or New Orleans. Souetre was probably willing to do the hideous deed for money to support the OAS. Mertz was a professional assassin and may have been acting on behalf of the CIA faction within SDECE. CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton was capable of moving the assassins through his Brown–Castellani network. His staff had a phony 201 file on Oswald and, through MKULTRA, could have set up Oswald as the patsy. Last but not least, William Harvey, who hated Bobby Kennedy, and Desmond Fitzgerald, the far-right Republican, had access to Corsican assassins and the Marcello–Trafficante–Bonanno Mafia clique that could have maneuvered Jack Ruby and the Dallas police. As outlined in
chapter 15
, Harvey recommended hiring Corsican drug smugglers as assassins, in
order to protect certain Mafiosi in the CIA's employ. He also wanted to turn Corsicans, working for the Soviets, into double agents, which brings us to the final piece in the puzzle.

In an incredible coincidence, Angleton met on 22 November 1963 with SDECE Colonel de Lannurien at Le Rive Gauche restaurant in Georgetown, regarding allegations made by Philippe de Vosjoli (FBN Agent Sal Vizzini's partner in operations into Cuba during the October 1962 Missile Crisis) that Colonel Leonard Houneau, deputy head of SDECE, was a KGB agent. De Vosjoli, however, proved to be a double agent working for Angleton against his own government and, according to Angleton's biographer, Tom Mangold, Houneau was exonerated, the CIA acknowledged that de Vosjoli had given “bad information,” and de Gaulle was so upset that he severed relations with the CIA over the incident. “The consequences of this split were serious and benefited only the KGB,” Mangold said. Among other things, the animosity created by Angleton cost the CIA valuable French intercepts and intelligence assets in Vietnam.
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It's almost as if Angleton was a double agent, and if he was the “mole” he was searching for, it's possible that SDECE agents working for the KGB may have sent an assassin into Dallas through Angleton's Brown–Castellani drug network, or through Paul Mondoloni. If Angleton was a KGB mole, perhaps he used QJ/WIN (who could have been Mertz) to assassinate JFK, and programmed Lee Harvey Oswald as the unwitting patsy through the MKULTRA Program.
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Speculation such as this will always surround the unsolved assassination of JFK. Angleton was, like White, debilitated by his alcoholism, and the problems he caused may well have been the result of incompetence rather than malice. So this chapter will close by returning to where it started, to eerie MKULTRA. On 29 November 1963, a week after the president was murdered, Marshall Carter, the deputy director of the CIA, met with Richard Helms, John Earman, James Angleton, Sid Gottlieb, and Lyman Kirkpatrick. What a group. At this meeting the CIA chiefs agreed to continue to test unwitting subjects through MKULTRA using the FBN and its safehouses.
⁵³
To this end they launched MKULTRA Subproject 149 in New York in January 1964, specifically to provide a replacement for Charlie Siragusa. An unnamed individual in the import and export business conducted the project at least until April 1965.
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These CIA officers, especially Angleton, had the desire and the ability to mold assassins and patsies. The three main suspects in the assassination – Marcello, Trafficante, and Hoffa – were CIA million-dollar men. And the CIA prevented the FBN from going after these drug traffickers, or
investigating CIA agents like Irving Brown – and perhaps even Michel Mertz – in Angleton's French connection. All of which forms an unmistakable trail leading from the CIA, through the FBN, to the assassination of JFK.

Charlie Siragusa's last year at FBN headquarters was not a happy one. As he said in his CIA debriefing, “I was the number two man. But instead of taking orders from me, Gaffney would go over my head to Giordano.”

“Charlie felt uneasy in the company of Gaffney and Giordano,” says his protégé, Andy Tartaglino. “He'd had a heart attack while shoveling snow, but they pushed him hard and complained when he didn't keep up. It was vicious. It got to the point,” Tartaglino says bitterly, “where he wouldn't even have lunch with them.

“Ambassador Rosal was bringing in fifty kilograms at a time,” Tartaglino continues, “so Charlie knew there was a lot more heroin entering America than Anslinger acknowledged; and he knew there was pouch traffic between Lebanon and Paris. The Colombian minister to Russia was involved, as were Corsicans and the Lower East Side mob. We were building a case at the Court House Squad, getting close to ‘the bigger' diplomat that Tarditi had alluded to, and Charlie knew all the details. I was on the phone with him daily. Meanwhile, Gaffney's on the phone to Pat Ward every day, trying to find out what
we're
up to. Gaffney finally brought me down to Washington as
his
assistant on the Ambassador case, to report the details to
him
every day.”
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Gaffney, naturally, has a different recollection. “Giordano and Belk built a high wall around New York to keep me from meddling in Belk's affairs,”
he says. And just as Siragusa complained that Gaffney went “over his head,” Gaffney's beef was that Belk bypassed him in the chain of command, and communicated directly with Giordano. As to his clash with Siragusa, Gaffney says, “Charlie was trying to become the Commissioner, so I applied for deputy. When he found out, he called me in and asked, ‘What makes you think you're qualified?' I told him that I'd made more cases and put more Mafiosi in prison than him. ‘So, if you're qualified for Commissioner,' I said, ‘I'm qualified for deputy.' ”

Such was the venomous, negative atmosphere at FBN headquarters in 1963. Anslinger had retired to Hollidaysburg, taking his coalescing mystique with him, and Giordano and Gaffney, after they had joined forces to nullify Siragusa, “went after each other like gladiators battling it out in an arena of politics and power,” according to FBN historian John McWilliams. Giordano and Gaffney filed civil service charges against one another, and Giordano won; but it was all for nothing, “since he was too weak to survive the massive reorganization that occurred in 1968.”
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Too committed to law enforcement to break away entirely, Siragusa took a job as chief of the Illinois Crime Commission in 1964. Highly committed to the FBN, he did one other significant thing as well: he introduced Andy Tartaglino to his contacts at the CIA. And by passing that torch, he provided his protégé with the power to avenge him.

“Charlie was good to me,” Tartaglino says reverentially. “He tried to keep me out of the office infighting. But several months before Charlie left, Gaffney took me off the Ambassador case and had me reassigned as an inspector. Fred Dick was my instructor, and we immediately left on an extended tour of the Bureau's overseas offices.”

As will become evident, Tartaglino's reassignment as an inspector marked a watershed in the FBN's evolution, and was a major factor in the organization's demise. In the meantime, an overview of his tour with Fred Dick will serve as a convenient introduction to the FBN's overseas situation in the early years of the Giordano administration.

In March 1963, Henry Giordano assigned his protégé, Mike Picini, as the new district supervisor in Rome. His job, as Picini explains it, “was to focus the local governments on curbing supply. The strategy was political; to show the police how to do it, supply them with intelligence, and get them to increase their commitment.”

Picini departed from FBN tradition and took a forthright, political approach toward drug law enforcement when dealing with his foreign counterparts. But conducting operations was still a challenge. His deputy, Hank Manfredi, was less involved than ever in FBN operations. He had bugged almost every Embassy in Rome and was so busy listening to foreign spies and diplomats, and reporting their conversations to the CIA, that he didn't have time to keep up with his FBN workload. “One night in Rome,” Fred Dick recalls, “Hank asked me to pose as a White House representative and give $300 to an Italian cop who was bringing police files to the American Embassy almost every night. This was his great source. This was how Charlie Siragusa got all his information on the Sicilian mob.”

“Hank was a great believer in collateral missions,” explains Colonel Tully Acampora, then in Rome as a CIA advisor to the Carabinieri. “He was passing information to Bill Harvey, who'd landed in Rome as station chief after Bobby Kennedy tossed him out of Washington. We knew the Mexicans were using the pouch in both directions, so Hank and I sat down and wrote reports to the CIA
and
the FBN. But we couldn't disrupt the diplomatic network without putting our own foreign policy objectives at risk. So we identified the Embassy people involved, photographed them, confronted them, and then used them as informants to broaden the thing. This channel was being watched, but it had to be handled carefully, because Hank did not have an entrée to military counterintelligence in Italy. Harvey was the key player in that regard, with Angleton and the Mossad. Military counterintelligence was Angleton, and that was strictly off-limits to Hank.”

The situation was just as delicate in France, where President de Gaulle had severed relations with the CIA over Angleton's false allegations that the deputy chief of SDECE was a KGB agent. French security officials knew that the FBN and CIA were in cahoots, and were angry with the FBN for having accused them of conspiring to dump heroin on America. “Cusack had taken a ‘get tough' approach,” Tartaglino sighs, “but the French were doing the best they could. What was needed was their cooperation, not their wrath, for only they could provide the informants, intelligence, and manpower we needed to conduct stakeouts and make arrests. France was not a victim country and needed to be persuaded, not pushed.”

Victor G. Maria agrees. An agent since 1958, first in San Francisco, then under his mentor Howard Chappell in Los Angeles, Maria was the sole FBN agent stationed in Paris from February 1962 until 1966. His top priority, reflecting Giordano's new policy of accommodation, was to find out how drugs were getting to the US without upsetting the French.

“My parents were Lebanese and I spoke Arabic,” Maria says, “and I'd been a croupier in Lake Tahoe and Vegas, so I hung around the Paris casinos where the wealthy Arabs and Corsicans went to gamble. I also went to the American areas, where I met young soldiers and musicians who were sending drugs back home. The only rule was: ‘If it's an international case, okay.' But as the French authorities repeatedly made clear, the FBN wasn't there to make cases on French citizens, and if we did, then the local police wouldn't help us develop the international cases. It was that simple.

“Charles Guillard, Marcel Carrere, and Emil Angles at the Central Narcotics Office [CNO] were fabulous,” Maria stresses. “They built up dossiers on the people we wanted, and persuaded the riot police and the gendarmes to help us too. We also got help from the vice squad of the Prefecture – that's Louis Souchon and Roger Voitot – who went after small retailers and worked up the Corsican ladder.

“The CNO also had access to SDECE people for wiretaps and files on the people we were targeting,” Maria says, “like Paul Mondoloni. But the FBN didn't have access to the files, and we weren't prepared to watch Mondoloni all day to the exclusion of everyone else. By myself, I covered Spain, France, Belgium, and Germany, and made trips into Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. In Europe,” he stresses, “most of my support came from the Army CID in Heidelberg. They provided flash rolls and people to cover me. But even Tony Pohl, who was French and spoke French with the right accent, was frustrated. Before Picini arrived in Rome, we'd get little blue memos from Cusack saying, ‘Make undercover cases or else.' But all the good cases were made with the expertise of the French police, within the confines of French law. Not undercover.”

Anthony Pohl agrees. As noted in
chapter 18
, he'd been recruited into the FBN by Siragusa in 1960, and after interrogating Etienne Tarditi, had been sent to France in 1961 to open an office in Marseilles and locate heroin conversion labs using Marty Pera's innovative precursor tracking system. But Paul Knight shunned him in Paris, and Cusack initially suspected him of being a spy for Lee Speer. Having come from the military and served as a CID agent in Europe for many years, Pohl was “horrified” by the FBN's “unprofessional” (call it paranoid) and counterproductive culture. Even after Cusack apologized following his return to Rome as district supervisor in January 1962, and even after Pohl had formed official relations with the French in Marseilles in June 1962, he was still beset by problems.

“There was no tight control of information,” Pohl says, “and even though we knew when the acidic anhydride was ordered and purchased, sometimes it would sit for months at the depot. Then Jo Cesari [the premier
Corsican chemist in Marseilles] would disappear for a few weeks. When he returned, his face would be pale and we knew he'd been working, but only once did we actually track the precursor to the lab.”

Part of the problem was that Cesari's half-brother, Dom Albertini, was an informer for an investigating judge in Marseilles.
³
Likewise, Marseilles Mayor Gaston Defferre protected the Guérini gang for political purposes, and SAC chief Jacques Foccart, along with Interior Minister Roger Frey and his deputy, Alexandre Sanguinetti, protected Marcel Francisci and thus, by default, Paul Mondoloni.
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