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CounterPunch
March 8,
2003
Will the Real Daniel
Ellsberg Please Stand Up!
The Clash of
the Icons
By DOUGLAS VALENTINE
Political activist Daniel Ellsberg became an icon
in 1971 after he leaked The Pentagon Papers. This "act
of conscience" helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam
War, and contributed to the demise of President Richard Nixon,
whose felonious minions, the infamous Plumbers, sent CIA officer
E. Howard Hunt, and former FBI agent (and self-professed rat-eater)
G. Gordon Liddy, to burglarize confidential files from Ellsberg's
psychiatrist's office. Hunt and Liddy thought they could trump
the anti-War movement by showing that Ellsberg was a mentally
deranged LSD-abuser, but their slap-happy plan backfired, and
instead opened up the Pandora's box of the CIA inspired dirty
tricks the Republican Party relied upon (and still uses today)
to wage political warfare.
Starting on March 9th, the Pentagon Papers
story will be broadcast as a made-for-TV movie on the popular
F/X network. Based partially on Ellsberg's autobiography, the
movie will star quirky James Spader as Ellsberg, and will feature
Hayley Lochner as "the wife," Jonas Chernick as CIA
connected New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan,
and Paul Giamatti as Anthony Russo, the man who went to prison
on Ellsberg's behalf.
Be forewarned: nowhere in this revisionist
history will be audience be presented with the cast of Corsican
drug smugglers and CIA agents that shaped Ellsberg's sensibilities
and sent him on his path to New Left notoriety. But as the reader
shall see in this article, somewhere between the official Pentagon
Papers story, and the CIA's involvement in international drug
trafficking, is a disturbing clash of facts from which Ellsberg
will not emerge with his icon status intact.
Ellsberg And the Quiet
American
The first thing the reader needs to know
is that Ellsberg was not always a pacifist "dove"
intent on ending the Vietnam War. At first he was an aggressive
"hawk." His militant approach to the Cold War
he was all for nuking the Soviet Union was shaped during
a tour of duty as a Marine lieutenant, and precisely because
of his hard-line attitude, and his ability to articulate it,
he was offered a job as a Defense Department analyst.
Then in 1965 he was assigned as a Pentagon
observer to the CIA's Revolutionary Development (RD) Program
in South Vietnam. Here Ellsberg came under the influence of
his mentor, CIA officer cum Air Force General Edward Lansdale.
The mass murderer Graham Greene used as the model for Alden
Pyle in "The Quiet American," Lansdale was the architect
of the CIA's anti-terror strategy for winning the Vietnam War.
When not engaged in typical RD Program "Civil Affairs"
activities, such as helping the local Vietnamese build perimeter
defenses around their villages, Ellsberg and his fellow RD advisors,
under the tutelage of Lansdale, dressed in black pajamas and
reportedly slipped into enemy areas at midnight to "snatch
and snuff" the local Viet Cong cadre, sometimes making it
appear as if the VC themselves had done the dirty deed, in what
Lansdale euphemistically called "black propaganda"
activities.
Functioning as a gruesome "shadow
warrior" was not Ellsberg's only claim to fame in South
Vietnam. It will not be addressed in the TV docudrama, but Ellsberg
was exceedingly charming and possessed with the uncanny ability
to reproduce conversations verbatim--talents that made him a
highly prized asset of John Hart, the CIA station chief in Saigon.
Hart and the CIA's foreign intelligence staff wanted to know
what influential Vietnamese citizens and officials were privately
thinking, and plotting, so they introduced Ellsberg into Saigon's
elite social circles, and he began reporting directly to station
chief John Hart on matters of political importance.
And if what his CIA colleagues say is
true, Ellsberg was not only as a superb spy, he was also as a
swashbuckling swordsman who romanced numerous women, including
the exquisite Germaine. One part French and three parts Vietnamese,
Germaine was the object of every red-blooded American man's desire,
and when Ellsberg met her at a swinging Saigon party, the hot-blooded
cocksman immediately rose to the occasion, heedless of the fact
that she was engaged to an opium-addicted Corsican drug smuggler
named Michel Seguin.
It is here, with Ellsberg's love affair
with Germaine, that the discrepancy between fact and fiction
has its origins. According to Professor McCoy, at the time Ellsberg
met Germaine, Ellsberg's close friend, CIA officer Lucien Conein,
was negotiating a "truce" with the Corsican gangsters
who supplied South Vietnam's top military officers and government
officials with that most lucrative of black market commodities,
heroin.
Ellsberg's Perilous
Peccadilloes
Legendary CIA officer Lou Conein was
an Old Vietnam Hand. As a member of Detachment 202 of the Office
of Strategic Services (OSS), Conein had fought with the French
Special Forces in Indochina in World War II. After the war he
married a Vietnamese woman and remained in Vietnam. He joined
the CIA upon its creation and after a tour of duty in Europe,
he returned to South Vietnam in 1954, as an aide to the aforementioned
Ed Lansdale, to help organize the CIA's anti-communist forces
in North Vietnam. As a measure of his knack for deceit and deception,
it is worth noting that one of Conein's favorite "dirty
tricks" was "to stage funerals without a corpse, and
bury the coffin filled with weapons for later use by the anti-communists."1
"Black Luigi" Conein departed
South Vietnam in 1958 after Lansdale had safely ensconced his
Catholic protégé, Ngo Dinh Diem, as President of
South Vietnam. Conein spent the next few years in the opium
rich outlands of Iran as a military advisor to the Shah's special
forces. In 1962 he returned to Vietnam as a "floating emissary,"
reporting directly to the Kennedy White House, while secretly
coaching the cabal of generals that murdered President Diem and
his opium-addicted brother Nhu on 2 November 1963.
After the bloody coup d'etat, Conein
remained in South Vietnam, but not without further controversy.
As noted, professor McCoy contends that Ellsberg and Conein
formed a fast friendship at the exact same moment Conein was
arranging a "truce" between the CIA and unnamed Corsican
drug smugglers in Saigon.
Conein, however, adamantly denied the
allegation that he arranged a drug-related "truce."
In a 1972 letter to McCoy's publisher, he insisted that his meeting
with the Corsicans, "had to do with ameliorating a tense
situation engendered by Daniel Ellsberg's peccadilloes with the
mistress of a Corsican."
Here we return to enchantress Germaine,
her opium-addicted Corsican fiancé, Michel Seguin, and
a new character in our passion play, Frank Scotton. In 1965
Scotton was ostensibly employed by the U.S. Information Service,
though his undercover job as a CIA officer was forming assassination
squads around Saigon in what was the prototype of the CIA's infamous
Phoenix Program. Through this experimental "counter-terror"
program, which fell under Lansdale's RD Program, Scotton and
Ellsberg met and became the best of friends. In fact, it was
Scotton who invited Ellsberg to the party where the fateful encounter
with Germaine occurred.
What happened next is subject to conjecture--and
it must be emphasized that in order to understand how the Discrepancy
might occur, the reader must need be aware that rumors, whisper
campaigns, and half-truths are the preferred weapons of political
warriors. CIA dirty tricks and deceptions are meant to misdirect
and discredit, so one must examine these statements closely to
discover what is being concealed, and why. Complicating the
already convoluted situation is the fact that Ellsberg's closest
friends, Lou Conein and Frank Scotton, were CIA officers. Which
is not meant to cast guilt through association on Ellsberg, but
it is intended to warn the reader that one must carefully study
their conflicting stories.
Scotton and Conein, in separate interviews
with this writer, claimed they warned Ellsberg to sever his relationship
with Germaine. But Ellsberg, they said, would not be kept from
his lover's embrace. Scotton and Conein claimed that Michael
Seguin hired a Vietnamese assassin to kill Ellsberg, but, they
said, they were able to intercept the assassin before he could
carry out his contract.
In an interview with this writer, Ellsberg
admitted to having had the affair with Germaine, and he confessed
that Seguin put a gun to his head and warned him to stay away
from the woman they both cherished. But Ellsberg vehemently
denied that either Scotton or Conein intervened on his behalf.
Their stories, he said, were standard CIA disinformation, designed
to make him seem beholden to former CIA comrades, and thus cast
doubt on his motives for leaking The Pentagon Papers.
Ulterior Motives
Theoretically, it seems logical to conclude
that one of the conflicting stories hides an ulterior motive.
And in a search of the recorded history of the time, there is
only one source that sheds any light on the situation. All we
know, according to Professor McCoy, is that CIA agent Lou Conein
met with Corsican gangsters to arrange a "truce" regarding
drug smuggling in South Vietnam, and that after this "truce"
the Corsicans (including, one would presume, Michel Seguin) continued
to serve as "contact men" for the CIA in the drug smuggling
business.
This is where The Discrepancy reaches
critical mass, for Ellsberg denies that his CIA mentor, Edward
Lansdale, or his CIA friends, Lou Conein and Frank Scotton, were
involved with Corsican drug smugglers.
Recapping: McCoy claims that Conein arranged
a" truce" with the Corsican gangsters over drug smuggling
in South Vietnam; Conein denied the allegation and said the meeting
concerned Ellsberg's affair with Germaine; and Ellsberg denies
(1) that Conein and Scotton intervened on his behalf, and (2)
that Conein, Lansdale and Scotton were involved with drug smugglers.
Who is telling the truth? Could a CIA
officer with a photographic memory not be aware that his colleagues
were involved with drug smugglers? Or is McCoy's research fatally
flawed? Did the alleged "truce" occur? Was the good
professor, who has prompted so many people to question the CIA's
role in international drug smuggling, misled by dirty trickster
Conein. Was the ulterior motive to move McCoy toward the Corsicans
and away from the CIA's unilateral drug smuggling operation?
Thinking the Unthinkable
It was 1970 when the mainstream American
press first reported the CIA's involvement in international drug
trafficking, and it was 1970 when the U.S. Senate launched a
potentially explosive investigation into the CIA's Phoenix "assassination"
Program, a special unit of which was providing security for the
CIA's unilateral drug smuggling operation.
The House of Representatives launched
deeper probes into CIA drug smuggling and the CIA's Phoenix Program
in early 1971, and, naturally, the CIA at this critical time
took extensive countermeasures in a concerted effort to conceal
these facts. What is relevant to the discrepancy is the that
in June 1971, Daniel Ellsberg leaked the aptly named Pentagon
Papers, shifting blame for the increasingly unpopular Vietnam
War from the CIA to the military, while distracting public attention
from the investigations of the CIA's Phoenix Program and the
CIA's involvement in drug smuggling.
Ellsberg is aware of the rumor that Conein
and Scotton asked him to leak the Pentagon Papers as part of
the CIA's disinformation campaign. But he shrugs off the insidious
rumor as yet another instance of CIA disinformation designed
to cast doubt on his motives for leaking The Pentagon Papers.
While it is definitely politically incorrect
within what passes nowadays for the New Left to even make the
suggestion, is it unthinkable that Ellsberg might have suffered
such a whisper campaign in order to prevent his CIA friends from
being indicted for drug smuggling and mass murder?
The Politics Of Heroin
(And War Crimes) In America
After Ellsberg leaked The Pentagon Papers,
the CIA's plot to cover-up its unilateral drug smuggling operation
moved forward with greater gusto. According to the Justice Department's
still classified DeFeo Report, Conein in the spring of
1971 was called out of retirement by CIA officer E. Howard Hunt
and asked to become an advisor to President Nixon's "drug
czar" (and Plumber) Egil Krogh, on matters regarding "problems
of narcotic control in Southeast Asia and the Pentagon Papers."
Consider that in 1971 the relationship
between the French intelligence service and Corsican drug smugglers
in its employ was exposed after a series of spectacular drug
busts made in America with the assistance of the CIA. Concurrently,
Conein was called out of retirement and immediately, in June
1971, told McCoy about the "truce" with the French-connected
Corsicans, one of who put a gun to Ellsberg head.
Consider also that Egil Krogh's investigators
stumbled upon the CIA's unilateral drug smuggling operation at
this time, and that in July 1971, President Nixon declared the
burgeoning war on drugs to be a matter of national security.
Nixon went after the CIA and quick as a flash, E. Howard Hunt
(Conein's comrade from OSS Detachment 202) bungled the bugging
of the Watergate Hotel. Washington Post reporter and former
Naval Intelligence officer Bob Woodward, then assigned to cover
Nixon's war on drugs, was approached by the still anonymous Deep
Throat, and based on unsubstantiated rumors, incrementally engendered
the Watergate scandal and effectively neutralized Nixon, and
his war on drugs.
In the summer of 1972 came the publication
of McCoy's book, which implicated the CIA in Corsican drug smuggling
operation in Thailand, Vietnam, Burma and Laos. But no CIA officer
was ever indicted for drug smuggling. In fact, the CIA boasted
that it was actually helping, by infiltrating the Corsican operation,
to wage the war on drugs. Amazing as it may sound, McCoy's exposure
in 1972 of the French Connection drug smuggling operation also
helped to divert public attention from the CIA's unilateral drug
smuggling operations.
That same summer of 1972, Lou Conein
became a consultant to the newly created Office of National Narcotics
Intelligence (ONNI) at the Department of Justice. After the
Drug Enforcement Administration was formed in July 1973, Conein
became chief of a special operations unit that in 1975 was investigated
by the U.S. Senate for the dubious distinction of assassinating
drug lords.
The Pentagon Papers,
Drugs, and Political Assassinations
Today only questions remain. Why did
Conein meet the Corsicans in 1965? Was the rumor of an assassination
attempt on Ellsberg concocted to provide Conein with a plausible
cover story for his "truce" with the drug smuggling
Corsicans? If so, why does Ellsberg deny that his CIA comrades,
Lansdale, Conein and Scotton, were involved in drug smuggling,
as McCoy contends? And, finally, was McCoy deliberately led by
Conein in a wide circle around the CIA's unilateral drug smuggling
operation?
Unless these questions are resolved,
the truth about Watergate and the Pentagon Papers will continue
to elude historians, and this quiet discrepancy will serve, like
the TV movie based on Ellsberg's autobiography, only to perpetuate
the myths, mysteries, and half-truths that define American history--a
history that hauntingly reflects standard CIA operating procedures.
Douglas Valentine is the author of The
Hotel Tacloban, The
Phoenix Program, and TDY.
His new book The Strength of the Wolf: the Federal Bureau of
Narcotics, 1930-1968 will be published by Verso. Valentine was
an investigator for Pepper on the King case in 1998-1999. For
information about Valentine and his books and articles, please
visit his website at www.douglasvalentine.com.
He can be reached at: redspruce@attbi.com
Valentine's last article for CounterPunch
was:
An Act of State: the Assassination
of Martin Luther King
Notes
1 Bart Barnes, The Washington Post, obituary
section, 6 July 1998
Copyright 2003. Douglas Valentine.
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