10. The New York Times Encyclopedic Almanac, 1972, 29: “As a result of Operation Intercept, the federal attempt to restrict the flow of marijuana from Mexico, heroin sales have jumped among children in New York city, a joint legislative committee is told”; Humberto Fernandez, Heroin (Center City, MN: Hazelden, 1998), 214: “In response to the shortage of marijuana, which was either seized or delayed due to Operation Intercept, an increase in heroin smuggling was noticed in southern California and as far north as San Francisco during this time.” These reports are discounted by Eric C. Schneider, who writes that Operation Intercept “lasted a mere twenty days, not long enough to have an impact on anything except Mexican-American relations” (Smack: Heroin and the American City [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008], 148). But heroin is such an addictive drug that even a brief introduction to it may have lasting consequences.
11. Epstein, Agency of Fear, 84.
12. BNDD Bulletin, September–October, 1970; quoted in Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 26.
13. Warren Hinckle and William Turner, Deadly Secrets: The CIA-Mafia War against Castro and the Assassination of JFK (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992), 373.
14. Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 26.
15. When Juan Restoy, one of those arrested, “subsequently broke out of jail and was killed in a shoot-out, Little Havana [in Miami] buzzed with a rumor that he had been set up and executed by a CIA execution squad to prevent his testifying about agency involvement in the narcotics traffic” (Hinckle and Turner, Deadly Secrets, 373).
16. Len Colodny and Tom Schachtman, The Forty Years’ War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, from Nixon to Obama (New York: Harper, 2009), 20.
17. New York Times, February 1, 1970; Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1976), 371.
18. Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press, 2003), 341, citing Washington Post, August 6, 1971.
19. Epstein, Agency of Fear, 86–87. At the time, Epstein pointed out, the CIA estimated that Turkey produced only from 3 to 8 percent of the world’s illicit opium. However, “Turkey was assumed to be the most convenient and proximate source for the European heroin wholesalers.”
20. Epstein, Agency of Fear, 86.
21. Epstein, Agency of Fear, 87.
22. Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 45, summarizing Ludlum’s reading from his own notes of an “implementation” meeting on November 3, 1969.
23. Drugs in Lebanon were channeled largely through the Casino de Liban, where Marcel Paul Francisci was the gambling concessionaire. The casino was controlled by Yousef Beidas through the Bank Intra, which the criminal financier Robert Vesco tried but failed to take over after the death of its owner Yousef Beidas (Arthur Herzog, Vesco: From Wall Street to Castro’s Cuba [New York: Doubleday, 1987], 150). No one has ever satisfactorily explained Vesco’s mysterious connections to Nixon, his nephew Don Nixon, Nixon’s aide Richard Allen, Attorney General John Mitchell, and the CIA. See, e.g., James Rosen, The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 228.
24. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 381.
25. Jussi Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 90; Time, March 9, 1970.
26. Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 53.
27. Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 88.
