The CIA, Narcotics & Underworld: Doug Valentine Interview

By Suzan Mazur, Scoop

Several years ago, when I was trying to make the distinction between Lewis Lapham, the Editor of Harper's Magazine -- whose roots are in an old San Francisco banking family -- and Lewis Lapham, the Central Intelligence Agency's man, I was directed to author Doug Valentine by Lou Wolf of Covert Action Quarterly, who described Valentine as one of the most knowledgeable people on the CIA.

Valentine told me the two Laphams were not the same man. I was relieved. But in the next breath he said that Tony Lapham, Harper's Editor Lewis Lapham's brother, had been both a covert CIA agent and General Counsel to the CIA, appointed in 1976 by then Director of Central Intelligence, George H.W. Bush. I was again concerned.

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Suzan Mazur: What do you suppose the New York Times is up to with the Weiner book? Why is a reporter from one of the most important commercial newspapers, sticking it to the CIA by exposing the CIA’s 60 years of horrific failure, with monarchs and dictators on the payroll (King Hussein of Jordan for 20 years, Mobutu, etc.), when as you note in your richly informative book on the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, “Establishment privateers run the secret government”?

Doug Valentine: Most of what Weiner writes about the CIA is already known. It’s a history book with a bias, not an expose, at least not for the Vietnam generation. He doesn’t even really get into the current Bush administration. He gives us a predictable treatment of William Casey and the Contras, when there was an incredible revival of the CIA under Casey.

Suzan Mazur: Weiner plays up the fact that long-time CIA counterintelligence chief, James Angleton, was constantly spilling the beans to Kim Philby during their frequent liquid lunches – Philby, a British agent who turned out to be a spy for the Soviet Union.

Doug Valentine: Angleton was key to understanding the CIA. Weiner hasn’t detailed Angleton’s relationship with the underworld through the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. He hasn’t gotten past CIA 101.

Angleton had his own mysterious agenda, counterintelligence, seeking out enemy agents inside the CIA. He had liaison to the Mafia through Charles Siragusa, a Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent – and Mario Brod, a labor lawyer from Connecticut and New York, who as an Army counterintelligence officer had worked with Angleton at OSS – Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.

As I say in the book, James Angleton alone possessed the coveted Israeli account. His loyalty was to the Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles – then Richard Helms, who was chief of Clandestine Services and later DCI. Director William Colby was his enemy.

Through Angleton’s relationships with Italian royalty, Tibor Rosenbaum [Mossad agent], Charlie Siragusa [FBN agent], Hank Manfredi [FBN], and Mario Brod, he was certainly aware of Meyer Lansky’s central role as the Mafia’s banker in the Caribbean - where Lansky’s mob associate from Las Vegas, Moe Dalitz, opened an account at Castle Bank - as well as in Mexico, where Angleton’s friend, Winston M. Scott, was station chief, and certainly kept tabs on Lansky’s associate, former Mexican president Miguel Aleman. As ever, Angleton and Lansky were the dark stars of the intelligence and financial aspects of international drug smuggling. Alan Block devotes some pages to this in his book, Masters of Paradise.

Angleton thought William Colby might be a mole. Angleton exposed the divisions within the CIA after 1966, the Colby vs. Helms factions. He also represented the literary sensibility the CIA once had, where finding secrets was like teasing the meaning out of a poem. Now we have sledgehammer spies.

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