Forbidden Book: Douglas Valentine's "The Phoenix Program: America's Use of Terror in Vietnam"

Article originally posted at FDL/The Dissenter

On June 10, Open Roads publishers announced a new "Forbidden Bookshelf" series. Curated by New York University Professor Mark Crispin Miller, "Forbidden Bookshelf" aims to "fill in the blanks of America’s repressed history by resurrecting books that focused on issues and events that are too often left in the dark."

One of the first books published in the series is Douglas Valentine's invaluable, in-depth history of one of America's most egregious counterinsurgency, torture and assassination programs, as described in his 1990 book The Phoenix Program: America's Use of Terror in Vietnam.

The book is intricately and densely written, yet reads like a Rashomon-like detective story, as Valentine allows many of the actors involved speak for themselves. Never has such an in-depth look at a major CIA operation been written. You know who did what and when. The larger picture is not lost either, as, for instance, Valentine refers to earlier counter-terror programs that influenced Phoenix, such as the UK's counterinsurgency-terror program in Malaysia after World War II.

An encyclopedic attention to detail is Valentine's forte, as those will know who have read his two-volume history on the rise of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The Phoenix Program itself was created by the CIA as a way to coordinate numerous counterinsurgency programs during the Vietnam war, using methods of blanket surveillance, kidnapping and extrajudicial detention, interrogation and torture, and the paramilitarization of the police. The goal, beyond gathering of intelligence, was to eliminate -- via murder, mass use of informants, and terror -- what the U.S. called the "Viet Cong Infrastructure" (VCI), especially the top and middle levels of VC leadership.

Instead, Phoenix sank under the weight of institutional corruption and interagency competition, not to mention Washington's demand to produce results -- even if there were no results to produce. Phoenix itself grew out of the CIA's theory of "Contre Coup," or "counter-terror." The idea was the U.S. would match the terror used by opponent forces, but do it even better.

As Valentine wrote in a May 2001 article: "The object of Contre Coup was to identify and terrorize each and every individual VCI and his/her family, friends and fellow villagers. To this end the CIA in 1964 launched a massive intelligence operation called the Provincial Interrogation Center Program [PICs].... Staffed by members of the brutal [South Vietnamese] Special Police, who ran extensive informant networks, and advised by CIA officers, the purpose of the PICs was to identify, through the systematic 'interrogation' (read torture) of VCI suspects, the membership of the VCI at every level of its organization...."

As the Vietnam War grew in intensity and the U.S. intervention neared half-a-million troops, the CIA tried to rationalize their anti-terror campaign, uniting their counter-insurgency, police, and intelligence aims, while working closely with their fractious South Vietnamese partners.

What followed was murder and torture and graft and corruption on a grand scale. Untold thousands died and were tortured. The figures for those killed in the "counter-terror" program range from the CIA's admitted 20,000 to over 40,000.

A vast number of those killed had no connection with the VC at all. Valentine explains in his book, "most Vietnamese jailed under Phoenix were anonymous pawns whose only value was the small bribe their families offered for their release." The bribes didn't help thousands, as Phoenix managers imposed quotas as high as 1,800 "neutralizations" per month.

Phoenix and Torture

The PICs became an integral part of Phoenix, and torture was standard operating procedure, while CIA "advisers" stood by. Later, CIA personnel argued they had tried to teach their South Vietnamese partners more effective kinds of interrogation, but in practice, they often were present during torture sessions, and countenanced much of what went on. Indeed, CIA's Support Services Branch was in charge of training police Special Branch officers in interrogation methods.

Valentine describes the torture in the PICs: "rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electrical shock ('the Bell Telephone Hour')," as well as suspension in air, beatings with rubber hoses and whips, "use of police dogs to maul prisoners,"and more. But as the first director of the PIC program in Vietnam, John Patrick Muldoon, told Valentine, "You can't have an American there all the time watching these things."

The situation will sound familiar to those who have followed the actions of U.S. and allied forces in Iraq and Afghanistan who routinely turned over prisoners for torture to local authorities, while shadowy U.S. agents lurked in the background of the foreign torture chambers. (A direct report on such actions in Iraq can be seen in Peter Maass's video report, Searching for Steele. More recent revelations in a new FOIA of the CIA's interrogation manual from the 1960s shows such interactions with foreign intelligence and police services during interrogation and torture was something the CIA thought and planned about a great deal.)

When the CIA was in control of their own captives, they used the kinds of "touchless" torture they had perfected and described in their KUBARK interrogation manual. Valentine describes the torture of high-level North Vietnamese officer Nyguyen Van Tai, who was kept in a specially-built prison cell, kept in isolation and constant surveillance by hidden cameras, in a room painted "snow-white," all the while exposed to frigid air conditioning. The solitary confinement continued over four years without Van Tai ever admitting who he was.

"Colby's imprimatur"

In her August 2007 New Yorker article on the CIA black sites, Jane Mayer noted the interest of the CIA in the Phoenix Program as a model for the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

"A Pentagon-contract study found that, between 1970 and 1971, ninety-seven per cent of the Vietcong targeted by the Phoenix Program were of negligible importance," Mayer wrote. "But, after September 11th, some CIA officials viewed the program as a useful model."

While as a work of history The Phoenix Program is one of the most important books ever written on the CIA and the military, on the birth of US "counter-terror" policy, and government sponsored torture and assassination programs, its relevancy to post-9/11 history is self-evident. Anyone trying to understand the chaos and crimes committed by US and associated forces in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars must know this book.

There's a good reason national security historian and author John Prados has called Phoenix a "must read." Heavily researched over a number of years, more than any other book I know of about the period (with Nick Turse's book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, a close second), Valentine's book relied on over 200 interviews with participants, including top CIA and special forces personnel. How the author obtained such access, and what happened as a result is a story in itself.

Valentine described the story in an email exchange with The Dissenter:

"I began work on The Phoenix Program in the summer of 1984," Valentine wrote. "I approached the subject from two angles. First, I made a direct approach to William Colby, the former Director of the CIA and the individual most closely associated with Phoenix, based on his defense of the program before several Congressional committees. Colby agreed to help and referred me to several CIA officers who played prominent roles in Phoenix. These former, and in some cases current, agents spoke openly to me, simply because I carried Colby’s imprimatur.

"Colby generated access lasted into 1987, when I started to notice doors closing and people avoiding me. I’d always known it would happen sooner than later, and I’d pretty much made the rounds, so it didn’t bother me too much. I’d hustled the CIA, I’d gotten inside its walls and rummaged around, and now the CIA was going to exact its revenge. That’s just how it works. If you fuck with he bull, you get the horns. Everyone knows that.

"I also got asked by CIA officer Bob Wall to join the CIA before the door slammed shut altogether.

"But I wasn’t ready to quit, and I wanted to back the CIA off a bit, so I filed a Privacy Act request, and in 1992 I got some results, thanks to the ACLU and a sympathetic judge in the federal district in Springfield, Massachusetts."

"It may cause damage"

More of the story is documented in John Prados' book, The Family Jewels:

"Elements at Langley became uncooperative after one retiree asked CIA lawyers, in the summer of 1986, what things were safe to talk about. When a Publications Review Board lawyer checked to see whether Phoenix was off-limits (the Board had previously cleared Phoenix material in works by Colby himself and agency officer Ralph McGehee), he was advised to caution interviewees not to talk to Valentine....

"By April 1988 the Publications Review Board was advising clandestine service officers of a concern that Valentine’s 'forthcoming book will contain so much detailed information about Agency operations and officers that... it may cause damage,' and asking that senior management of the Directorate of Operations should have the entire matter brought to their attention. Spooks, including some in the ostensibly impartial Inspector General’s office, were ranging the halls telling each other that the author was bad news and hoping they might escape his attention. Valentine eventually discovered this stonewalling due to the reticence of CIA veterans—and the materials quoted here emerged in the course of legal discovery in the lawsuit Douglas Valentine brought against the Central Intelligence Agency."

Valentine has posted online some of the legal documents from his lawsuit against the CIA. His papers collected in the writing of the book are held by the National Security Archives, and available to researchers. Many of his taped interviews, including interviews with William Colby and other senior Phoenix personnel, can be heard online (thanks Cryptocomb.org).

What Phoenix Wrought

While a good knowledge of the Phoenix Program in necessary to understand how U.S. counterinsurgency acts in reality in countries around the globe, in a new introduction for the Open Roads edition of the book, Valentine writes about the corrupting influence of Phoenix upon democratic processes domestically.

Valentine speaks of the "insidious" spread of Phoenix methods in the United States for the purpose of "the political control of its citizens through terrorism, on behalf of the rich military-industrial-political elite who rule our society."

"Indeed, America's security forces were always aware of the domestic applications of the Phoenix," Valentine writes, "and the program has not only come to define modern American warfare, it is the model for our internal 'homeland security' apparatus as well. It is with the Phoenix program that we find the genesis of the paramilitarization of American police forces in their role as adjuncts to military and political security forces engaged in population control and suppression of dissent."

For Valentine, who makes a compelling case, the building of Guantanamo, the use of black sites and torture, the provision -- even as late as 2013 -- for the indefinite detention of Americans and other "war on terror" prisoners, "was easy to predict," if you knew about Phoenix.

I am grateful to Doug Valentine and Mark Crispin Miller for giving The Phoenix Program a new publishing life, to help educate a new generation, which faces a fight against forces of state repression every bit as difficult and important as any faced in this country's history.

Other books released as part of Open Road Media's "Forbidden Bookshelf" series include Christopher Simpson's landmark history, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy; The Search for an Abortionist: The Classic Study of How American Women Coped with Unwanted Pregnancy Before Roe v. Wade by Nancy Howell Lee, Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football by Dan E. Moldea; and The Lords of Creation: The History of America’s 1 Percent by Frederick Lewis Allen. More titles are promised in the near future.

Doug Valentine: Meditations on Christopher Dorner

Slaves to the System
Meditations on Christopher Dorner

by Douglas Valentine

[posted by permission of the author, originally posted at Counterpunch]

The death by fire of Christopher Dorner evoked a rush of memories dating back to September 1971, when, in the wake of the Attica Prison Massacre, I began making plans to migrate from New York State to California.

At age 21, I had no master plan, other than to get far away from where I was, a college drop-out working for a tree company in the suburban town where I was born and raised. Pleasantville. Irony intended.

I hadn’t been “political” during the Vietnam War. In that phase of my misspent youth, I was occupied with sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. I went to one anti-war demonstration in Poughkeepsie. The organizers bused us over from New Paltz. All I remember is dropping out of the parade and hitching back home after an angry guy on the curb spat at me.

A few years later, sitting over my untouched bacon and eggs in the local P’ville diner, reading the Daily News account of Attica, I found I wasn’t hungry anymore. Coming on top of the slaughter of millions of Vietnamese halfway around the world, it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. It seemed like the war had come full circle and was now at home, where it belonged. Time to enlist.

Maybe Christopher Dorner felt something similar.

My buddy Mike wanted to teach tennis in Southern Cal and by September 1972 we were driving cross country in my blue, three-speed-on-the-column Rambler, purchased for $600 from a little old guy my father knew named Terwilliger, a barnstormer who’d flown some of the first bi-planes around the country at the beginning of the 20th Century.

I mention old Terwilliger to emphasize how time flies, and how easily we forget. The powers that be count on it.

Mike and I camped along the way. We got as far as Shamrock, TX, where we had a car accident at 2:00 am on Route 66 while tripping on LSD. That’s a story in itself. Anyway, we couldn’t find a service station to fix the water pump, the only part of the car that needed fixing. We had long hair and the grease monkeys in the Panhandle didn’t lend screwdrivers to our kind.

I sold the car for $10 and the tape deck for $20 and we hitched the rest of the way, stopping in the Grand Canyon for a few days, where a degenerate hippie ripped off our stash while we were skinny dipping in the Havasu.

The hippie scene was extinct by 1972. Heroin was becoming the drug de jour. “Grow up. Turn off. Sell out.” That was the mantra, much like today.

We got to Southern Cal and lo and behold, Mike’s sister wasn’t expecting me. No room for Dougie. I sat on their front door step, with $40 in my wallet, wondering what the fuck. And at that moment Tommy Henschel pulled up in his VW, got out, and said, “Hi!”

Tommy had gone to high school with Mike and me. He’d fled the draft to Alberta and knew we were heading out West and drove down to meet us, all very impromptu. Tommy and I got an apartment in Anaheim and jobs at a sheet metal factory where I met a Chicano guy named Danny who’d just done five years for a marijuana importation from Mexico bust.

Tommy soon retreated from sooty Orange County to pristine Canada, and Danny and I hitched to Eureka to get a job on a fishing boat, but it was December and no jobs were available, just lots of rain. We were broke and sang for our supper at the local Salvation Army. On Christmas Eve we hitched down to San Francisco and spent Christmas Day with his grandmother, feasting on homemade tacos. She was a full blooded Apache Indian, then in her 80’s, who’d run a brothel in San Francisco at one time.

Danny got busted on Christmas Day night for pulling a knife on a cop, and I fell in with a bunch of transients who introduced me to some street people down on Market Street who knew how to hustle the system in San Francisco in December 1972. It was easy. You got on Welfare. They gave you money for rent and food stamps and, as a bonus, Medical scripts that got you uppers and downers from participating physicians. Mine was from Argentina. You could sell the pharmaceuticals for extra cash or eat them yourself.

Thus began life in North Beach in 1973. I moved into the New Rex Hotel on Broadway with aspirations of infiltrating the City Lights Book crowd. You could see Brautigan sipping espresso at Enrico’s, and Bob Kaufman racing around in a psychotic haze, pan-handling and eating crumbs off tables in cafes. But I never got in with them. Instead I started hanging out with the barkers and strippers. I made friends with Sam, an old black heroin addict and B&E man. I let him use my room and in return he protected me from the predators. I made friends with a big armed Jewish guy from NYC who hired himself as a bodyguard for serious drug buyers who came into town to cop quantity. Sonny, a former jazz drummer who’d been given electric shock, lived down the hall and so did Jesse, who’d spent 15 years walking the Big Yard at San Quentin

The New Rex was populated with alcoholic ex-cons, transients, glue-sniffing transvestites, promiscuous gays (this was before AIDs), outpatients like Sonny from local mental facilities living on SSI (these folks were ripped-off by the predators minutes after cashing their monthly check), and black guys who rotated in and out of jail and aspired to make an easy living off the steady stream of white suburban girls that came into town in pretty skirts, went dancing at the black clubs, and sometimes ended up hooked on smack and turning tricks.

There was an opportunity to commit some new felony on every street corner. It was enticing. Sam introduced me to his fence, Billy Justice, who liked me because I could hustle pool and quote poetry. Late one night we were walking home from a pool hall on Mission Street and crossed paths with an old guy dressed in a trench coat, wearing a fedora. He pulled out an envelope and opened it up under a street light. Diamonds sparkled. But Billy demurred, as none were large enough to invest in.

The cops were totally corrupt. One night they raided the New Rex, kicking in doors, stealing anything of value, passing whatever drugs they found to their drug dealing relatives for re-sale. I made friends with a big Samoan guy (no shit, this is true) who played pool at a place on upper Grant. One night we’re out riding around in his car and he gets pulled over. The cops tell me to get lost. A few days later I see the Samoan again. It was a stolen car but the cops let him go in exchange for the quantity of heroin they removed from the trunk. (They couldn’t make the car seizure and grab the junk.) Business as usual.

I hope there is a spiritual statute of limitations for some of the things I got involved in. I’ll leave all that to your imagination. The point is that Christopher Dorner wasn’t even born in 1973.

Where did he come from? What on earth made him join the Navy and the LAPD? Like Glen Ford at Black Agenda says, he bought the bill of goods. It’s easy, enticing. The powers that be (Left and Right) spend billions twisting and mutating our warped attitudes to exactly that end.

There were black cops in San Francisco in 1973, yes indeed. One of them even called me a nigger while I was being booked. Me, a good-looking white guy!

I’d gotten in a street fight with two undercover SF detectives. I wound up facedown, handcuffed on the sidewalk in front of the New Rex, my head in a puddle of Colt 45 and broken glass. All I could see was the jack boots of a motorcycle cop. The cop held my glasses in his hand in front of my eyes. “Are these yours?” he inquired. I replied in the affirmative, at which point he stomped on them.

Milton, the black guy I was arrested with, was freaking out in the paddy wagon on the way to the booking station. “They’re going to take me into an alley and shoot me in the head,” he kept shouting.

“Oh shut up,” I said with studied insensitivity, “You’re not George Jackson.”

Back then George Jackson was fresh in peoples’ minds. There was a different collective consciousness, which was fading fast into PTSD too.

Like Milton, who was wanted on a few warrants, I was never jailed for political crimes, although it’s hard in America to distinguish a political crime from some other kind of crime, especially if you’re black and or poor.

Likewise, it’s almost impossible to categorize the many and varied punishments doled out by the Left (represented by MSNBC, The Nation, Mother Jones) and Right (Fox KKK News, CNN, The NY Times) branches of the capitalist system for being black or poor and committing “economic” crimes.

Some things never change. Everyone individually has to learn for himself, if you ever learn at all, what your enlightened elders knew – which is why I doubt that in the black hole of historical truth that characterizes today’s poisonous political climate, many readers have ever even heard of George Jackson.

I’m sure Chris Dorner (who was frequently and snidely referred to as a “wannabe martyr” in the days leading up to his incineration) never heard of Jackson, a full-fledged martyr.

Jackson, notably, was shot and killed in a botched prison escape in August 1971.

Jackson was not an aberration in 1971, like Dorner was in 2013. Convicted of robbing a gas station at age 18, he was sent to San Quentin, a cornerstone of the American prison gulag. He didn’t adjust well and got involved in repeated attacks on corrupt guards and white racist prisoners. Facing life in a cage, he studied the Viet Cong, whose tactics he adopted. He converted to Marxism and co-founded a black power group in 1966. Placed in solitary for being overly-aggressive, he wrote revolutionary letters that were compiled into a book and earned him fame and the love of white, mostly French, intellectuals.

After being transferred to Soledad, he became increasingly desperate. Lifting a page from the VC terror manual, he advocated “selective retaliatory violence” against corrupt guards and white racist inmates.

Things got wild. In August 1970 his younger brother, seeking to free George and several other black prisoners, took several hostages at the Marin County courthouse. Four people were killed during the getaway, and Angela Davis was tried and acquitted for murder. It was said she had given the younger Jackson his guns.

The Davis trial was quite the cause célèbre and fashion statement.

A year later, in August 1971, a month before the Attica Massacre, George Jackson pulled a gun – perhaps delivered to him by his lawyer – and, referencing Ho Chi Minh, freed a number of fellow prisoners, and took a few guards and white prisoners as hostages. Four guards and two of the hostages were later found dead in his cell. Jackson escaped to the prison yard where he was allegedly shot and killed, in what several white intellectuals, and Jim Jones of the infamous Jonestown commune in Guyana, believed was a political assassination.

A lot of blacks doubted that the true story of George Jackson’s demise was told. Official accounts of what happens in prisons and jails are as reliable as a politician’s promises or the opinions of Glen Beck or David Corn. It’s still Left or Right capitalism – Coke or Pepsi.

Individual cases like Dorner’s or Jackson’s, where it’s impossible to understand the motive, are easily exploitable and an endless source of hype for the Left and Right pundit classes in their endless quest to shape public attitudes and sell subscriptions. It’s certainly true that the American slave state persists thanks to this relentless anvil chorus, as both sides have an equal stake in perpetuating the underclass. (It’s also true that the slave state exists largely under the guise of a war on drugs – and that blacks bear the brunt.)

Dorner probably never thought deeply about the context in which he was operating. He certainly had an inkling, based on his personal situation. But he was no more involved in the Civil Rights Movement than Barack Obama who, in a speech today (February 15) urged blacks to abandon their evil ways, stop having unprotected sex, get married (no hint that half of white American marriages end in divorce) send their kids to good schools that don’t exist (as opposed to the prep-prison schools that do exist), buy nice houses with money they can never save, and most of all, to get good jobs that also don’t exist.

And never will exist in a capitalist system. No mention on Obama’s part that capitalism relies on a poor class of exploited workers and under-employment to keep wages low. Obama can’t challenge the system, any more than Chris Matthews or Al Sharpton or Glen Greenwald, all of whom profit from it.

If only Dorner had known the history, which in 1974, wasn’t history at all.

I got out of jail and thanks to a quirk in the justice system was able to continue in my pursuits. By 1974, I was living on Stockton Street in a quaint apartment with a girlfriend who had a steady job. I ventured over to North Beach daily and was there in May 1974 when one of the scion’s of the American media, William Hearst, was underwriting the delivery of boxes of food to the area’s hungry underclasses.

Hearst was not doing this out of the goodness of his black heart. A black guy named Donald Defreeze and his gang, the Symbionese Liberation Army, had kidnapped Heart’s 19 year old daughter Patty and were holding her hostage. Defreeze demanded that Hearst feed every needy Californian, and Big Daddy quick as a flash sent trucks into the city. I wandered over and got a box off the back of a truck parked on Broadway. Among the items was a canned ham. The food lasted a few days. It was not a long term solution. And poor Donald Defreeze didn’t know what to do next.

Meanwhile Patty, aka Tania, went over to the dark side and in April 1974 participated in a bank robbery in San Francisco. People weren’t quite sure what to make of that! Had she been brainwashed? Or had she been restored to sanity…..

The SLA was accused of a number of murderous crimes and in May the gang was cornered in a house. A Dorner-style a shootout ensued and, back to the future, the authorities set the house on fire. The gang members probably committed suicide rather than burn. His family didn’t believe the corpse identified as Defreeze’s was actually his.

There was more disbelief than what surrounded the media accounts of Jackson and Attica (but not Jonestown), given that Defreeze was a graduate cum laud from Vacaville – the same institution that produced electric Sonny at the New Rex.

Defreeze’s mentor at Vacaville, Colston Westbrook, was a certified CIA psywar expert. He’d been an adviser to the Korean CIA and CIA agent Lon Nol in Cambodia. From 1966 until 1969 Westbrook reportedly worked (undercover as an employee of Pacific Architects and Engineers) as an adviser to the Vietnamese Police Special Branch. In 1970 he returned to the US and got a job at the University of California at Berkeley.

According to venerable Mae Brussell, Westbrook’s control officer was William Herrmann, who was connected to the Stanford Research Institute, RAND Corporation, and Hoover Center on Violence. In his capacity as an adviser to Governor Ronald Reagan, Herrmann put together a CIA-style pacification plan for California at the UCLA Center for Study and Prevention of Violence. As part of this pacification plan Westbrook, a black man, was assigned the task of forming a black cultural association at the Vacaville Medical Facility. Although ostensibly fostering black pride, Westbrook was in truth conducting an experimental behavior modification program. Westbrook’s job, claims Brussell, was to program, MKULTRA style, unstable black persons, drawn from California prisons, to assassinate black community leaders.

Westbrook designed the SLA’s logo (a seven-headed cobra), gave Defreeze his African name (Cinque), and set Cinque and his gang on their Phoenix flight to cremation, care of the Los Angeles SWAT Team, the FBI, and U.S. Treasury agents.

I left the Left Coast days after that event and took a bus back East. I got a job with a tree service, working for low wages, and picked up where I’d left off. What else can you do? A life of crime is only feasible in a capitalist system if you wear a white collar.

Some things never change.

When I was in jail in San Francisco, there were, in the block of cells I was in, 26 black guys, me and another white guy (whose girlfriend had turned him in for stealing her jewelry) and a Chinese guy who fell off a top bunk, split his skull wide open, and died from the fall.

Today there are more blacks in prison than were enslaved in 1850.

Many more are in the military and law enforcement, shoring up the system that enslaves all the poor.

I ask you, What do you make of that?

--------------------------

DOUGLAS VALENTINE is the author of five books, including The Phoenix Program and The Strength of the Wolf, which are available at his websites http://www.members.authorsguild.net/valentine/ and http://www.douglasvalentine.com/index.html.

Oliver Arts and Open Press recently published Doug's first book of poems, A Crow's Dream, which is available at the following website:
http://www.oliveropenpress.com/Oliver.020.CROWS%20DREAM.html

"The Hand Is Faster Than The Eye"

The following poem is by Douglas Valentine, part of his new book of poems, A Crow's Dream, published by The Oliver Arts and Open Press.

The Hand Is Faster Than The Eye
(Composed 11 September 2001)

I learned that lesson long ago,
It was the first articulated truth:
"The hand is faster than the eye,"
Said the raven to the youth.

There is love, and then betrayal.
There is a cause, and then there's none.
Then Mandrake lifts his velvet cape
And all you ever knew is gone.

Valentine is, of course, best known for his investigative non-fiction, which produced three of the most trenchant works on U.S. clandestine operations, both CIA/military and the "war on drugs": The Phoenix Program, The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA, and The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs. (My own review of Strength of the Pack can be seen here.)

Valentine has always been a sensitive and incisive commentator. One wonders how much the exposure to evil affects someone. Valentine recently made many audio tapes of his interviews with CIA and US military officials available online. The interviews were made during his research into the Phoenix Program. Certainly archiving the historical record is one way to address the contact with evil.

But poetry is another thing altogether, as it speaks more directly to the senses, to the sense of life and love that cannot be eliminated, and reminds us of our humanity, even when we are in or have entered some very dark places. - I haven't read Valentine's book yet. It's on order, but I look forward to getting my copy soon.

Three other poems excerpted from A Crow's Dream can be read here.

"How Government Tries To Mess With Your Mind"

There's a very good podcast interview by Lew Rockwell of author Doug Valentine on the question about government infiltration of the media. Really, given the massive amounts of money spent, as Valentine points out in the interview, by the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the CIA on propaganda meant for both foreign and domestic consumption, I don't know if infiltration is even the right word anymore.

The question of government influence on the media, particularly through direct intervention, is not one that is often aired in media circles, for obvious reasons. But it's important to know this kind of history, as it's not about the past, but about our present and our future. My thanks to Doug and Lew for such a stimulating discussion.

Listen directly to podcast by clicking here.

Book Review: Doug Valentine's The Strength of the Pack

The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA is a book about the corruption of not just an agency, but of an entire state apparatus. Douglas Valentine, whose copiously detailed history of The Phoenix Program (1990) provided the definitive book on that CIA-South Vietnam torture-assassination program, has turned his attention to the way the CIA and its backers suborned the anti-drug war for their own purposes.

He took on the task of describing the creation and evolution of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which as the years went by, became subordinated politically to the CIA's overseas covert operational apparatus. In the end, DEA agents found themselves going after some drug traffickers, while protecting others, particularly those of interest to or supported by the US government for its own purposes. In the meantime, there was also a lot of incidental personal corruption, with millions of dollars there for the taking for those looking to skim some cream off the heady concoction of government covert business and the immense profits of illegal drug trafficking.

Taking advice from Andy Tartaglino, an old Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) man, whose investigation into corruption at the FBN helped bring about the demise of that agency in the late 1960s, Valentine began his investigation into DEA corruption by first exploring the early history of that agency's predecessors, the FBN and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD). The equally impressive result of his researches into this earlier history can be found in the 2006 fascinating introductory volume to Pack, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs.

The Strength of the Pack begins where Wolf left off, with the merger of the old FBN with the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control into the BNDD, and later, the transformation of the latter during the second Nixon administration into the DEA. Along the way, we meet a heterogeneous collection of sincere drug agents and careerist apparatchiks, Corsican gangsters, Italian Mafia, old OSS men, foreign guerillas and tribal chieftains, corrupt national leaders, MKULTRA operatives, and many, many more. The history takes us from the years of Johnson's Great Society through Vietnam, the French Connection, the ugly Nixon years, Watergate, supporting the opium-running muhajadeen (to counter the Soviets in Afghanistan), all the way to the build-up to the war in Iraq. (As Valentine points out, a key U.S. adviser to the Iraqi Interior Ministry after the U.S. invasion was Steve Casteel, a former high-level DEA agent.)

Doug Valentine is a meticulous researcher, and the book is accordingly well footnoted, and includes photos of key individuals, and some, though not an overwhelming amount, of reproduced documentation. The book is an intense, though entertaining read, as Valentine knows how to carry the reader right into the heart of the unfolding operations. Much of his information, as with The Phoenix Program, comes from interviews with key participants, and many will be the future historians beholden to Valentine for capturing this kind of testimony before it was forever lost.

Valentine is no supposedly "objective' historian, but understands that history is always written from some point of view. It's clear he is outraged at the corruption and hypocrisy of the drug "wars," not to mention sickened by those killed, disappeared, tortured, etc., so that the intelligence agencies -- primarily the CIA -- will not be disturbed in their skullduggery, which often as not is in the service of some of the most corrupt and criminal individuals on the planet.

This is most important because, as Valentine documents, following other authors (whom he generously cites) like Alfred McCoy and Gary Webb, the history of the drug wars and the agencies that presumably fight them is really a history of the subordination of those agencies for political ends. The money and the political leverage that comes from these "wars" is used to bankroll the CIA's covert wars and interventions. Indeed, by the end of the period Valentine documents, he indicates that nearly every overseas DEA agent works in one way or another for the CIA (while at home, the management of DEA was taken over by the FBI). The cost of all this to the American public is immense, both in terms of billions of dollars, but also in terms of attacks on personal liberties, as the counterinsurgency tactics employed abroad are turned increasingly back upon citizens at home.

This is an essential book, and the reader will want to keep it, along with Strength of the Wolf, as a reference work in an area of contemporary history that is solely lacking reference works. In sum, The Strength of the Pack is a seminal work on the history of federal drug law, the creation and transformation of the drug enforcement agencies, and their interpenetration with U.S. imperialist policy abroad, from the days of the Vietnam War through the current narco-terrorism "wars."

Originally posted as an Amazon review

Archival Interviews with CIA & Military Officers to Be Released

The following announcement has been released regarding the pending publication of a treasure-trove of documentary material on the CIA and the 1960s torture-killings program in Vietnam, the infamous Phoenix Program. Both historians and political activists should be grateful to Doug Valentine and Cryptocomb for making this new material accessible to the general public. I look forward to perusing it.

Cryptocomb is proud to announce the publication of over 8GB's of taped interviews journalist/author Douglas Valentine conducted with more than a dozen CIA and military officers while researching his book The Phoenix Program. The original interviews were recorded in the late 1980s on magnetic tape and, with the help of several volunteers, subsequently converted onto CD's twenty years later. Advances in technology now make it possible to post the interviews on Cryptocomb for everyone to hear. The Phoenix Program, notably, is the template for the targeted killings in the war on terror, and the interviews are invaluable tools for learning about the men who were instrumental in its development and prosecution. Many of the people at the helm of the Phoenix Program later went on to walk the halls of the U.S Dept of Homeland Security, Congress and the Pentagon. The first interviews will be posted April 22nd, with more to follow each week through May 8th.

Those who wish to support Cryptocomb's work can do so by clicking here. (Disclosure: I have no financial or other association with either Doug Valentine or those who own or operate the Cryptocomb website.)