One of America's most troubling historical chapters is the case of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who led the battle against racial segregation, was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.

The authorities remain convinced that his assassin was a career criminal named James Earl Ray. But the story was never that simple. For years, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI had treated King as an enemy of the state, with that alarm growing when King opposed the Vietnam War and called for a poor people's march on Washington.

Last December, after a civil trial brought by King's family, a 12-member jury challenged the conventional wisdom of a lone gunman. But the major media attacked the trial as bizarre and ridiculed the King family as conspiracy theorists.

A new investigative article at Consortiumnews.com reexamines that case and sorts through what the case may have contributed to the historical record. The article by Douglas Valentine

The Clash of the Icons

by
Douglas Valentine
Copyright December 1998

Political activist Daniel Ellsberg and Professor Alfred McCoy have something special in common. Based on their actions and accomplishments 25 years ago, they achieved the status of icons within the subculture of the New Left.

Icon Ellsberg became a celebrity in 1971 after he leaked The Pentagon Papers, an "act of conscience" that helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam War. This "act of conscience" also, albeit accidentally, contributed to the demise of President Richard Nixon, whose felonious minions allowed CIA officer E. Howard Hunt and erstwhile FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy to burglarize confidential files from Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, in a slap-happy attempt to show that Ellsberg was mentally deranged, and thus discredit the anti-War movement.

Icon McCoy became a celebrity in 1972, with the publication of his book, The Politics of Heroin In Southeast Asia. Since then McCoy's book and its sequel have provided researchers with a compass for charting the CIA's involvement in international drug trafficking.

But somewhere between The Pentagon Papers and The Politics of Heroin is a discrepancy that engenders a disturbing clash of facts from which only one icon can emerge with his status fully intact.

Ellsberg's Perilous Peccadillos

In examining this clash of facts, let us begin by explaining that Ellsberg was not always a "dove" intent on ending the Vietnam War. On the contrary, at first he was an aggressive "hawk," a former Marine lieutenant and Defense Department analyst who in 1965 was assigned as a Pentagon observor to CIA officer Edward Lansdale's Revolutionary Development (RD) Program in South Vietnam. When not helping the shell-shocked Vietnamese build perimeter defenses around their beseiged villages, Ellsberg and his fellow RD advisors would slip into enemy areas and "snatch and snuff" the local Viet Cong cadre.

More importantly, Ellsberg had the uncanny ability to reproduce conversations verbatim, a talent that made him a highly prized asset of the CIA station in Saigon. The CIA wanted to know what influential Vietnamese citizens and officials were privately thinking and plotting, so through his CIA contacts, Ellsberg was introduced into Saigon's stratospheric social circles, and began reporting back to the CIA on matters of political significance.

In South Vietnam, Ellsberg was not only a superb shadow warrior and spy, his CIA and Special Forces comrades knew him as a swashbuckling swordsman who romanced many women, including the exquisitely beautiful Germaine. One quarter French and three quarters Vietnamese, Germaine was a fixture on the fashionable Saigon scene, and when Ellsberg met her at a party, the hot-blooded cocksman immediately rose to the occasion, heedless of the fact that Germaine was engaged to an opium-addicted Corsican drug smuggler named Michel Seguin.

It is here, with Ellsberg's notorious love affair with Germaine, that the Clash of Icons has its origins. According to Alfred McCoy, at that time, Ellsberg's 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 Unusual Associates

Legendary CIA officer Lou Conein was an Old Vietnam Hand who, as a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), fought with French Special Forces in Indochina in World War II. Afterwards he married a Vietnamese woman and remained in Vietnam. He joined the CIA upon its creation and after a tour of duty in Europe returned to South Vietnam in 1954, as an aide to Edward 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." (Bart Barnes, The Washington Post, 6 June 1998.)

Conein departed South Vietnam in 1958 after Lansdale's protege, Ngo Dinh Diem, was safely ensconced 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 anti-communist special forces. In 1962 he returned to Vietnam as the CIA's chief of field operations. He also served as a "floating emissary," reporting directly to the White House and secretly coaching the cabal of generals who murdered President Diem and his brother Nhu in late October 1963. After the bloody coup, Conein remained in South Vietnam until 1968, but not without further controversy. Indeed, as noted, McCoy contends that at the same time Ellsberg and Conein had formed a fast friendship, while working for Lansdale's RD Program, Conein was arranging a "truce" between the CIA and unnamed Corsican drug smugglers in Saigon.

However, in a letter to McCoy's publisher, Conein adamantly denied the allegation that he arranged a drug-related "truce", and stated that his meeting with the Corsicans "had to do with ameliorating a tense situation engendered by Daniel Ellsberg's peccadillos with the mistress of a Corsican."

Here we return to Germaine, her opium addicted lover, Michel Seguin, and a new character in our passion play, Frank Scotton. Tall, dark, and ruggedly handsome, Scotton in 1965 was ostensibly employed by the benign U.S. Information Service, although his undercover job was forming assassination squads around Saigon, in what was the prototype of the CIA's infamous Phoenix Program. Through this experimental program, which fell under Lansdale's RD Program, Scotton and Ellsberg met and became best friends. In fact, it was Scotton who invited Ellsberg to the party where the fateful meeting with Germaine occurred.

What happened next is subject to conjecture, and it must be emphasized that in order to understand the Clash of Icons, the reader must be aware that rumors, whisper campaigns, and half-truths are the preferred weapons of political warriors. CIA deceptions are meant to mis-direct and discredit, so we must examine them closely to discover "why" we are being deceived, and "what" is being concealed.

Complicating the situation is the fact that Ellsberg's friends, Lou Conein and Frank Scotton, were CIA spies. This is not meant to cast doubt on Ellsberg through his associates, but it is intended as a warning that one must carefully study their conflicting stories.

According to Scotton and Conein, in separate interviews with this writer, they warned Ellsberg to stay away from Germaine, but Ellsberg would not be deterred, which put Michel Seguin in the awkward position of having to defend his honor. Both Scotton and Conein claimed that Seguin hired an assassin to kill Ellsberg, but they intercepted the assassin before he could carry out his contract.

In an interview with this writer, Ellsberg admitted to having the affair with Germaine, and he acknowledged that Seguin put a gun to his head and warned him to stay away from her. But Ellsberg vehemently denied that either Scotton or Conein intervened on his behalf. Their story, he said, was 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.

Could it be that the conflicting stories hide an ulterior motive? According to McCoy, Conein met with the Coriscans to arrange a "truce" regarding drug smuggling in South Vietnam, and that after this "truce" the Corsicans continued to serve as "contact men" for the CIA in the drug smuggling business.

But -- and this is where the Clash of Icons reaches critical mass -- Ellsberg denies that either his mentor, Edward Lansdale, or his friend, Lou Conein, were involved with Corsican drug smugglers.

Recapping the clash: McCoy claims that Conein reached a "truce" with the Corsicans over drug smuggling in South Vietnam; Conein denied the allegation and said the meeting with the Corsicans had to do with Ellsberg's love affair with Germaine; and Ellsberg denies that Conein and Scotton intervened on his behalf, or that Conein, Lansdale, and Scotton were involved with drug smugglers.

Who is telling the truth? Could a man with a photographic memory like Daniel Ellsberg be unaware that his CIA friends were involved with drug smugglers? Or is McCoy's book fatally flawed? Did the "truce" never occur?

The possibility that McCoy is wrong raises the ironic possibility that McCoy, who has prompted so many people to question the CIA's role in international drug smuggling, was himself misled, by dirty trickster Lou Conein, toward the Corsicans and away from the CIA's unilateral drug smuggling operation, which McCoy failed to mention in his books.

The CIA's Unilateral Drug Smuggling Operation

There is amply evidence to support the notion that the CIA hatched a plot to conceal its involvement in the illicit Southeast Asian drug business in 1970, when reports of the CIA's involvement in international drug smuggling first began to reach the American media, and the U.S. Senate began to investigate the CIA's Phoenix assassination" Program, a special unit of which was providing security for the CIA's unilateral drug smuggling operation.

At this precise moment, Daniel Ellsberg leaked the aptly named Pentagon Papers, distracting public attention from the Senate's Phoenix investigation, and shifting blame for the unpopular Vietnam War from the CIA to the U.S. military.

Ellsberg is aware of the rumor that his former CIA comrades, Lou Conein and Frank Scotton, asked him to leak the Pentagon Papers for the above stated reasons, and he shrugs the rumor off as yet another instance of CIA disinformation. But is it unthinkable that Ellsberg would suffer a whisper campaign in order to prevent his friends from being investigated for drug smuggling? Moreover, by denying that Conein intervened on his behalf with Michel Seguin, Ellsberg is able to disassociate himself from the great prevaricator, Conein.

The Politics of Heroin in America

After Ellsberg leaked The Pentagon Papers, the CIA's plot to cover up its unilateral drug smuggling operation moved forward with greater intensity. According to the Justice Department's still-classified DeFeo Report, in the spring of 1971 Lou Conein was called out of retirement by CIA officer E. Howard Hunt and asked to become an advisor to President Nixon's drug czar, Egil Krogh, on matters regarding "problems of narcotic control in Southeast Asia and the Pentagon Papers (italics added)."

Consider that in 1971, the relationship between the French intelligence service and Corsican drug smugglers was exposed in a series of spectacular drug busts, which were made 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 Corsicans.

Consider, also, that Egil Krogh's private investigators, in early1971, stumbled upon the CIA's unilateral drug smuggling operation, and that President Nixon, in July 1971, declared the war on drugs a matter of national security. Nixon went after the CIA, and quick as a flash, E. Howard Hunt (Conein's comrade in OSS Detachment 202) bungled the bugging of the Watergate Hotel. Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, who had just been assigned to cover the war on drugs, hooked up with Deep Throat and began incrimentally reporting Nixon's political machinations, engendering the Watergate scandal, and effectively neutralizing Nixon's war on drugs.

In the summer of 1972 McCoy's book was published, and mapped out the CIA-supported drug smuggling operation out of Burma and Houi Sai in Laos. But no CIA officers were indicted for drug smuggling. Indeed, at the time it was to the CIA's advantage to expose this particular operation, which featured Corsicans, because it diverted public attention from its unilateral drug smuggling operation, and it allowed the CIA to boast that it was actually helping wage the war on drugs.

That same summer of 1972, Conein became a consultant to the newly created Office of National Narcotics Intelligence (ONNI) at the Department of Justice, and after the Drug Enforcement Administration DEA) was formed in July 1973, he became chief of a DEA special operations unit that was investigated in 1975 by the U.S. Senate for assassinating drug lords.

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 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 himself led in a wide circle around the CIA's unilateral drug smuggling operation?

Unless these questions are resolved by Ellsberg and McCoy, the truth about CIA drug smuggling, Watergate, and The Pentagon Papers will continue to elude historians, and this quiet Clash of Icons will serve only to perpetuate the myths, mysteries, and half-truths that define American history, a history which itself reflects standard CIA operating procedures.

Douglas Valentine is the author of The Hotel Tacloban and The Phoenix Program. Portions of this article were derived from his forthcoming book, The Strength of the Wolf: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1930-1968.

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