PJ 83
CHAPTER 7
Though the CIA continued to maintain drug experiments in the streets of America after the program was officially cancelled, the United States reaped tremendous value from it. With George Hunter White's connection to underworld figure Little Augie, connections were made with Mafia king-pin Lucky Luciano, who was in Dannemore Prison.

Luciano wanted freedom, the Mafia wanted drugs, and the United States wanted Sicily. The date was 1943. Augie was the go-between between Luciano and the United States War Department.

Luciano was transferred to a less harsh prison and began to be visited by representatives of the Office of Naval Intelligence and by underworld figures, such as Meyer Lansky. A strange alliance was formed between the U.S. Intelligence agencies and the Mafia, who controlled the West Side docks in New York. Luciano regained active leadership in organized crime in America.

The U.S. Intelligence community utilized Luciano's under-world connections in Italy. In July of 1943, Allied forces launched their invasion of Sicily--the beginning push into occupied Europe. General George Patton's Seventh Army advanced through hundreds of miles of territory that was fraught with difficulty--booby trapped roads, snipers, confusing mountain topography, all within close range of 60,000 hostile Italian troops. All this was accomplished in four days--a military "miracle" even for Patton.

Senator Estes Kefauver's Senate Subcommittee on Organized Crime asked, in 1951, how all this was possible. The answer was that the Mafia had helped to protect roads from Italian snipers, served as guides through treacherous mountain terrain, and provided needed intelligence to Patton's army. The part of Sicily which Patton's forces traversed had at one time been completely controlled by the Sicilian Mafia, until Benito Mus­solini smashed it through the use of police repression.

Just prior to the invasion, it was hardly even able to continue shaking down farmers and shepherds for protection money. But the invasion changed all this, and the Mafia went on to play a very prominent and well-documented role in the American military occupation of Italy.
The expedience of war opened the doors to American drug traffic and Mafia domination. This was the beginning of the Mafia-U.S. Intelligence alliance--an alliance that lasts to this day and helped to support the covert operations of the CIA, such as the Iran-Contra operations. In these covert operations, the CIA would obtain drugs from South America and Southeast Asia, sell them to the Mafia and use the money for the covert purchase of military equipment. These operations accelerated when Congress cut off military funding for the Contras.

One of the Allies' top occupation priorities was to liberate as many of their own soldiers from garrison duties as possible so that they could participate in the military offensive. In order to accomplish this, Don Calogero's Mafia were pressed into ser­vice, and in July of 1943, the Civil Affairs Control Office of the U.S. Army appointed him mayor of Villalba and other Mafia of­ficials as mayors of other towns in Sicily.

As the Northern Italian offensive continued, Allied intelli­gence became very concerned over the extent to which the Ital­ian Communists' resistance to Mussolini had driven Italian poli­tics to the left. Community Party membership had doubled be­tween 1943 and 1944, huge leftist strikes had shut down facto­ries and the Italian underground fighting Mussolini had risen to almost 150,000 men. By mid-1944, the situation came to a head and the U.S. Army terminated arms drops to the Italian Resis­tance, and started appointing Mafia officials to occupation ad­ministration posts. Mafia groups broke up leftists' rallies and reactivated black market operations throughout southern Italy.

Lucky Luciano was released from prison in 1946 and de­ported to Italy, where he rebuilt the heroin trade. The court's decision to release him was made possible by the testimony of intelligence agents at this hearing, and a letter written by a naval officer reciting what Luciano had done for the Navy. Luciano was supposed to have served from 30 to 50 years in prison. Over 100 Mafia members were similarly deported within a couple of years.

Luciano set up a syndicate which transported morphine base from the Middle East to Europe, refined it into heroin, and then shipped it into the United States via Cuba. During the 1950s, Marseilles, in Southern France, became a major city for the heroin labs and the Corsican syndicate began to actively cooper­ate with the Mafia in the heroin trade. Those became popularly known as the French Connection.

In 1948, Captain White visited Luciano and his narcotics as­sociate Nick Gentile in Europe. Gentile was a former American gangster who had worked for the Allied Military Government in Sicily. By this time, the CIA was already subsidizing Corsican and Italian gangsters to oust Communist unions from the Port of Marseilles. American strategic planners saw Italy and southern France as extremely important for their naval bases as a coun­terbalance to the growing naval forces of the Soviet Union. CIO-AFL organizer Irving Brown testified that, by the time the CIA subsidies were terminated in 1953, U.S. support was no longer needed because the profit from the heroin traffic was suf­ficient to sustain operations.

When Luciano was originally jailed, the U.S. felt it had eliminated the world's most effective underworld leader and the activities of the Mafia were seriously damaged. Mussolini had been waging a war since 1924 to rid the world of the Sicilian Mafia. Thousands of Mafia members were convicted of crimes and forced to leave the cities and hide out in the mountains.

Mussolini's reign of terror had virtually eradicated the inter­national drug syndicates. Combined with the shipping surveil­lance during the war years, heroin trafficking had become almost nil. Drug use in the United States, before Luciano's re­lease from prison, was on the verge of being entirely wiped out.
PJ 83
CHAPTER 8
The U.S. Government has conducted three types of mind-control experiments:

* Real-life experiences, such as those used on Little Augie and the LSD experiments in the safehouses of San Francisco and Greenwich Village.

* Experiments on prisoners, such as in the California Medi­cal Facility at Vacaville.

* Experiments conducted in both mental hospitals and the Veterans Administration hospitals.

Such experimentation requires money--and the United States Government has funneled funds for drug experiments through different agencies--both overtly and covertly.

One of the funding agencies to contribute to the experimenta­tion is the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), a unit of the U.S. Justice Department and one of President Richard Nixon's favorite pet agencies. The Nixon Administra­tion was, at one time, putting together a program for detaining youngsters who showed a tendency toward violence in "concentration" camps. According to the Washington Post, the plan was authored by Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker. Health, Edu­cation and Welfare Secretary Robert Finch was told by John Er­lichman, Chief of Staff for the Nixon White House, to imple­ment the program. He proposed the screening of children of six years of age for tendencies toward criminality. Those who failed these tests were to be destined to be sent to the camps. The program was never implemented.

LEAA came into existence in 1968 with a huge budget to as­sist various U.S. law enforcement agencies. Its effectiveness, however, was not considered too great. After spending $6 bil­lion, the F.B.I. reports general crime rose 31 percent and violent crime rose 50 percent. But little accountability was required of LEAA on how it spent its funds.

LEAA's role in the behavior modification research began at a meeting held in 1970 in Colorado Springs. Attending that meeting were Richard Nixon, Attorney General John Mitchell, John Erlichman, H.R. Haldeman and other White House staffers. They met with Dr. Bertram Brown, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, and forged a close collaboration between LEAA and the Institute. LEAA was a product of the Justice Department and the Institute was a product of HEW.

LEAA funded 350 projects involving medical procedures, behavior modification and drugs for delinquency control. Money from the Criminal Justice System was being used to fund mental health projects and vice versa. Eventually, the leader-ship responsibility and control of the Institute began to deteriorate and their scientists began to answer to LEAA alone.

The National Institute of Mental Health went on to become one of the greatest supporters of behavior modification research. Throughout the 1960s, court calendars became blighted with lawsuits on the part of "human guinea pigs" who had been experimented upon in prisons and mental institutions. It was these lawsuits which triggered the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights investigation, headed by Senator Sam Erwin. The subcommittee's harrowing report was virtually ignored by the news media.

Thirteen behavior modification programs were conducted by the Department of Defense. The Department of Labor had also conducted several experiments, as well as the National Science Foundation. The Veterans Administration was also deeply involved in behavior modification and mind control. Each of these agencies, including LEAA. and the Institute, were named in secret CIA documents as those who provided research cover for the MK-ULTRA program.

Eventually, LEAA was using much of its budget to fund experiments, including aversive techniques and psychosurgery, which involved--in some cases--irreversible brain surgery on normal brain tissue for the purpose of changing or controlling behavior and-or emotions.

Senator Erwin questioned the head of LEAA concerning ethical standards of the behavior modification projects which LEAA had been funding. Erwin was extremely dubious about the idea of the government spending money on this kind of project with-out strict guidelines and reasonable research supervision in order to protect the human subjects. After Senator Erwin's denunciation of the funding polices, LEAA announced that it would no longer fund medical research into behavior modification and psychosurgery. Despite the pledge by LEAA's director, Donald E. Santarelli, LEAA ended up funding 537 research projects dealing with behavior modification. There is strong evidence to indicate psychosurgery was still being used in prisons in the 1980s. Immediately after the funding announcement by LEAA, there were 50 psychosurgical operations at Atmore State Prison in Alabama. The inmates became virtual zombies. The operations, according to Dr. Swan of Fisk University, were done on black prisoners who were considered politically active.
The Veterans Administration openly admitted that psychosurgery was a standard procedure for treatment and not used just in experiments. The VA Hospitals in Durham, Long Beach, New York, Syracuse and Minneapolis were known to employ these techniques on a regular basis. VA clients could typically be subject to these behavior alteration procedures against their will. The Erwin subcommittee concluded that the rights of VA clients had been violated.
LEAA also subsidized the research and development of gadgets and techniques useful to behavior modification. Much of the technology, whose perfection LEAA funded, had originally been developed and made operational for use in the Vietnam War. Companies like Bangor Punta Corporation and Walter Kidde and Co., through its subsidiary Globe Security System, adapted these devices to domestic use in the U.S. ITT was another company that domesticated the warfare technology for potential use on U.S. citizens. Rand Corporation executive Paul Baran warned that the in­flux back to the United States of the Vietnam War surveil­lance gadgets alone--not to mention the behavior modifica­tion hardware--could bring a out "the most effective, op­pressive police state ever created".