Exclusive: U.S. Directs Agents to Cover Up Program Used to Investigate Americans

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20. Nixon originally created the DEA to be a private presidential army

Watergate saved us from the worst of that, but the potential was built in from the start. According to Edward Jay Epstein's Agency of Fear:

http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/agency/chap34.htm

The proposal for a new narcotics superagency was submitted to Congress on March 28, 1973. Even though the House Committee on Government Operations noted, "The plan was hastily formed.... Administration witnesses were able to give the Sub-Committee only a bare outline of the proposed new organization and its functions," Congress refused to block the reorganization plan which purported to heighten the efficiency of the war against heroin. Accordingly, Reorganization Plan Number Two automatically became effective sixty days later, and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was created on July 1, 1973. The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, which itself had been created by Reorganization Plan Number One, in 1967, was absorbed into the superagency, along with the Office for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement and the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence. In the process John Ingersoll's position as director of the BNDD was abolished, and the directors of the two other offices-Myles Ambrose and William Sullivan-resigned. Five hundred special agents of the Customs Bureau were transferred to this new agency, which employed. on paper, at least, more than four thousand agents and analysts and resembled the FBI as a domestic law-enforcement agency. John R. Bartels, the son of a federal judge who had been recommended for ODALE by Henry Petersen, was now named acting director of this new conglomerate.

If the Watergate burglars had not been arrested and connected to the White House strategists, the Drug Enforcement Agency might have served as the strong Investigative arm for domestic surveillance that President Nixon had long quested after. It had the authority to request wiretaps and no-knock warrants, and to submit targets to the Internal Revenue Service; and, with its contingent of former CIA and counterintelligence agents, it had the talent to enter residences surreptitiously, gather intelligence on the activities of other agencies of the government, and interrogate suspects. Yet, despite these potential powers, the efforts of the White House strategists had been effectively truncated by the Watergate exposures: Ehrlichman and Krogh were directly implicated. in the operations of the Plumbers; Sullivan had been involved in the administration's wiretapping program; and Liddy and Hunt were in prison. The grand design could not be realized, and DEA became simply a protean manifestation of the earlier narcotics agencies.

Bartels soon found, however, that it was not an easy matter to turn this superagency into a conventional narcotics police force. For one thing, when the special offices created by executive order were collapsed into the new agency, Bartels inherited some fifty-three former (or detached) CIA agents and a dozen counterintelligence experts from the military or other intelligence agencies-all of whom, under the original game plan, were supposed to work on special projects designated by the White House strategists. These high-level intelligence agents and analysts had a very different approach to narcotics intelligence from that of the traditional narcotics agent, who operated mainly by spreading "buy money" among his contacts in the underworld until someone attempted to sell him a significant quantity of narcotics. James Ludlum, a former CIA official who took over-the Office of Strategic Services of the new drug agency, explained to me, "My approach was not to arrest a few traffickers but to build the entire intelligence picture of what was going on in the drug world.... I wanted to identify the modus operandi of the major heroin wholesalers, and this meant acquiring a great deal of information which the drug agency did not possess about the patterns of narcotic use."