Agency Of Fear - Opiates and Political Power in America - By Edward Jay Epstein 1977

The Story of How the Drug Enforcement Administration Came to Be.

PREFACE
This book is based on the view that the American president under ordinary circumstances reigns rather
than rules over the government of the United States. To be sure, the president is nominally in command
of the executive branch of the government, and he has the authority to fire the officials that in fact control
such critical agencies as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the
Internal Revenue Service, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the criminal division of the Department of Justice,
etc. (though he does not in many cases have the authority unilaterally to appoint a replacement). In
practice, however, this presidential power is severely mitigated, if not entirely counterbalanced, by the
ability of officials in these key agencies to disclose secrets and private evaluations to the public that
could severely damage the image of the president.
For example, in theory, six presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, had the power to fire
J. Edgar Hoover as head of the FBI, but in each case he had the power to retaliate by revealing illicit
activities that occurred during their administrations (as well as information about the private lives of the
presidents). This potential for retribution by government officials is compounded by the fact that in the
vast complexity of the executive branch a president cannot be sure where embarrassing secrets exist, and
he must assume that most officials have developed subterranean channels to journalists, who will both
conceal their sources and give wide circulation to the "leak." A president could seize control over the
various parts of the government only if he first nullified the threat of disclosures by severing the conduits
through which dissidents might leak scandalous information to the press. This prerequisite for power is in
fact exactly what President Nixon attempted when he set up a series of special units which, it was hoped,
would conduct clandestine surveillance of both government officials and newsmen during his first
administration. If he had succeeded in establishing such an investigative force, he would have so
radically changed the balance of power within the government that it would have been tantamount to an
American coup d'etat.
A coup d'etat is not the same as a revolution, where power is seized by those outside the government, or
even necessarily a military putsch, whereby the military government takes over from the civilian
government; it is, as Edward Luttwak points out in his book Coup d'Etat, "a seizure of power within the
present system." The technique of the coup involves the use of one part of the government to disrupt
communications between other parts of the government, confounding and paralyzing noncooperatingagencies while displacing the dissident cliques from power. If successful, the organizers of the coup can
gain control over all the levers of real power in the government, then legitimize the new configuration
under the name of eliminating some great evil in society. Though it is hard to conceive of the technique
of the coup being applied to American politics, Nixon, realizing that he securely controlled only the
office of the president, methodically moved to destroy the informal system of leaks and independent
fiefdoms. Under the aegis of a "war on heroin," a series of new offices were set up, by executive order,
such as the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement and the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence,-
which, it was hoped, would provide the president with investigative agencies having the potential and the
wherewithal and personnel to assume the functions of "the Plumbers" on a far grander scale. According
to the White House scenario, these new investigative functions would be legitimized by the need to
eradicate the evil of drug addiction.
In describing the inner workings of the "war on heroin" I have relied heavily on the files supplied to me
by Egil Krogh, Jr., who was the president's deputy for law enforcement before he was imprisoned for his
role in the Plumbers' operations. This archive includes verbatim transcripts of' conversations the
president had with presidential advisors; handwritten notes describing meetings between John
Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman, and other principals in the administration's "crusade";
option papers drafted for the Domestic Council; scenarios designed for the media; internal analyses of
political problems; drafts of presidential speeches; private reports on the drug problem; briefings for the
press; and outlines of conversations Krogh had with the president. Krogh, after he was released from
prison, spent more than three weeks assisting me in analyzing the material, and I then went over many of
the documents with Jeffrey Donfeld, who was Krogh's assistant on the Domestic Council. The archive is
by no means complete-the White House retained a large portion of Krogh's files-and it presents
information only from the perspective of the White House. I therefore filled in the archive by
interviewing officials in the various agencies that were to be affected by the White House plans for a
"reorganization." These interviews took over three years, and reflect personal animosities as well as
bureaucratic perspectives. Because the circumstances surrounding each interview bear directly on the
credibility of the interview-why, for example, did Krogh provide me with such embarrassing
documents?-I have decided to reveal all the sources for this book and comment on the motives, problems,
contradictions, and gaps that I found in the interviews and documents. Unless otherwise specified,
whenever references are made to persons explaining, commenting, observing or otherwise divulging
information, they were made to me for the purposes of this book, and a fuller explanation of when,
where, and why is provided in the final section of the book. Books and documents are listed in the
Bibliography.
The research for this book was financed in large part by the Drug Abuse Council, Inc., a privately
financed foundation which was established to provide another perspective on problems of drug abuse.
Assistance was also provided by National Affairs, Inc., the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Police
Foundation. Esquire helped subsidize my reportage of poppy-growing in Turkey, and The Public Interest
magazine supported my investigation of methadone clinics and helped me obtain the Krogh file.
Research on various parts of the book was done for me by Hillary Mayer, Suzanna Duncan, Elizabeth
I am also indebted, for their insights into the political process, to Edward Banfield, Daniel Bell, Allan
Bloom, Edward Chase, Nathan Glazer, Erving Goffman, Andrew Hacker, William Haddad, Paul
Halpern, Bruce Kovner, Irving Kristol, Edward Luttwak, Jerry Mandel, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Victor
Navasky, Bruce Page, Norman Podhoretz, Mark Platner, John Rubenstein, William Shawn, Jonathan
Shell, Leslie Steinau, Edward Thompson, Lionel Tiger, Paul Weaver, William Whitworth, and James Q.
Wilson. The conclusions that I draw from their insights are, of course, entirely my own.