Customer Reviews

The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage Intrigues That Shaped the DEA

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The hidden and secret history of this nation's so-called War on Drugs and its warriors has been waiting quite some time to be told; we are now very fortunate to have historian Douglas Valentine's two-volume set of books that provide a well-documented and robust narrative of the various government agencies that evolved into the current DEA. Valentine's first book, The Strength of the Wolf, provides us with a stunningly documented and detailed volume about the old Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). The book is replete with a slew of startling facts about the FBN's connections to the CIA and the FBN's intelligence related overseas operations.Indeed, Valentine's first book was quite helpful to a section of my book just out on Dr. Frank Olson's murder, A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments.Valentine did a superb job in his first book revealing the CIA's ties to the FBN. At points, both agencies seem to merge into one and to perform as one. That the two agencies performed as one and so closely shared objectives says a lot about the overalll objectives of intelligence gathering. Valentine's excellent newer book, Strength of the Pack, moves readers into current years and delivers a cornucopia of startling and long-secret data and information that throws considerable light on the mockery of the efforts of the U.S. to rid itself of the curse of drugs. After reading Valentine's latest excellent book one does not have to contemplate very long to understand why illicit drugs will continue to flood our nation and little will be done about it. Anyone concerned about this problem, and wanting to learn about how the so-called 'War on Drugs' really operates, should read both of Valentine's very important titles.

I'd heard many times that the CIA was involved in drug trafficking, but I had no idea how pervasive or systematic its involvement had been until I read The Strength of the Pack. Valentine's work, based on in-depth interviews with former FBN, BNDD and DEA officers, ranks alongside that of Gabriel Kolko as an indictment of our government's consistent failure to develop coherent, overarching goals for its foreign policy and the tragic and destabilizing effects for people and societies all over the world. Instead we have two agencies, the CIA and the DEA, falling over each other like Keystone Cops, arresting each others' agents and then being forced to release them, spending billions of dollars of the public's money on turf wars, and sowing murder and mayhem all over the planet. As a resident of Florida, I was particularly interested in the leading role of the CIA's Cuban exile allies in the development of Latin America as a new source for the drug industry after the loss of Vietnam put a dent in the CIA's operations in South East Asia. The shift from heroin to cocaine as the CIA and its agents' product of choice was a consequence of this geographic shift. One can't help wondering to what extent the present US war in Afghanistan and the reemergence of its heroin industry under US occupation is driven by the CIA's loss of control over most of Latin America during the past decade and its consequent need to develop new patterns of supply and demand in the global drugs trade.

After "The Strength of the Wolf" Valentine exposes in "Strength of the Pack" how the USA Government became the greatest narcotic dealing organisation of the world. There are only some interisting details missing which Rufus Katzer will reveal soon in his work "The Mallorca Trust".

I'm a retired DEA Agent and this guy know what he's talking about except that I think that he is wrong in stating that the CIA has infiltrated the DEA. Otherwise, I think that he's got things right.