Mainstream Americans, for the most part, are only distantly aware of the contours and the ramifications of the international traffic in illicit narcotics. Drug addiction? Not to worry. Unless it has infected someone close, narcotics use is a plague affecting only people on the other side of town, who haven`t learned how to handle discrimination and poverty, and the denizens of faraway, exotic places like Hollywood, where they haven`t learned how to handle wealth and fame.
It`s all rather entertaining, the stuff of rock lyrics and stand-up comics` routines. And, anyway, there is an easy reassurance in the periodic announcements of one president after another that a new war on drugs is being launched and in the televised press conferences of law enforcement officials that feature the fruits of drug seizures, all neatly aligned on tables. We can barely make out the voices of those who warn us, with equal frequency, that the battle against narcotics is being lost.
James Mills` astonishing book, ”The Underground Empire,” may make more of us pay attention to the disaster of drugs. Although for a few his book will be merely exciting (after all, this is the author who was capable of writing such thrilling fictions as ”Report to the Commissioner” and ”The Panic in Needle Park”), in others it will instill a deepening sense of foreboding. It is not another dreary preachment on the addict`s useless misery. It is–if it is to be believed in its entirety–a spellbinding inside look at the entrepreneurial crime of drug trafficking. Much of it is told from the perspective of a few dedicated if ultimately frustrated agents in a little-known federal anti-narcotic strike force known as ”Centac” (Central Tactical Unit) that was for a time an effective arm of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Readers can pick up Mills` huge book for some vicarious thrills but those who accord it full or even partial credence will lay it down with a realization that the drug traffic, one of the world`s biggest businesses, is sapping the strength of user nations, principally our own, and threatening the political destabilization of supplier nations, such as Mexico. We already know that oil and automobiles are significant factors in balance of trade statistics; so, we will discover, is drug-dealing. And it is all-corrupting. It corrupts more than the minds and bodies of addicts; it corrupts more than law enforcement agencies, judicial systems, and financial institutions. It corrupts governments and their relations with one another.
Mills, a respected journalist-novelist, stumbled on Centac`s secret in a manner unsurprising to those who know Washington, D.C.: he heard about it at a dinner party there. What happened next is puzzling, especially to those who know Washington. To hear him tell it, a day later, Mills–for reasons unexplained–was ushered through layers of security into the inner sanctum of one Dennis Dayle, Centac`s director. Before the ensuing interview ended, Mills inquired of Dayle whether he ”could remain with him, sit in his office, travel with him, observe him and his agents around the world.” The answer, Yes, came a few weeks later from a section chief in the DEA. Mills, who must have been flabbergasted by his good fortune, then devoted five years to doing what he had proposed. He followed Centac through four continents, sitting in on tactical sessions and meetings with undercover agents. At times he even found himself face to face with the leaders of the drug trade.
The bulk of Mills` narrative is devoted to three Centac operations. One was an effort, with the aid of a well-placed informant, to ensnare a Chinese, Lu Hsu-shui, who from Bangkok controlled much of Southeast Asia`s billion dollar heroin exportations. Another was directed at Alberto Sicilia-Falcon, a homosexual Cuban who conducted a cocaine-heroin-marijuana organization from a fortress outside Tijuana. The third operation was aimed at Donald Steinberg, an enterprising product of the Fox River valley who moved to Ft. Lauderdale and became the logistical genius behind a sprawling marijuana network. We learn, along with a welter of details, that everyone in the narcotics trade, whatever his nationality, talks exactly like a character out of Elmore Leonard. It is fascinating. It is also frightening because Mills` revelations reinforce a conclusion that what we trivialize as a ”problem” will never be solved unless it is treated as an important aspect of foreign policy, an unlikely prospect.
Although Mills` book reads like something from the pen of Leonard or John le Carre, everything in it must be true. Mills is at pains to assure us that it is: ”No names have been changed, there are no composite characters, no invented scenes or dialogue.” And one has to believe him since he is apparently in possession of tangible evidence of his underground labors. He
”collected hundreds of pages of classified documents, 183 two-hour tape cassettes . . . and 22 notebooks” and the identity of his sources, having been revealed in his book, is no longer subject to any journalistic privilege. Besides, a varied life has taught me that often the truth really is stranger than fiction.
However, Mills` book provides no satisfactory answer to one question that, left unresolved, could undermine its credibility. That question relates to the author`s unimpeded access, tape recorder in hand, to Centac`s activities for the purpose of producing a book. Notoriety compromises any covert exercise and jeopardizes the lives of its participants. That is why an evidentiary privilege ordinarily shields the identity of undercover informants from judicial disclosure. It also explains why the producers of ”60 Minutes” have never been invited to travel with the CIA. For a mid-level law enforcement bureaucrat to authorize the penetration of Centac`s nerve centers by a journalist, security clearance indeterminate, seems reckless; for Centac agents and informers to acquiesce seems madness.
It is legitimate to ask whether Mills` book proposal, properly considered, could possibly have been approved at any but the highest levels of the Justice Department following White House consultations. And that leads to the question, would its approval at those elevations have been anything less than preposterous?
Perhaps either Mills or representatives of the DEA will put these questions to rest in the weeks to come. Then we will better understand how to assess Mills` book. Or maybe we will only understand why the operation known as Centac is now defunct.
