Narrator: June 17, 1971.
Richard Nixon declares war on a new enemy.
It's more dangerous than the mob,
more of a threat than Communism.
They call it the "War on Drugs."
America's public-enemy number one is drug abuse.
Man: Anytime you've got that massive amount of drugs
flowing into one area, you're gonna have war.
[ Gunfire ]
[ Indistinct shouting ]
This goes out there.
Stratton: It was the CIA that introduced LSD to the United States.
Moran: The agency was elbow-deep with drug traffickers.
I want him dead, gentlemen.
Man: Nobody knows Pablo Escobar was just a customer.
Stratton: When you're making that kind of money
and living outside the law, it's exciting as hell.
This is crack.
Man: Really? is this your spokesperson?
Any questions?
Together: Just Say No!
Get your hands up, man! Get them up!
And people want their government to get tough
and to go on the offensive.
♪♪
President Clinton: Three strikes and you are out.
President Trump: It's time to stop the drugs
from pouring into our country.
Man: It's a war without end.
Stratton: No, I do think that most Americans
would be utterly shocked
if they knew the depth of involvement
that the Central Intelligence Agency has had
in the international drug trade.
♪ Every little move
♪ Every little thing you do
Narrator: 11 years before the War on Drugs is declared,
the story begins here at Miami's Fontainebleau Hotel.
It's a favorite spot
for one of the era's most notorious gangsters --
Santo Trafficante Jr.
Born into the powerful Sicilian mob,
he's well-known by the FBI
as one of the world's biggest heroin traffickers.
Stratton: Santo Trafficante Jr.
at one point had two or three
of the most popular casinos in Havana.
He was running heroin out of there.
These guys were powerful.
They were able to get people killed.
Narrator: But Trafficante is not here on vacation.
He's here to meet with two CIA operatives.
Wright: What's interesting about the CIA and the Cold War
and the War on Drugs is that the CIA
had so many shared interests with drug dealers
and their modes of operation.
Narrator: They're meeting in this hotel to plan the assassination
of America's newest Cold War enemy.
Trafficante: Gentlemen.
♪♪
Narrator: Just two years earlier,
Havana was the Caribbean's sin city.
Santo Trafficante ran a vast criminal network
with no fear of arrest --
gambling, guns, and girls.
But by far, the most lucrative product is heroin.
Smuggled from the Middle East through Marseille, France,
via Havana and on to the United States,
they call the route "The French Connection."
Stratton: The thing about Trafficante
and like so many of these wise guys, these Mafia guys,
they would always claim
they weren't in the narcotics business.
They could say, "Oh, yeah, I killed 15 guys,
but I never dealt heroin," which was just like, "Oh, okay."
The fact of the matter is that they've been involved
in the heroin trafficking from the beginning.
Narrator: Trafficante made Havana the center
of his drug-trafficking empire
by paying off Cuba's president, Fulgencio Batista.
The corrupt dictator also happened to be
on the CIA's payroll.
at all came to end with Fidel Castro's revolution.
Members of the old regime,
including those involved with the mob, are rounded up.
[ Guns cock ]
It was bad enough that we had the Soviet Union
that was this threat, but it was far away.
Suddenly, it's right at our doorstep.
Suddenly, that threat
is something that we can actually see,
and that created a tremendous amount of anxiety in Washington.
Narrator: Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon,
signs off on a covert CIA mission...
...take out Fidel Castro.
You know why Kennedy wants him dead?
Trafficante tells the agency men
it can't be done like a normal mob hit.
Parenti: The CIA is, from its very beginning,
collaborating with mafiosos
who are involved in the drug trade,
because these mafiosos will serve
the larger agenda of fighting Communism.
Trafficante: Okay, so, what are you...
Moran: At the agency then, and even to this day,
morality sometimes has to take a back seat
to whatever the final end is.
Narrator: This clandestine document --
The Doolittle Report -- is the key to understanding
the last half century
of the CIA's involvement in the drug trade.
Issued in 1954, it lays out the core mission for the agency.
The Doolittle Report essentially said,
we might have to bend the rules a little bit,
or we might even have to break the rules,
in order to combat
this very real threat called Communism.
Narrator: The CIA undertakes extortion,
kidnapping, torture, even murder.
Plotting assassinations and coups in Iran,
Indonesia, the Congo, Guatemala, and now Cuba,
where the Mafia are natural partners.
It doesn't matter the Mafia is also America's largest supplier
of illegal narcotics.
Wright: The CIA enters into a devil's bargain.
When you're at war, you will do anything, in the short term,
that it takes to win that war.
Narrator: The CIA delivers the ingredients to carry out
Castro's assassination...
...a suitcase with $150,000 in cash...
and poison.
Valentine: Trafficante agrees to do this, knowing that,
once you've worked for the CIA, they have two choices --
they can either kill you or they can protect you.
It's a business decision
that has to do with the Mafia's crime empire
and its prospects for the future.
Narrator: The plot to poison Castro
coincides with a planned invasion of Cuba.
The newly elected President Kennedy
reluctantly signs off on the operation
that will be led by a paramilitary force
of Cuban exiles, trained by the CIA,
known as Operation 40.
Valentine: Operation 40 were gonna go in apart from the brigade
and they were gonna knock off
all the political leaders of Castro's regime.
♪♪
Narrator: A small group of Operation 40 commandos
is headed to Cuban soil.
Their goal -- make contact with anti-Castro locals
and then seize control of the government.
One of the leaders is this man --
Felix Rodriguez.
The son of wealthy Cuban landowners,
his uncle is Minister of Public Works under Batista.
When his friends are executed in the Revolution,
he is one of the first to volunteer
when the CIA begins forming their plan
to take out Fidel Castro.
Moran: For Felix Rodriguez and the other Operation 40 guys,
this was beyond just the mission of the agency.
This was something that they were
personally passionate about.
Narrator: Rodriguez has been undercover for six weeks
when he receives word.
The invasion is on.
[ Indistinct shouting ]
The CIA-trained troops land at the Bay of Pigs...
...but Castro is onto both the poison plot...
and the invasion plan.
[ Explosion ]
It's a bloodbath.
Over 100 CIA-trained soldiers are killed,
1,200 are captured.
But Felix Rodriguez and the other leaders of Operation 40
escape to Miami.
And it's here in South Florida
where many Operation 40 veterans
will find a lucrative new trade.
Parenti: This army of Cubans that had been trained by the CIA
found themselves seriously underemployed.
And they looked around,
and there was a great way to make money,
and they had the skills for it.
It was smuggling drugs.
Narrator: The Bay of Pigs
may have been one of history's greatest blunders,
but the men behind it will play oversized roles
when the Cold War and the War on Drugs collide
in the years to come.
Valentine: You start having this boom
of drugs and lawlessness in Miami,
which is the very first experience of blowback
from this whole Cuban fiasco.
Narrator: By the end of the '60s,
an estimated 20% of America's heroin and 60% of the cocaine
are connected to anti-Castro operatives.
The seeds of the War on Drugs have been planted.
Narrator: Sandoz Laboratories,
one of the world's leading pharmaceutical factories.
Two American spies have just arrived.
The mission -- corner the market on the world's supply
of a powerful new psychoactive drug.
Wright: The CIA saw itself as being in a kind of
Cold War psychological warfare arms race with the Soviet Union.
What's the answer to controlling people
and brainwashing them or getting them to confess?
It's drugs.
Narrator: The CIA has just authorized the purchase
of 10 kilograms of pure LSD-25,
enough to dose more than half the population
of the United States.
Sandoz even supplies the CIA with a receipt
and shipping information.
The CIA were scared stiff the KGB was gonna get all this LSD
and come over and start dosing people.
So they bought every drop of LSD in existence at that point.
They gave it to George White and let George start dosing people.
♪ Hey, oh
♪ My little Tina
♪ Hey, oh
♪ Nothing could be sweeter
♪ Hey, oh
♪ She's my little ballerina
♪ Hey, oh
♪ My little Tina
♪ She's my little queen and gonna make me royalty tonight ♪
Narrator: George Hunter White,
a larger-than-life undercover federal narcotics agent.
He's known for busting international drug rings
at home and abroad.
But unbeknownst to his supervisors,
White also works for the CIA.
His job -- to conduct experiments for an operation
called Midnight Climax.
White pays prostitutes to lure their clients
to the agency safe house.
George had a CIA safe house stocked with booze.
George would sit behind this one-way mirror,
drinking martinis, sitting on a portable toilet.
If he had to take a leak, he didn't want to get up and leave.
[ Indistinct conversation ]
[ Laughter ]
Hookers would bring these suckers back to the apartment...
...and dose them with pure LSD-25.
Man: This is where I have my effect --
in the mind.
Narrator: This is Lysergic acid diethylamide,
better known as acid.
The powerful drug was first synthesized
in 1938 in Switzerland.
With a dose of mere micrograms,
the mind becomes confused.
Perception in distorted.
Personal identity is called into question.
The results can be euphoric bliss or deadly panic.
♪♪
Do you see that? The light?
White observes the effects of the acid-laced cocktails
on the unsuspecting men.
Valentine: White was very much into S&M.
He would visit prostitutes himself,
and they would strap him to a bed and whip his butt.
Oh, my God. What's that?
[ Laughs ]
Narrator: Recognizing the bizarre behavior brought on by the drug,
he gives LSD the code name "stormy."
White takes meticulous notes...
...and files his reports to his CIA handlers.
So, that was how LSD was introduced to this country.
Narrator: Operation Midnight Climax is part of a larger,
top-secret CIA program called MKUltra.
The goal -- learn how to control
and even reprogram people's minds.
The CIA believes LSD might hold the key.
Over the next 10 years,
the agency doses a cross section of the American public.
Everyone from unwitting housewives to soldiers
to even criminals, like gangster Whitey Bulger, is tested.
♪♪
The Allan Memorial Hospital.
A psychiatric patient is being prepped for treatment.
But this is no ordinary mental hospital.
The doctor is not looking for a cure.
The patient has no idea what they are about to endure.
This goes out there.
Dr. Ewen Cameron -- the former president
of the American Psychiatric Association.
During the Nuremberg trials, he evaluates Nazi war criminals.
But Cameron has another side to him.
He's fascinated by the idea that the identity can be erased
and the mind reprogrammed.
While George White's tests become inseparable
from his own sexual obsessions,
Cameron's approach is clinical and deadly serious.
Cameron was working for the CIA.
They were looking into brainwashing.
They were looking into mind control.
They were looking into how they could create
what they called "Manchurian candidates."
Narrator: Even his own nurses don't know he is working
on a top-secret CIA program.
Stratton: He was doing a lot of different testing with LSD.
They were trying to figure out if they could get people
to go out and do things
that they would ordinarily not do, like assassination.
Narrator: Once the subject is dosed with a sufficient amount of LSD,
Cameron begins to try and reprogram the patient's mind.
He shocks them with high voltages...
...and forces them to listen to repetitive audio loops
for days at a time.
[ Man repeating "Black is white, and war is peace" ]
Woman: The drug began to take hold very rapidly.
Things became very frightening,
and I became more and more despondent,
and I thought, "I can't --
I can't live like this any longer."
Narrator: But not every subject in the MKUltra program
finds the drug's effects so terrifying.
The CIA's quest to create mind-controlled zombies
is about to have an unintended consequence
that will change America.
Wright: You know, what the CIA really dreamed of
was sort of like a drug you could give to someone,
get them to commit all sorts of unspeakable acts,
and they wake up the next day
and they don't remember what they've done.
Narrator: Another CIA LSD experiment is under way.
Volunteers have been paid $75
to participate in a research study.
One of the volunteers -- Ken Kesey,
a young writer, wrestler, and graduate student
at nearby Stanford University.
He'll go on to write the bestseller
"One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest."
A nurse turns on a recording device
and asks Kesey what the drug is doing to his brain.
The case of MKUltra has to be one of the craziest cases
of blowback in CIA history.
Because here, they took this drug, LSD,
and thought that they were gonna be able to use it
to control people's minds, and the unbelievable irony
is that LSD is a drug that does exactly the opposite.
It frees your mind and causes people to question authority.
Narrator: Within months, Kesey will be hired as a nurse's aid
and given access to the hospital's supply of LSD.
Perhaps the CIA never meant to "turn on" Ken Kesey,
but they did.
Soon, he is turning his friends on to acid,
then the entire West Coast,
then an entire generation.
Stratton: It created the counterculture, as we know it, of the '60s.
All that was a kind of blowback, or backfire,
of the CIA's attempt to control people
turned out to be just the opposite.
It was the CIA that introduced LSD to the United States.
Narrator: While LSD takes hold in the United States,
in Southeast Asia, a covert CIA war
will fuel a new drug epidemic -- heroin.
O0[ Indistinct conversations ]
Man: The President of the United States is dead.
President Kennedy has been assassinated.
It's official now. The president is dead.
Narrator: The United States is shaken to its core.
JFK is shot down in the streets of Dallas...
and Lyndon Johnson takes over as Commander in Chief.
The war against Communism in Vietnam
becomes President Johnson's most pressing issue.
What the American public doesn't know
is just across the border from Vietnam, in Laos,
more seeds are being planted for the War on Drugs.
Moran: Everybody at the time was focused on Vietnam,
but in nearby Laos, there was one of the hugest
paramilitary covert operations going on.
And President Johnson, in fact,
was under a tremendous amount of pressure to keep it secret.
♪♪
Narrator: Local forces are waging a secret war
against communist guerrillas in the remote Laotian highlands,
and they're being trained by a legendary CIA operative...
Tony Poe.
A World War II fighter pilot,
he earns two Purple Hearts in the Battle of Iwo Jima.
After the war, he becomes one of America's most prolific spies.
Now he's the CIA's man in Laos.
A lot of people think of someone like James Bond
as the kind of spy prototype,
you know, suave and wearing a tuxedo.
In a place like Laos,
that's not the kind of spy we were sending over there.
[ Indistinct shouting ]
Keep moving forward!
Narrator: Tony Poe breaks CIA rules
and leads a regiment to battle himself.
Moran: If you take a situation like Laos was at the time,
that kind of craziness,
and you insert someone like Tony Poe,
that's basically like adding gas to a fire.
Stratton: After the battles, he'd send his guys out...
...to chop the ears off of these dead enemy.
And then they would pack the ears up
and send them back to the CIA headquarters, like trophies.
Another thing that they would do
is chop the heads off their victims,
and then they would fly over with helicopters
and drop the heads, like bombs, on the villages.
[ Helicopter blade whirring ]
Narrator: Tony Poe's ally against communists
is a powerful local warlord...
[ Speaking native language ]
...Vang Pao.
A resistance fighter in World War II,
he now commands a ragtag army of Hmong Hill people
against communists infiltrating their tribal land.
Stratton: Guys like Vang Pao and a guy like Tony Poe
get in business together because they had a common enemy,
which was Communism.
[ Helicopter blade whirring ]
Narrator: But what Poe doesn't realize
is that Vang Pao is not just fighting Communism.
He's also lining his own pockets.
Northern Laos is in the heart of the Golden Triangle,
an area which includes Burma and Thailand,
known as one of the most fertile opium growing-regions
in the world.
Here, the Hmong have used opium for centuries as medicine.
But on the international drug market,
the real value of the poppy's sap
is that it can be refined into heroin.
Moran: When the CIA is focused on a mission,
on a particular end,
they're not going to sit down and pontificate about
"What are the long-term, global consequences
of our actions going to be?"
Narrator: Tony Poe has ordered a CIA plane
to drop off weapons and ammunition
for the Hmong warriors
and to pick up injured soldiers, women, children, and cargo.
The plane is owned by Air America.
One of the most important aspects of fighting Communism
in Laos involved a company called Air America,
which was actually a front for the CIA.
Narrator: The CIA plane lands back at this secret base
in the Long Tieng Valley, in Laos.
Unmarked on any map, it's fast becoming
one of the busiest airports in the world.
But this plane isn't just carrying the wounded and frail.
Vang Pao has begun using Air America
to transport his raw opium from the hills to the cities.
Moran: The Hmong people see Americans coming and going with planes
and having the resources to be able to help them
transport something that's been in their culture for decades.
It's a no-brainer.
Wright: The CIA built Air America
to move people and weapons and money below the radar.
Well, that's identical to what drug traffickers have to do.
It's almost inevitable that the CIA and drug traffickers
are continually crossing through the same worlds,
continually using the same methods
and on a rather intimate basis.
Narrator: The CIA turns a blind eye
to Vang Pao's growing heroin operation.
But Tony Poe didn't come to Laos to enrich a local drug lord.
[ Indistinct shouting ]
Tony Poe hated Vang Pao 'cause he knew he was selling drugs.
[Bleep] you, you son of a bitch!
Tony Poe was actually the model
for Colonel Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now."
At one point, I was sitting, talking with him,
and he was running his hand over his bald head
like Marlon Brando did in the movie.
And I said to him, "Did you get that from Brando,
or did Brando get that from you?"
Narrator: In 1965,
the CIA pulls Tony Poe out of Long Tieng.
Moran: There are probably a lot more Tony Poes
that we don't know about --
people who went in believing in the higher cause,
and then found that there was a lot of activity
that they either had to sanction or turn a blind eye to.
When your moral compass starts to stray
so far back and forth, you can start to lose it,
as Tony Poe did.
♪♪
Narrator: With Tony Poe reassigned,
the CIA will send in a new team
to help run their secret war in Laos.
Parenti: Vang Pao is now unleashed to continue his drug dealing,
and that region becomes
the epicenter of global heroin production.
Man: What is going to be the theme of your meeting?
Are you going to tell what's bad about LSD?
Not necessarily.
Man #2: Will LSD be in evidence
at the graduation ceremony, Ken?
Um...
Why don't you guys come? [ Laughs ]
♪♪
Narrator: Five years since Ken Kesey was first introduced to LSD
through the CIA's MKUltra mind-control program,
he is now a psychedelic convert
committed to spreading the LSD gospel across America.
He throws parties known as "acid tests"
where LSD-laced Kool-Aid is served,
and partygoers are invited to achieve a communal high.
Meanwhile, across the country,
there's a smaller, but growing hippie scene,
and a group of them have turned
this country estate into a commune
and are about to drop acid.
Leading them on their acid trip is Timothy Leary.
A popular lecturer at Harvard, Leary's fascinated
by the effect of psychedelic drugs on the brain.
LSD was legal then, and he was giving it to graduate students
to open their minds
and, like Timothy Leary said, "question authority."
And that's when he became an outlaw.
Leary: Our aim is to transform American society.
America today is an insane asylum.
We're going to try to bring about a religious renaissance
and a spiritual revolution.
When he urged people to take LSD,
the effect that it had on people
was so powerful that they almost treat him like a guru of sorts.
[ Laughter ]
Stratton: Millbrook is a bastion of old New England,
had all of these hippies coming in there,
and Ken Kesey showed up there on his bus
with all his merry pranksters.
And that scared the hell
out of this old, blue-blooded, WASP aristocracy
that lived in Millbrook, New York.
Narrator: Leary's acid crusade has made him a target.
[ Police radio chatter ]
A local prosecutor is on a crusade of his own --
G. Gordon Liddy,
a former FBI agent turned assistant district attorney
in Dutchess County, New York.
Gordon Liddy was an obscure anti-drug,
right-wing prosecutor in Dutchess County, New York,
until he took on Timothy Leary and the LSD movement.
No one was as determined to take Leary down as G. Gordon Liddy.
He just went after Leary with a vengeance.
[ Police radio chatter ]
We waGo, go, go!is
Keep your eyes open. Watch out for drugs.
Inside, the officers find hippies tripping on LSD,
watching a loop of a waterfall.
Are you on drugs?
Where's Leary?
Leary was into disrupting the normal culture
of America with LSD.
Hands in the air! Get up against the wall!
Hands in the air!
That scared the hell
out of this old, blue-blooded, WASP aristocracy
that lived in a place like Millbrook, New York.
Narrator: Liddy's men find a stash of LSD
and some marijuana.
But Liddy can only arrest Leary for marijuana possession
because LSD is still legal.
The marijuana charges against Timothy Leary are dropped
when it's revealed G. Gordon Liddy
failed to read him his rights.
But Liddy doesn't give up.
He continues a relentless campaign against Leary,
tracking his moves over the course of the next year.
Worn down by Liddy's crusade,
in 1967, Leary leaves Millbrook and the East Coast
and heads west, where the LSD-fueled counterculture
is in full swing.
Despite the fact it was the CIA
that first introduced LSD to America,
the drug is now in the hands of a group
that's increasingly seen as a threat.
Wright: Young people, they were fighting for racial justice and equality.
They were fighting against the Vietnam War.
They were seriously opposing the government,
and drugs were at the forefront.
There was this propaganda that the hippies, Timothy Leary,
and LSD were all part of a communist conspiracy.
♪♪
Narrator: LSD begins to be distributed by an underground organization
called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.
Stratton: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love
was actually an organization of hippie Mafia drug dealers
dealing specifically in black Afghani hash
and then, later, LSD.
Narrator: To keep the sale of LSD flowing,
the Brotherhood will need a brand ambassador
who encompasses everything the organization stands for.
Turn on, tune in, drop out.
♪♪
Narrator: Timothy Leary's attention-grabbing antics
make him the perfect public face for the movement.
Stratton: It was really kind of a political-social movement.
But in order to keep that movement going, you need money.
Narrator: Fortunately for the Brotherhood,
Leary has brought with him a rich and connected friend...
William Mellon Hitchcock --
playboy millionaire,
owner of the Millbrook estate where Leary was arrested.
Stratton: Billy Hitchcock was the scion
of one of the most famous old WASP families.
His father was the model for Tom Buchanan
in Scott Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby."
So, for the son, Billy Hitchcock,
to now team up with Timothy Leary was a big scandal.
Narrator: Hitchcock begins to help bankroll
the Brotherhood's mass production of acid.
It was never about the money,
but it was always about the money.
Narrator: As an entire generation
looks for ways to expand their consciousness,
the Brotherhood of Eternal Love moves in to fill the void.
Stratton: LSD has escaped from the lab.
You've got Leary espousing
"turn on, tune in, and drop out."
Huge cultural changes were taking place in the country.
Man: You're listening to a rock-'n'-roll radio station,
you bet.
♪♪
Narrator: The Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic,
a haven amidst the chaos of San Francisco's streets.
This man has just taken acid for the first time
and he's having a bad trip.
The doctor treating him keeps detailed notes,
but who he's working for is a secret
no one in San Francisco knows.
Colonel James Ketchum, a psychiatrist in the Pentagon's
top-secret psycho-chemical warfare program.
He's obsessed with finding the key
to manipulating the mind of the enemy.
And like the CIA's MKUltra program,
he's willing to do whatever it takes
to find the answers he's looking for.
Here, at the Edgewood Arsenal,
Ketchum first puts his LSD research to the test.
After ingesting LSD, volunteers are instructed
to perform basic military tasks.
Man: The confused volunteer needed help
as he attempted to traverse part of an obstacle course.
Influenced by an obvious lack of purpose,
the drugged volunteer made no effort
to traverse the trail of tires
and, in obvious confusion,
wandered aimlessly through the woods.
Narrator: Other trials move into more dangerous territory...
...pushing the soldiers to the limits of sanity.
How do you feel right now?
I just can't figure it out.
It's hard to figure out.
I don't see it. I don't believe it. I feel it.
Reefer, reefer, reefer!
Narrator: Many of these soldiers have been offered a powerful incentive
to take part in the program --
time away from combat duty in Vietnam.
[ Helicopter blade whirring ]
Just over the border, in Laos,
the CIA's Air America airline
is increasingly becoming part of the international drug trade.
When those planes were returning to American bases,
they were often used to bring back
some of the bounty of Laos.
And that bounty was heroin.
O0 C1Narrator: In the remote highlands of Laos...
Communist forces are increasingly threatening
to overtake the territory controlled by CIA ally Vang Pao.
The situation in Laos really called for extraordinary means
conducted by extraordinary men.
Narrator: The CIA has sent in a veteran spy
to run the Laos operation --
Ted Shackley, known as The Blond Ghost,
former head of the CIA's top secret Miami station,
where the CIA ran failed missions to kill Fidel Castro,
which included poisoned milkshakes
and exploding cigars.
Now he's here fighting another secret war.
Moran: The CIA itself was under a tremendous amount of pressure
to accomplish this mission to fight Communism.
[ Radio chatter ]
Narrator: To help finance his war, Vang Pao
has been using Air America to traffic heroin.
But with the war raging, Shackley and the CIA
don't just turn a blind eye to the drug trafficking.
The U.S. provides Vang Pao two transport planes.
Now he's able to fly his opium directly to his refineries...
...one right on the American air base.
Wright: The CIA at the same time it was fighting, in its mind,
a very successful anti-communist war,
was also standing up an army of drug smugglers.
Narrator: Vang Pao is fast on his way
to becoming the biggest heroin trafficker in the world,
and he's got a growing customer base
just over the border in Vietnam.
Parenti: One side effect of this covert war in Laos
is that there's a lot of heroin in the theater of war,
and many American troops get addicted.
[ Gunfire ]
One of my fellow soldiers
was found dead after a firefight.
We thought he had been shot,
and actually he had the needle stuck in his arm.
Narrator: Heroin, a highly addictive opioid
extracted from the poppy plant and synthesized for morphine.
Once ingested, morphine molecules
rush opioid receptors in the brain stem
that controls the body's survival functions.
It can lead to intoxicating highs
or shut down the respiratory system and lead to death.
[ Gunfire ]
Castillo: The rule was you don't get high while on patrol.
But you can't control depression.
We were wet during the monsoon season 24/7.
The miserable life we lived -- we were homesick.
Narrator: As the war progresses,
two G.I.s are overdosing every day.
[ Speaking Vietnamese ]
[ Drumroll ]
[ Upbeat music plays ]
A nightclub in Saigon,
a refuge from the horrors of combat.
[ Music continues ]
Sitting at the back of the club
is a man well-known to the CIA --
mobster Santo Trafficante Jr.
Valentine: Trafficante had assured protection back in 1960.
He was involved in these plots to kill Castro.
Once you've worked for the CIA,
you're what they called, in that business, a million-dollar man.
Narrator: Trafficante is meeting with a Corsican gangster,
a middleman for another CIA-connected drug trafficker --
Vang Pao.
They are discussing a deal
that will bring tons of heroin into the United States.
Valentine: With the booming heroin trade,
which was because of the influx of American troops,
Trafficante had to go out there
and make sure that his family got its fair share.
Narrator: The deal allows Trafficante to ramp up his operation.
Soon his couriers are trafficking Vang Pao's heroin
from refineries in Hong Kong via South America
and the Caribbean onto the United States.
In one shipment alone, they smuggle in as much as 20%
of all the heroin consumed that year.
The history of the CIA is really the history
of unintended consequences and blowback.
With CIA secret wars being fought in places like Laos,
they became instrumental in flooding America with drugs.
[ Horn honking ]
[ Siren wailing ]
Narrator: By 1970, New York City alone
will have over 200,000 heroin addicts.
Parenti: A lot of people came back,
who had served in Vietnam, addicted to drugs.
Doesn't help that the economy is also declining,
depressing situation for a young person
who's just spent a year, maybe two years,
in a terrible and confusing war.
Narrator: With the demand for heroin rising,
a new breed of homegrown dealers emerges.
One of these dealers has just arrived
to check on his operation.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
These women are part of a production line
that runs 24 hours a day
They're made to work in the nude
so that can't steal the product.
Pure, uncut heroin that's sold by this man.
I say we're gonna make some money today or what?
Frank Matthews.
Born in rural North Carolina, his first arrest comes at 14
when he's busted for leading a gang of chicken thieves.
He moves to Brooklyn,
where he opens a barber shop as a front for selling heroin.
The heroin business
has always been controlled by organized crime
and then along comes a guy named Frank Matthews.
[ Radio tuning ]
♪ I can't keep giving you all my love♪
Haven't got all day.
Narrator: At any given time,
hundreds of pounds of heroin are being diluted and packaged.
Chepesiuk: He actually had two places in Brooklyn --
the Ponderosa and the OK Corral.
The thing that fascinates me is how could you operate
two drug mills like this, busing in 40 women every day,
and not anybody getting suspicious.
Narrator: With a nearly unlimited supply of heroin
coming in from Southeast Asia,
Matthews begins building an empire that stretches the length
of the Eastern Seaboard, west to St. Louis.
They call him Black Caesar.
That's what I'm talking about.
Frank Matthews became one of
the biggest heroin distributors in the world.
♪♪
Narrator: But with the thousands of addicts
that come with every new deal...
Matthews will find himself in the cross hairs
of a very powerful enemy --
the newly elected president, Richard Milhous Nixon.
Wright: When Nixon came into the White House,
it was essentially to clean up
this chaos and anarchy in the streets
and to impose law and order.
There was this legitimate fear
that heroin was going to take over
and destroy the United States.
♪♪
Narrator: The grand opening of an exclusive resort --
Paradise Island in the Bahamas.
The crowd celebrating New Year's Eve
is a star-studded collection of Hollywood actors,
politicians, and wealthy investors.
Stratton: People look back on the '60s and they go, "Oh, it was great."
The music was great, rock 'n' roll,
but then it started to change.
'68 was like a turning point.
Martin Luther King was assassinated.
Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.
It was the end of the hippie era of the '60s
where it was all about peace, love, and brotherhood.
Things were starting to turn dark.
Narrator: It's been a good year for at least one of the partygoers,
the President-elect Richard Nixon.
Richard Milhous Nixon is no stranger to the White House.
He served two terms as vice president under Eisenhower,
where he signed off on the secret plan
to assassinate Fidel Castro.
He narrowly lost to Kennedy in 1960.
By the time he runs for president again,
crime rates are skyrocketing,
and he appeals to what he calls "the silent majority."
Parenti: These besieged middle-class suburbanites
who fear what, at that time, seems to be a society
going through really profound and negative changes.
♪♪
Narrator: At Paradise Island, it all seems a world away.
But Nixon has no idea he's celebrating alongside
one of his counterculture enemies.
William Hitchcock is the millionaire playboy
and sometimes-financier
of The Brotherhood of Eternal Love.
He's also invested the equivalent
of 35 million in today's dollars in Paradise Island.
But Hitchcock is not the only one at this party
moving large sums of cash to the Bahamas.
You could take as much money as you wanted in cash
and deposit it in banks down there
in the Bahamas and launder it.
Next thing you know, wired back into
a bank account in the United States
and nobody would ever know that it came
as a result of illegal activity.
Narrator: The Bahamas is full of banks that launder dirty money,
but none will become as infamous as the Castle Bank & Trust.
Founded by a former CIA spy,
its clients include celebrities like John Fogerty,
Tony Curtis, and Hugh Hefner.
But Castle serves another purpose.
Stratton: Money that was coming from the drug business
was deposited in these banks
and then used to finance covert CIA operations.
Wright: Drug trafficking is really all about laundering money,
and it turns out that so is being a CIA officer.
Because everything the CIA does has to be secret,
and in order to be secret, you have to launder your money.
Narrator: Even the president-elect banks at Castle.
♪♪
While Hitchcock is celebrating in the Bahamas,
back in California, another of his investments
is working around the clock.
In this makeshift lab, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love
is producing a potent new brand of LSD
that they hope will stamp out all competition.
It will become the most famous acid ever produced.
They call it "Orange Sunshine."
Orange Sunshine, after Sandoz LSD-25,
was the purest LSD manufactured in the world.
Steve Jobs dropped acid, The Grateful Dead.
It infiltrated music, business.
Orange Sunshine was all over the country.
Narrator: In the coming months,
Hitchcock's lab will produce 10 million hits --
enough to dose the entire population
of New York City and L.A.
Padilla: I figured out where we could load the water supply
with a 55-gallon drum of acid.
Timothy Leary stopped us.
Timothy said,
"Thou shalt not alter
thy brother's consciousness without his permission."
Wow.
That's Timothy Leary.
Timothy Leary wasn't promoting "Go give everybody acid."
We were. "Everyone should take LSD."
Narrator: But soon, the luck of Orange Sunshine's
most famous advocate will run out.
[ Police radio chatter ]
[ Siren wails ]
A cop on the night shift makes a routine traffic stop.
The driver is LSD evangelist Timothy Leary.
The police searched the car
and in the ashtray was a joint and a roach.
And they busted Timothy for a minute amount of pot.
Narrator: Shortly after his arrest,
he makes a surprise announcement.
I'm going to run for the governorship
of the state of California.
I think that we need a new party,
and by "party", I mean party.
Schou: Leary's platform included, among other things, banning football,
banning all money, creating a barter system
that would kind of take over capitalism.
The song "Come Together", which was written by John Lennon,
was actually a campaign song for Timothy Leary.
Let the kids get high.
As a matter of fact, President Nixon,
why don't we all turn on together?
Narrator: His Republican opponent -- Ronald Reagan.
There's nothing smart, there's nothing grown-up
or sophisticated in taking an LSD trip at all.
They're just being complete fools.
♪♪
Wright: When anti-war protesters descended on Washington
and protested Nixon's policies,
Nixon probably could smell the marijuana smoke
wafting in through the windows of the White House,
and so Nixon associated marijuana
with his political opponents.
Narrator: But in the Nixon administration,
Leary's old nemesis, G. Gordon Liddy,
has been brought in by the Treasury Department
to hatch a plan to clamp down on drugs.
We can then try and cover that section
of the border, okay?
Sounds good.
Wright: G. Gordon Liddy was the law-and-order figure
in the White House.
And when Nixon was elected into the White House,
Nixon saw and Liddy saw
that drugs were this powerful hot-button issue.
[ Horns honking ]
Narrator: Liddy launches Operation Intercept --
shutting down the entire 2,000-mile border with Mexico,
cutting off the source of most of America's marijuana.
For over 20 days,
all vehicles crossing the border are searched.
It's the largest operation of its kind in history.
Wright: The interesting thing about the very beginning
of the War on Drugs --
many of these acts were completely symbolic.
It actually had no impact whatsoever
on the drug trade in the U.S.
Narrator: A few marijuana smugglers may have been apprehended,
but the most successful traffickers in America
are not waiting in line at the Mexican border.
♪♪
Narrator: A small private plane is losing altitude, fast.
The pilot, Juan Restoy,
a former Cuban politician who fought against Fidel Castro,
now a key player in the nation's largest
narcotics distribution network.
[ Indistinct shouting ]
[ Loud crash ]
1970, there was a plane crash in California.
Juan Restoy was flying this plane.
Turns out that this guy was a veteran
of the Bay of Pigs Operation and a CIA operative.
[ Helicopter blades whirring ]
[ Police radio chatter ]
Narrator: Restoy survives,
but the crash catches the attention of federal agents
working on Operation Eagle,
a national investigation of narcotics smuggling.
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for being here.
The Attorney General will have a statement,
and I introduce to you now
the Attorney General of the United States.
We have called all of you this morning
to tell you about Operation Eagle,
which is the code name for the biggest operation
of its kind in history.
10:00 a.m. last night,
special agents of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs
made simultaneous raids in Miami,
New York, and Chicago
and seven other cities.
Please. [ Speaks indistinctly ]
We are very pleased to report that the raids
have already resulted
in the arrests of 123 defendants.
Narrator: What Attorney General John Mitchell
neglects to mention is as many as 70% of those arrested
are Cubans who fought for the CIA against Fidel Castro.
The agency's secret war against Communism has given rise
to an entire generation of drug traffickers.
Wright: Cuban exiles trained by the CIA for the Bay of Pigs
had all these skills in radios, flying airplanes, boats,
and applied these skills to smuggling drugs.
♪♪
Narrator: The crackdown on drugs begins to attract unlikely allies --
Elvis Presley.
The King of Rock 'n' Roll has seen better days.
Elvis has developed a prescription drug habit
that includes uppers, downers, and needles.
Doctors are on call to provide an endless supply of drugs.
Wright: At the time, Elvis Presley was essentially a stoned junkie.
He also was obsessed with firearms.
He actually wanted to obtain a drug agent badge from Nixon
so he could safely travel the world
with his drugs and -- and firearms.
Elvis wrote this rambling letter requesting a visit with Nixon.
Expressed all these concerns
and the Communists in the entertainment industry,
the un-American people,
foreign acts like the Beatles
that were coming over to our country
and subverting clean-cut American youth.
Narrator: The letter works, and Nixon agrees to meet.
Being seen with the rock-'n'-roll legend
makes for a public relations coup for the president...
but it's also part of a larger strategy.
If you look at the wider framed photos,
there's Elvis Presley, there's President Nixon,
and there's this young man wearing glasses
and he was this White House high-end political fixer,
And his name was Egil "Bud" Krogh.
Narrator: Egil "Bud" Krogh.
As Nixon's deputy of domestic affairs,
he'll help hire G. Gordon Liddy,
and they will spearhead policies
that will lead to the declaration of the War on Drugs.
That's why Bud Krogh brought in Elvis Presley.
He was the "drug" guy.
Narrator: Elvis gets his badge,
but there's no record of The King
ever performing any drug busts.
Meanwhile, at a state prison in California,
one of Nixon's political enemies
is beginning a sentence for a small amount of marijuana.
Timothy Leary's run for governor has been cut short.
But the underground hippie organization,
the Brotherhood of Eternal Love,
doesn't want their LSD guru to die behind bars.
Padilla: Timothy was one of us.
So Timothy being in prison -- We weren't gonna let him down.
Stratton: Brotherhood was extremely well-financed.
So the Brotherhood hires the Weathermen
to break Leary out of prison.
Narrator: Launched by radical students in 1968,
the Weather Underground has turned into
a violent revolutionary organization,
carrying out bombings across the United States.
For a rumored $20,000 fee, the Weather Underground
breaks Timothy Leary out of prison.
Stratton: After they break him out of prison, he ends up in Algeria.
While he's in Algeria, he hooks up with Eldridge Cleaver
and a lot of the Black Panthers who were also on the lam.
Narrator: It's an audacious move,
but the Brotherhood doesn't lay low for the rest of 1970.
One of their associates will attempt
one of most brazen drug distribution stunts of all time.
Laguna Beach, California.
25,000 young people have gathered
for an outdoor rock concert to celebrate the counterculture.
Schou: The idea initially was just to have
a Woodstock-type rock concert,
but some of the local artists decided that it would be better
to give it kind of a spiritual connotation
to try to avoid any unnecessary law-enforcement scrutiny,
but it became completely out of control.
Narrator: One of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love's associates
has hired a private plane,
and it's flying towards the festival.
Padilla: The plane flew over the Christmas Happening
and dropped thousands of Christmas cards,
and in the middle was a tab of Orange Sunshine.
♪♪
Schou: It's just a legendary moment
in the countercultural history of the United States.
An actual acid drop from the sky
on a huge crowd of young Americans.
♪♪
Narrator: Over the past decade...
secret government drug tests and covert CIA operations...
...have unleashed a wave of drugs into the United States.
It's fueled the counterculture
and, increasingly, anarchy in the streets.
Stratton: The economy's starting to falter.
There's riots in the major cities of the United States,
so all these things are coming to a boiling point.
The Nixon administration is looking at this and going,
"My God. What are we gonna do?
We can put the controls back on our society
that seems to be out of control.
We're gonna declare a war on drugs."
Narrator: June 17, 1971.
President Richard Nixon is about to make
one of the most important speeches
in presidential history.
Do you want to join me here?
Won't you be seated, please, ladies and gentlemen?
Come on, Dr. Jaffe.
Fine. All right.
Narrator: Standing next to the president,
31-year-old drug policy guru Bud Krogh.
Standing to his left, his boss,
Nixon's chief counsel John Ehrlichman.
Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to summarize for you
the meeting that I have just had with the bipartisan leaders
which began at 8:00 and was completed two hours later.
America's public-enemy number one in the United States
is drug abuse.
In order to fight and defeat this enemy,
it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.
This will be a worldwide offensive.
Fundamentally, it is essential for the American people
to be alerted of this danger,
to recognize that it is a danger that will not pass
with the passing of the war in Vietnam,
which has brought to our attention the fact
that a number of young Americans
have become addicts as they serve abroad.
This offensive deals with the problem there,
but will then go on to deal
with the problem throughout America.
Narrator: President Nixon never actually uses the word,
but for everyone listening, it's clear --
Richard Nixon is declaring a war on drugs.
President Nixon: The briefing team will now be ready to answer any questions
on the technical details of the program.
Wright: Nixon proclaiming this War on Drugs is this epic moment --
Nixon standing up as the law-and-order president.
We'll proceed in about five minutes.
Narrator: Nixon has launched one of the most expensive
and politically complicated initiatives ever attempted.
But behind the scenes, there's another agenda at work.
In the eyes of the inner circle of the Nixon administration,
the War on Drugs brought together
the peace movement, the hippies,
the counterculture, African-Americans.
All of this stuff can be captured and addressed
by force with law enforcement
under the rubric of the War on Drugs.
And the trick is to create a system that deals with this
without appearing to.
This announcement this morning is the culmination of a project
that began about a year ago.
Narrator: It will be decades before one of Nixon's top advisers
will allegedly admit to a magazine writer
this deception behind the origin of the War on Drugs.
Stratton: We got a problem with the blacks,
we got a problem with the hippies.
What are we gonna do?
We're gonna declare a war on drugs.
And we criminalize these elements
and we broadcast it all over the nightly news.
We can put the controls back on our society
that seems to be out of control.
Right. Right. Okay.
Fine.
Narrator: Nixon soon finds himself increasingly frustrated
by the War on Drug's lack of progress
and grills his inner circle for answers.
Inner cities are increasingly
in the grip of a heroin epidemic.
Drug-related deaths are up to 1,000 a year
in New York City alone.
Junkies steal to finance their addictions,
and police corruption is rampant.
NYPD narcotics detective Frank Serpico
tells a mayor's commission
that cops are paying off their superiors
for a transfer to the narcotics division.
Serpico: I saw what was going on.
Being transferred to the Gold Coast, as it was called,
where there was big money -- of course.
Narcotics was where the money was.
[ Police radio chatter ]
Cops would notify drug dealers
whenever some other cops were going to raid their place.
There was no limit. There was no morality.
[ Horn honking ]
Narrator: Cops are also putting drugs on the street.
And in one of the strangest coincidences
in the War on Drugs, fact will collide with fiction.
A movie called "The French Connection"
is a favorite for an Academy Award.
It tells the story of a NYPD 1962 bust
of the famous French Connection heroin smuggling network
run by gangsters like Santo Trafficante.
So this great movie comes out, "The French Connection."
Gene Hackman plays the narcotics cop
who made the big French Connection bust.
Narrator: For 10 years, the confiscated heroin is thought to be held
in a secure Manhattan police lockup.
Stratton: So they had all this heroin that they busted,
and it was in the property vault in NYPD custody.
Open them up.
But when they ultimately went down there to get it...
...they found it was gone.
Narrator: Large amounts of heroin
from the famous French Connection bust
have been stolen from the police evidence room
and replaced with flour.
Stratton: $70 million worth of heroin
goes from NYPD into the streets of New York City.
And they couldn't figure out, "Well, what happened?"
Of course, we know what happened -- the cops stole it.
And, amazingly, as people are sitting there
watching the movie "The French Connection,"
that heroin was on the streets of New York
being sold to dealers and drug addicts.
Narrator: The French Connection heroin robbery
remains the single largest theft in American history,
and it was done by the police themselves.
The French heroin was big -- it corrupted New York City,
and it corrupted the New York cops.
It corrupted everybody.
Narrator: While drugs are corrupting the nation's police,
the White House itself will soon be engulfed
in its own criminal conspiracy.
Abort.
I repeat -- abort. Get out of there.
Hello?
O0 C1Reporter: Good evening.
We have a mystery story out of Washington.
Five people have been arrested and charged with breaking
into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee
in the middle of the night.
Narrator: One year to the day after President Nixon
declares a war on drugs,
his law-and-order presidency is about to unravel.
One of Nixon's top lieutenants, G. Gordon Liddy,
is arrested for trying to break into
the Democratic National Committee's headquarters.
When his five burglars are interrogated,
it's revealed they're part of a secret White House team
that includes an ex-CIA officer
and four former anti-Castro operatives.
As Congress begins hearings
investigating just how high the plot goes...
Mr. Ehrlichman, are you telling me that the break-in to Dr. Fielding's office
was to satisfy the President of the United States?
...across the country...
another kind of conspiracy is brewing.
A casino in Vegas.
The East Coast's biggest heroin dealer
is enjoying a run on the roulette table.
Chepesiuk: Frank Matthews was ahead of his time,
'cause he was the Al Capone
of African-American drug dealing.
[ Cheering ]
♪♪
Narrator: But Frank Matthews is not in town just to gamble.
The drug trade is changing,
and he wants to find a way to stop the growing violence.
[ Gunshots, people screaming ]
Just recently, one of Matthews' top dealers
was gunned down in a popular nightclub.
How you all doing?
Yo. You good?
So he's called a summit
of the country's top black drug lords.
Stratton: A lot of people in law enforcement will tell you
that when the mob was in control of the neighborhoods,
there was a lot less crime.
The days of sharing with the Italians, they're over now.
Y'all hear me? Over.
This is our time now.
This is our time!
Now you had the emergence of these gangs
that were cutting out the mob.
It created these turf wars and these battles.
What I'm saying first, though, we got to stick together, though,
without killing each other.
His objective was to form some kind of network
where they could work together rather than kill each other.
This business is ours now. All the way.
That's it. That's it.
Narrator: But before he can see his dreams of unity fulfilled...
he's arrested in Vegas.
Matthews jumped bail on July 2, 1973,
and has never been seen again.
Narrator: To add to the mystery,
the testimony of nine of his French Connection suppliers
is suppressed for national security reasons by the CIA.
Stratton: Frank Matthews may be one of the few
of the big drug kingpins who actually got away.
But unlike Matthews, most of the guys
who were involved in the drug trade
were getting hammered with these huge sentences.
Narrator: Possibly the most enduring legacy of Nixon's war on drugs
is a series of laws passed in New York State.
Life sentence for pushers.
Stratton: We saw guys coming in
who were like low-level street dealers
with 20, 30 years' time.
Narrator: Under what are known as the Rockefeller Drug Laws,
anyone caught with more than four ounces of drugs --
even marijuana -- faces a 15-year-to-life sentence.
It's the same as second-degree murder.
Other states soon follow suit.
Hart: Rockefeller Drug Laws reverberate to this day,
because 90% of the people who were arrested under those laws
were black and brown.
Narrator: But for the man who declared America's War on Drugs,
the battle has come to an early end.
The irony of Nixon championing a war on drugs
is his own criminality.
The guy leaves office in disgrace.
Narrator: For their roles in the Watergate scandal,
four of the key architects of the War on Drugs
will go to prison --
the former Attorney General
who spearheaded Operation Eagle, John Mitchell...
the senior adviser who introduced Nixon
to Elvis, Bud Krogh...
the president's chief counsel, John Ehrlichman...
and the former prosecutor who first made his name
trying to take down LSD guru Timothy Leary,
G. Gordon Liddy, will be sent to a Connecticut federal prison.
And it's here where one of the strangest connections
in the history of the War on Drugs will be made.
O0 C1Narrator: The federal prison at Danbury, Connecticut, 1974.
Richard Nixon's dirty tricks mastermind,
G. Gordon Liddy,
is here serving time for his role in the Watergate break-in.
When Gordon Liddy found himself in federal prison,
he found a fellow inmate there, Carlos Lehder.
[ Camera shutter clicking ]
Narrator: Carlos Lehder, a Colombian car thief
who will soon change the face of the drug trade.
Liddy had all these ideas about the will to power,
to impose your will on circumstances
and do heroic things as an individual.
Lehder was completely inspired by this man.
This weird admiration society built up.
Carlos Lehder started dressing like him,
started talking about the same ideas,
and Carlos Lehder would then get out
and basically flood America with cocaine.
Narrator: And as a founding member
of Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel,
he'll revolutionize a new drug trade.
[ Helicopter blades whirring ]
[ Police radio chatter ]
The power dynamics that forged the War on Drugs
will now reverberate across five decades.
Hart: Sometimes people say that the War on Drugs
really wasn't about drugs.
And they state that like that's news.
[ Indistinct shouting ]
It's only news to people
who just haven't been paying attention.
Of course it wasn't about drugs.
Stratton: It was a fraud.
It was a political maneuvering that was designed
to keep certain aspects of the culture under control.
Wright: In many ways, the counterculture
was a product of the CIA LSD program
that released it into the populace.
All of these individual experiences
that people had taking LSD collectively
completely altered society.
Moran: What's really remarkable is that a lot of these patterns
that have their origins in the 1960s become cyclical.
Wright: Virtually all of the CIA activities abroad
always came on the backs of drug smuggling
and drug financing.
Moran: And we're going to see those relationships develop
again and again throughout the War on Drugs.
Valentine: The War on Drugs is not about one thing,
it's about many things in relationship to each other.
Narrator: On the next episode of "America's War on Drugs"...
Stratton: Pablo Escobar had tremendous political ambition.
Man: If you were gonna mess with Pablo,
you know, Pablo will kill you.
This is an outlaw regime.
Man #2: They're flying secret shipments of weapons down
and then coming back with cocaine.
Man #3: I'm going after the drug dealers that they were protecting.
We were really playing Russian roulette with our lives.
Man #4: I knew it went all the way to the White House.
Moran: You basically have a secret CIA operation laid bare.
MAN #5: It was really hard for me to fantasize
that something so small could be so valuable.
It was like, "This is what I was made for."