After Nixon’s second landslide, the White House set out to redesign the Executive Branch, and among the alterations was a new plan for the nation’s drug fighting apparatus. The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and several other bureaucracies were to be absorbed into a vast new organization called the Drug Enforcement Agency.  From its birth in July of 1973, the DEA had awesome powers—as great in many respects as the FBI and Customs combined—and their reach was global. They could detain and interrogate suspects, call for wiretaps and no-knock warrants, and bring in the tax men.  And with the influx of several hundred agents picked up from the CIA and Customs, the new superagency now had the talent and ability to conduct black bag operations and domestic surveillance.  But thirteen days before this omnipotent police force was to be turned loose, the D.C. Metro cops arrested five burglars in the Watergate office complex and the Administration’s secret plans began to come unraveled.

One unexpected benefit of the Watergate debacle was the mountain of evidence, memos, tapes, and diaries, offering a surgical cross-section of government operations at the highest level. Author Edward Jay Epstein dug through this mountain in the late ‘70s and after interviewing the principal players, he came to the conclusion that the Nixon War on Drugs was a mask for darker designs. In his book, Agency of Fear^[6], he makes a persuasive case that the DEA was to have functioned at some level as a private army for the White House.  The discovery of the famous Enemies List gave some hint of what they had in mind.

When Richard Nixon’s helicopter lifted off the South Lawn for the last time in 1974, he left behind a drug fighting apparatus that was larger by an order of magnitude than the one he inherited.  For half a century, the federal anti-narcotics force had been a tiny sidebar to the country’s overall enforcement effort, largely symbolic, never involving more than a few hundred men. Now it was a vast international law-enforcement operation with