Pete’s vivid personal accounts in TDY in the dark world of Black Operations quickly morph from mysterious suspense to a dangerous, terrifying adventure... This compelling story will keep you on edge throughout....” S. BRIAN WILLSON, author, Don't Thank Me For My Service This novel by Douglas Valentine, author of the nonfiction bestseller The CIA as Organized Crime, is based on a true story, one told to him by a Vietnam veteran and barely, yet grippingly, fictionalized here. In early 1967, a bored, adventurous photojournalist on an Air Force base in Texas is offered a Temporary Duty (TDY) assignment somewhere overseas. The mission is steeped in secrecy, but Pete is promised a large bonus and hazardous duty pay. So he agrees. He and a small group of photojournalists, each with a special skill, are isolated on a Special Forces base where they are kept under constant surveillance by a group of highly trained and menacing soldiers. The small band of twelve men is flown overseas on a transport plane large enough for 120 men. They are never told where they are going, until they arrive. And when they finally reach their destination, the mission that unfolds is terrifying beyond anything Pete ever imagined. The secret would haunt him for the rest of his life. TDY shows how “black operations” are organized and conducted. Meticulous in detail, and accurate in every aspect of “over the fence” missions deep into enemy territory, it reveals for the uninitiated the skill, determination, and self-sacrifice of American soldiers. In stark contrast to the honor and commitment of these soldiers, TDY reveals the unimaginable duplicity and corruption of powerful men for whom American soldiers and civilians are pawns in a ruthless game. Written in sparing prose, TDY is a story of Pete’s journey through the underworld and his awakening to the reality of the Vietnam War and the CIA role in Southeast Asia
This book provides insight into the paradigmatic approaches evolved by CIA decades ago in Vietnam which remain operational practices today in Afghanistan, El Salvador, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. Valentine’s research into CIA activities began when CIA Director William Colby gave him free access to interview CIA officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. The CIA would rescind it, making every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented the CIA’s elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture and assassination in Vietnam. While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos, to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA’s relationship with the federal drugs agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States. Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug law enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure that the flow of drugs continues unimpeded to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ. Ultimately, portions of his research materials would be archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Center, and John Jay College. This book includes excerpts from the above titles along with updated articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA’s ongoing illegal and extra-legal activities. These terrorism and drug law enforcement articles and interviews illustrate how the CIA’s activities impact social and political movements abroad and in the United States. A common theme is the CIA’s ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability. Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis now. Valentine tracks its steady infiltration into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people.
The Strength of the Pack documents previously unknown aspects of the history of federal drug law enforcement, from the formation of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in 1968 through the early years of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Picking up where The Strength of the Wolf left off, the book shows how successive administrations expanded federal drug law enforcement operations under the pervasive but hidden influence of the CIA. The "wolf pack" is a metaphor for the multitude of agencies and their offshoots that comprise the labyrinth system currently waging the eternal war on drugs. Once upon a time, the "lone wolf" federal narcotics agent, last of the noir detectives, hard-boiled and streetwise, stalked his prey: vicious Mafia drug dealers and their international connections. But the rise of the American Superpower and the opium-infused Vietnam War saw the lone wolf replaced by a dehumanized bureaucratic system more suitable to empire: the wolf pack, secretly led by the CIA and designed specifically for using the war on drugs as a covert means of advancing the interests of the U.S. ruling class at home and abroad. Based largely on interviews with former federal narcotics agents and CIA officers, as well as the influential politicians and government bureaucrats they worked with, The Strength of the Pack focuses on the CIA's steady infiltration and corruption of federal drug law enforcement for the purpose of waging political and psychological warfare against the American public. Many books have focused on the public policy aspects of federal drug law enforcement, but no book to date has plumbed as deeply into the secret policies, or taken as comprehensive a view of them, as this one.
The Strength of the Wolf is the first complete history of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (1930 - 1968). Working undercover around the globe, the FBN's charismatic "case-making" agents penetrated the Mafia and its French connection. In the process, however, they uncovered the national security establishment's ties to organized crime. Victims of their freewheeling methods and unparalleled success in hunting down society's predators, the agents were ultimately targeted for destruction by the FBI and CIA. Based largely on interviews with case-making agents, The Strength of the Wolf provides a new, exciting, and revealing chapter in American history.
Through interviews with former narcotics agents, politicians, and bureaucrats, this exposé documents previously unknown aspects of the history of federal drug law enforcement, from the formation of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) up to the present day. The narrative examines how successive administrations expanded federal drug law enforcement operations at home and abroad; investigates how the CIA comprised the war on drugs; analyzes the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations’ failed attempts to alter the DEA's course; and traces the agency's evolution into its final and current stage of “narco-terrorism.”
A “very dramatic [and] compelling” World War II story of murder, mutiny, and a military cover-up, from the author of The Phoenix Program (The New York Times). Captured by the Japanese while on patrol in the fetid jungles of New Guinea, Douglas Valentine’s father, who’d enlisted in the US Army at age sixteen, was sent to a prison camp in the Philippines, where he was interned with Australian and British soldiers. The events that followed make up this “well-told, chilling” story of betrayal and brutality—a powerful tale of a son uncovering the traumatic events that shaped the rest of his father’s life (Los Angeles Times Book Review). “Not just a searing picture of life in a terrible POW camp, it is also a significant historical document about a place that the U.S. military says never existed.” —Publishers Weekly
“This shocking expose of the CIA operation aimed at destroying the Vietcong infrastructure thoroughly conveys the hideousness of the Vietnam War” (Publishers Weekly). In the darkest days of the Vietnam War, America’s Central Intelligence Agency secretly initiated a sweeping program of kidnap, torture, and assassination devised to destabilize the infrastructure of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam, commonly known as the “Viet Cong.” The victims of the Phoenix Program were Vietnamese civilians, male and female, suspected of harboring information about the enemy—though many on the blacklist were targeted by corrupt South Vietnamese security personnel looking to extort money or remove a rival. Between 1965 and 1972, more than eighty thousand noncombatants were “neutralized,” as men and women alike were subjected to extended imprisonment without trial, horrific torture, brutal rape, and in many cases execution, all under the watchful eyes of US government agencies. Based on extensive research and in-depth interviews with former participants and observers, Douglas Valentine’s startling exposé blows the lid off of what was possibly the bloodiest and most inhumane covert operation in the CIA’s history. The ebook edition includes “The Phoenix Has Landed,” a new introduction that addresses the “Phoenix-style network” that constitutes America’s internal security apparatus today. Residents on American soil are routinely targeted under the guise of protecting us from terrorism—which is why, more than ever, people need to understand what Phoenix is all about.
Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire is a non-fiction book about what writer William Burroughs called, "the backlash and bad karma of empire." Set against the author's month-long trip to London, Vietnam and Thailand in early 1991, it tells how the American empire was created by rapacious businessmen backed by a murderous military establishment, media moguls who designed a relentless psychological warfare campaign that glorifies warriors who are programmed to kill on command, and clerics who contrived a religious justification for imperialism, the subordination of women, and the establishment of chattel slavery. Pisces Moon shows how these mythmakers, led by CIA drug traffickers after World War Two, destroyed much of Southeast Asia. It also tells how the myth of American greatest has come home to roost and is now manifest as the vainglorious, militant Christian nationalist movement that wishes to establish a right-wing dictatorship. Pisces Moon argues that the survival of American democracy, and the world, depends upon people being able to distinguish between material evidence and substantiated facts on the one hand, and conspiracy theories, religious beliefs, and supremacist myths on the other.
Voted Outstanding Academic Title in 2004 by Choice. The Strength of the Wolf is the first complete history of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), which existed from 1930 until its wrenching termination in 1968. The most successful federal law enforcement agency ever, the FBN was populated by some of the most amazing characters in American history, many of whom the author interviewed for this book. Working as undercover agents and with mercenary informers around the globe, these freewheeling "case making" agents penetrated the Mafia and the French connection, breaking all the rules in the process, and uncovering the Establishment's ties to organized crime. Targeted by the FBI and the CIA, the case-makers were, ironically, victims of their own fabulous success in hunting down society's predators. An incredible, never-before-told story, The Strength of the Wolf provides a new, exciting, and revealing look at an important chapter in American history.
The natural world is tangible to Valentine as he prunes trees or watches "ghostly columns of frozen mist arise" from the Contoocook River in winter. Yet all is not lyric: Marvis Flynn, protagonist of a long poem that takes up a quarter of the book, parodies the Lord's Prayer. Sinister characters abound.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.