Federal Bureau of Narcotics

The Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) was a U.S. government agency whose agents collaborated closely with the CIA on behavioral control operations. George White, a OSS veteran who worked as a narcotics agent, used his Bureau position as cover to operate safehouses in New York and San Francisco where the CIA conducted unwitting drug experiments. The Bureau provided access to drug offenders and prostitutes who became unwitting experimental subjects. Narcotics agent Charles Siragusa ran a New York safehouse, opened in 1961, while White operated in San Francisco.¹

Founding and succession

Congress created the FBN within the Treasury Department in 1930 to enforce the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 and related drug laws.³ Harry Anslinger was appointed its first commissioner and ran the bureau from August 1930 until 1962, making it a national instrument of drug prohibition and propaganda across five administrations.³ In 1968 the FBN was merged with the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control to create the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), which in turn was absorbed in 1973 into the newly formed Drug Enforcement Administration.³

The OSS and CIA pipeline

The bureau's overlap with American intelligence dated to World War II. Garland Williams, one of the first agents Anslinger hired in 1930 and the FBN's regional director in New York, helped establish OSS training schools in Maryland and Virginia and served as the OSS chief of sabotage training; several FBN agents, White among them, instructed OSS officers in undercover technique.² White himself held an FBN commission continuously through his Army, OSS, and CIA service, remaining a special agent who sent Anslinger regular reports on the worldwide narcotics trade even while moonlighting for the Agency.² Charles Siragusa and Ira Feldman, who also worked the safehouses, were likewise products of this OSS-narcotics world.¹ When Sidney Gottlieb of TSS wanted a field operative for unwitting drug testing in 1952, Anslinger personally granted permission for White to work part-time for the CIA, and the FBN's everyday access to addicts, pushers, and prostitutes gave Operation Midnight Climax its supply of subjects.¹

The Long committee

The CIA's relationship with the Narcotics Bureau required careful management. In 1967, when a Senate committee chaired by Senator Edward Long began investigating wiretapping by government agencies including the Narcotics Bureau, the Commissioner of Narcotics told a senior TSS man that if CIA officials were "concerned" about its dealings with the Bureau coming out, the most "helpful thing" they could do would be to "turn the Long committee off." TSS officials then misled and lied to the top echelon of the Treasury Department, the Bureau's parent organization, about the safehouses and how they were used.⁴