Exhibit Z1

Admiral Moorer’s role in the Watergate coup

The following is an excerpt from OPIUM LORDS (April 2002), by Salvador Astucia, pp 250-254.

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Near the end of President Nixon’s first term, on June 17, 1972, five men were arrested breaking into the Democratic national headquarters in the Watergate office-appartment building in Washington, DC. It was quickly learned that the arrested burglars had been hired by the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP). Immediately, attorney general John Mitchell resigned as director of the CRP. Clearly, this was an embarrassment for President Nixon, but the incident did not impact the ensuing fall elections which Nixon won by a landslide. The Democrats retained majorities in the House and Senate.

A few days after the break-in, charges of burglary and wiretapping were brought against the five men arrested at the scene, plus two additional officials within the Nixon administration. They were E. Howard Hunt, Jr., a former White House aide, and G. Gordon Liddy, general counsel for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President.

Investigation into the scandal continued for the next two years and culminated with the resignation of President Nixon on August 9, 1974.(5)

As previously mentioned, the Watergate burglary occurred a month after the SALT I agreements were signed by Nixon and Breshnev. SALT I and accompanying agreements marked a new era of détente between the two superpowers.

As it turns out, Watergate was not the only cover-up in the Nixon White House. Joan Hoff, a research professor of history at Montana State University, recently wrote an article asserting that on December 21, 1971—six months before the Watergate burglary occurred—Nixon approved the first major cover-up of his administration; however, he was not covering up his own misdeeds. He was covering up the Navy’s. Nixon had learned that Admiral Thomas Moorer, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had authorized his subordinates to spy on the White House’s National Security Counsel. For thirteen months, from 1970 to late 1971, Navy Yeoman Charles E. Radford systematically stole and copied NSC documents from Alexander Haig, Henry Kissinger, and their staff. When Nixon learned of this, he ordered it hushed up; but he let the military know he was aware of the spying. Apparently Nixon and his aides thought that approach would give them more leverage with a hostile defense establishment.(6)

The news media slowly began to cover the Watergate burglary. Several major newspapers investigated the possible involvement of the White House in the break-in. Leading the pack was The Washington Post and its two young reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, whose stories were based largely on information from an unnamed source called "Deep Throat"; the mysterious identity of Deep Throat became a news story in its own right and continues to be speculated on to this day.

The journalistic integrity of Yale graduate Bob Woodward became tainted and comprised years later when it was revealed, by authors Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, that prior to working at the Washington Post, Woodward had worked at the Pentagon for the Office of Naval Intelligence as a Naval Lieutenant. Silent Coup—a 1991 book by Colodny and Gettlin—reveals that in 1969, the twenty-six-year-old Lieutenant was the briefing officer for Admiral Moorer, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had authorized his subordinates to spy on the White House’s National Security Counsel. A briefing officer sees, hears, reads, and assimilates information from one of several sources and passes it on to more senior officers. This is a coveted position for young officers seeking career advancement. The work is often Top Secret.

Colodny and Gettlin asserted that Admiral Moorer sent Lieutenant Woodward to the basement of the White House to act as a briefer for Alexander Haig.(7) The ramifications of this information are staggering.

On June 17, 1971 Nixon declared that heroin addiction was "Public Enemy No. 1," and he targeted Auguste Joseph Ricord for extradition from Paraguay and prosecution in the US for managing large-scale heroin smuggling into America.(8)

(An interesting point: The Watergate burglary occurred exactly one year after Nixon’s decree that heroin addiction was Public Enemy No. 1. The renown burglary occurred on June 17, 1972.)

This may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Nixon had become too bold, too independent. His war on drugs even led to the demise of Lucien Sarti—the French-Corsican assassin who fatally shot President Kennedy in the right temple with an exploding bullet—when Mexican agents shot and killed him in Mexico City on April 27, 1972.(9)

In his first three and a half years as president, Nixon got Congress to increase the Bureau of Narcotics’ annual budget from $14 million to $74 million and expanded its agent force from 600 to 1,600. The Bureau of Customs—the agency that monitored drug-trafficking into the United States from other countries—grew from 9,000 to 15,000.(10)

The Nixon administration determined that the primary smuggler of heroin into the United States was Auguste Ricord. Consequently, in March 1971 the United States government attempted to extradite Auguste Ricord from Paraguay, but there was a breakdown in protocols and it did not happen;(11) although Ricord remained in jail in Paraguay. Over the next year and a half, Nixon turned up the heat on Paraguay to release Ricord to the United States. On June 14, 1971 Nixon met with ambassadors to all countries that grew opium poppies or converted opium gum to morphine and morphine to heroin. He had called them home to impress upon them the seriousness of the situation and to order each of them to make heroin a daily, personal, and official concern. Nixon advised the team of ambassadors in the "problem countries" to influence, even exert pressure on, the heads of state to help break up the international heroin cartel.(12)

In effect, the US ambassadors became Nixon’s foot soldiers on his war against heroin.(13) Under his leadership, US Customs and narcotics agents were encouraged to "exploit" investigative techniques of Latin and European countries that were legally unacceptable in the United States. Such practices included unauthorized wiretaps, bugging, even torture. In other words, the US agents did not use these techniques themselves, but they would not discourage other countries from acquiring information by whatever means was acceptable. This approach allowed US agents to be somewhat agressive in building a case against Ricord as a citizen of Paraguay, but without violating his rights in the United States after he was arrested, extradited, and prosecuted.(14)

In September 1971, a newly created Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control held its first formal meeting in the White House. It was chaired by Attorney General John Mitchell, the secretaries of Defense, Treasury, and Agriculture; and the Director of the CIA. The committee fought the war on heroin through diplomatic channels. Their objective was to convince heads of state—through pressure from US ambassadors—that President Nixon was serious about stopping the flow of heroin into the United States.(15)

On July 4, 1972 the American Embassy in Asuncion, Paraguay did not hold an Independence Day party for the Paraguayan officials. This had been an annual tradition for 111 years. Nixon’s message was loud and clear: Send us Ricord.(16)

Around this time the Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control held another meeting to discuss the Ricord case, the continuing difficulties with drug smuggling from Panama, and similar problems in Thailand, Burma.(17) It is significant that the Committee was discussing two countries that make up the Golden Triangle.

In September 1972 the government of Paraguay announced they would extradite Ricord to the United States to face prosecution for heroin trafficking.(18)

On December 16, 1972 Auguste Ricord was convicted of conspiring to smuggle narcotics into the United States.(19) On January 29, 1973 Ricord was sentenced to 20 years in prison and fined $25,000.(20)

On July 1, 1973, President Richard Nixon created the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) by merging its predecessor agency, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) with various law enforcement and intelligence gathering agencies. DEA has been charged with the responsibility of enforcing the nation's federal drug laws and works closely with local, state, federal and international law enforcement organizations to identify, target and bring to justice the most significant drug traffickers in the world.(21)

SOURCES:

(5) Encyclopedia Britannica: Richard Milhous Nixon, Watergate Scandal

(6) Joan Hoff, The Nixon Story You Never Heard (article). Collusion between Admiral Moorer, Yeoman Radford, and others within the US military is also discussed at great length in Silent Coup by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin.

(7) Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, Silent Coup, pp. 69 - 71. The authors cited the following sources for the Woodward-Haig connection: The National Personnel Records Center provided basic information about Woodward’s military career, including duty stations, assignments, date of rank, decorations, and dates of induction and discharge; Playboy interview of Woodward by J. Anthony Lukas (February 1989); NROTC guide obtained from Naval Military Personnel Command; Woodward himself provided the authors with a copy of his 1969 resignation letter and of NAVOP order, also known as an ALLNAV; An excerpt from Haig’s 1962 master’s thesis was published in the Washington Post on January 18, 1981.

(8) Evert Clark & Nicholas Horrock, Contrabandista!, pp. 181 - 182

(9) ibid, pp. 215 - 216

(10) ibid, p. 206

(11) ibid, pp. 3 - 22

(12) ibid, p. 182

(13) ibid

(14) ibid, p. 214

(15) ibid, p. 183

(16) ibid, p. 206

(17) ibid

(18) Evert Clark & Nicholas Horrock, Contrabandista!, p. 212

(19) ibid, p. 230

(20) ibid, pp. 230 - 231

(21) DEA Museum and Visitors Center, "An Introduction to DEA," http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/deamuseum/deaintro.html