Posts Tagged ‘DEA’

Interview with Wilson Bryan Key
Thursday, March 24th, 2011

Context: Research for Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control
Location: Phone (27th March 2005), Interviewee’s home in Nevada (30th June 2005)
Date: 27th March 2005 and 30th June 2005
Interviewee: Wilson Bryan Key

Wilson Bryan Key was the man who first popularised the notion of subliminal advertising. In a series of books starting in 1973 he explained how the advertising industry craftily inserted sexually explicit images into mainstream advertisements in order subliminally to persuade consumers to buy products they neither wanted nor needed. Over the course of his life he would sell over 8 million books. He died in 2008.

This is an amalgamation of two interviews with Key, the first conducted by telephone in March 2005, the second in person at his house in Nevada on June 30 that year. Both interviews have been heavily edited (Key made some extraordinarily slanderous claims, which I have cut ). In the interviews he runs through his ‘discovery’ of the subliminal deception, the origins of his theories about the technique and his controversial dismissal from an – apparently tenured – post at a university in Canada. He then moves onto his recruitment by US Special Forces, his role in the Judas Priest subliminal trial and the impact of subliminal advertising today.

I really liked Key: he was a formidable, personable, hospitable, intelligent man. At the same time, however, I was unable to stop myself wondering whether he had in fact slipped irreversibly into a fantasy world. You decide

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How did you get interested in subliminal advertising?

In the beginning I spent a big part of my life in the military. And I had a lot to do with reading aerial photographs. And in aerial photographs, if you look at it from a military perspective, wherever you see something that looks too normal, it should be there, it’s perfect, distrust that – because someone is putting one over on you. You begin to question everything.

I’d been a journalist and a feature writer, when I found myself writing four or five stories all over again I decided to get the hell out of it and get a PhD. And my life was half-way between business, advertising, public relations work and universities. I ran a market research business in Puerto Rico for about 6 or 7 years, and I was tied in with a political party… And then I needed a way to make a living so I went back to teaching. Ended up in Canada, University of Western Ontario. I was there 6 years.

What was your PhD in?

Psychology.

And your position at Western Ontario was teaching psychology?

Communications Studies. I was a tenured professor. I worked in the journalism department, sometimes in the psychology department and I even took some art classes occasionally. But my background is very un-concentrated, I wandered all over the place. I thought, when you get a tenured professorship you think, ‘Well now I’m safe. They can’t fire me any more’. Well, that’s not true.

So what happened? You discovered this subliminal business? How did that come about?

The first one was I think an illustration in Esquire Magazine, and I was lecturing to the class on this particular article, it was on one of the beatnik poets of the day. And I looked at the picture, I think it was of him, a painting of him, upside down. And there on the bookshelf behind him was an erect penis as a bookend. I walked around the table: ‘Jesus Christ! That shouldn’t be there!’ Then I started poking around and within three months I had a two foot pile of the stuff in my office. And then I got the students interested. They were delighted with this. It was almost like participating in a revolution! So I had no trouble getting material. Once I started looking for it I started, for a month or so, looking at the pages of magazines just off the edges, looking horizontally, not confronting it. I knew that they were putting something into this printing. And then I discovered the S E X business.

You see, the whole society depends so greatly on marketing, advertising, whatever you want to call it. And to assume that these people left language and pictorial communication alone? They have refined it to a degree vastly beyond what anybody suspected before. And to assume everything is the same as it is in language? Forget it! That can’t be true! They spend an enormous amount of money. These ads, some of them that I have used in these books, I was able to make a fairly good estimate of the amount that was spent: $10 million! In one of [my] books there is an advertisement featuring ice cubes in an empty glass – Johnnie Walker, I believe, and that thing was in use for at least 10 years. It’s been on the back cover of every magazine in this country and probably many others.

The advertisers know that most of it doesn’t work. But they try everything. And part of it depends on the volume of ads they put out. But when they find one that does work, demonstrably, they’ll go with it, they’ll milk it as much as they possibly can. So we tried to go in the book with these ads that were repeated immediately. And invariably when you look at these super-ads, you find subliminals.

Anything in communications studies that looks sincere, honest, straightforward, that it’s all hanging out: distrust it! Distrust it very much! Because someone is pulling your leg.

In the beginning I got a lot of help from radiologists, people who spend their lives looking at x-rays. And they again were very well-trained in being very distrustful. For example, no physician will read an x-ray of someone he is emotionally involved with, his wife, for example, or his child. Because you can’t be certain what’s there is really there: the big question is, how do you differentiate between reality and fantasy? And our society now has got to the point where it is extraordinarily difficult for us to make this differentiation.

The x-ray people were very sensitive about this because they’d have someone else read the x-ray, they wouldn’t touch it. I asked ‘Why do you do that?’ and they said it was this business of projection. It’s like looking at a Rorschach inkblot. And looking at a Rorschach inkblot, there’s nothing there. Anything you put there, you are making it up. It’s a fantasy. And that’s where a lot of my interest in this evolved.

Your suspicions were piqued by the vast amounts of money being spent on advertising by major corporations, weren’t they?

I figured at least 10 million dollars over a period of 7 years was spent printing one single advertisement. That probably cost $100,000 for one artist to do it. Now, what the hell’s going on here? They’re not playing a game. If it doesn’t work, they will know about it in 2-3 weeks. I used to work for Seagram’s. And most ads probably don’t work. At least, not dramatically. They do succeed in keeping the name out there. But if they find one that does work, that one ad for Seagram’s was used for 10 years and they spent several million dollars buying space for it. And a good ad is an ad that sells. That’s all. Nothing else matters.

I worked in advertising for a long time. And I ran a consulting firm for 10 years. Publicly, no, they can’t admit to all this. There’s a law against it! It would be dreadful!

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Interview with DEA Agent #2
Thursday, November 25th, 2010

Context: Research for Cocaine: An Unauthorised Biography
Location: Los Angeles
Date: October 4th 2000
Interviewee: Senior DEA Agent

This interview, with a senior DEA agent who will no doubt wish to remain anonymous (if you’re reading this, recognise yourself, and would like me either to name you or to remove the transcript altogether, let me know!), took place in Los Angeles in the summer of 2000. This agent is very interesting on the development of the ‘Kingpin’ strategy that eventually collapsed the Medellin cartel – and the ensuing rise of Cali. He also explains the emergence of some of the main Mexican cocaine cartels – and how ignorance of the ways they were operating in tandem with the Colombians gave them a relatively free hand. The brief section in which he deals with corruption in Mexico is pretty eye-opening.

Download: Download Interview (PDF)

There was cocaine in 1965 but very small amounts, mostly from Peru. Mostly by seamen arriving in the New York who were smuggling in a couple of kilos at a time. We didn’t see any large shipments. The biggest I saw back in those days was 5 or 6 kilos at a time. It was a drug used mostly by folks in the entertainment world. Artists, writers, musicians – a cachet drug. It wasn’t highly abused, we didn’t see many ODs or criminal activity other than the smuggling itself. I was in New York City. Half of all the heroin addicts in the US were in the New York area and probably a good portion of the cocaine crowd.

When did the cocaine trade in the US really pick up?

Around 77, 76. When we began to see several things. First of all there was the violence in Florida. We began to see the Colombians and the Cubans shooting it out with each other on the streets in broad daylight, pretty much as they had been doing in their own countries for years. We hadn’t seen that level of violence in the States. Sure, we had a lot of gun violence and drive-bys and that sort of thing but for the most part we have never really had the machine-gunnings and the sort of group-against-group violence that is typical in other parts of the world, particularly in South America. And that was a wake-up call. A lot of the policymakers began looking at this and saying ‘What’s going on?’ and we began to realise that cocaine was flooding the country, that organisations were bringing in 100 kilo shipments at a time and what probably retarded our attention to this somewhat was that heroin had re-emerged, even though the French Connection was out of business for a few years by then and we thought we had made a significant progress on heroin (which we had) our friends in South east Asia began to  produce a lot more than they normally produced and the Mexicans began to ship a lot of better quality heroin into the US and so we were really geared up to go after the heroin when all of a sudden we were hit on our left side – blind-sided – by this flood of cocaine. And as a law enforcement officer, the two drugs present a completely different challenge…

You were a heroin specialist?

Yeah, chasing the French Connection. I was in New York for that interregnum between the demise of the French Connection and the rise of cocaine, when there was almost a sort of a Pax Romana for a couple of years and we actually thought, in the words of Nixon, that we had turned the corner. Well, we turned the corner – to find another corner!

Was there any special incident that drove home to you the new threat?

There were some murders. There was a very interesting case in Queens back in the early 1970s where two young children were found slaughtered in the basement of a family residence in Queens. In a residential area that normally would not see this kind of violence. Even though New York City is a violent place there seems to be some level of violence that it will not stoop to. And that was one that captured the attention of the city for weeks. This incredibly brutal – I think the kids were strangled to death and found hanging from the plumbing pipes in the basement. This was headline stuff for weeks, mostly because the family seemed like it was so normal. It was an immigrant Colombian family that – a man and a woman. I want to say that he was a schoolteacher or something. I know he had a job and they were portrayed as average middle class ordinary people and how could something like this happen to them? All of a sudden about a month or so later it started to come out that this guy was heavily into the cocaine traffic and that he had owed the group some money and he had reneged on paying them and that this was their way of showing revenge. This was sort of an intense symbol that this was something a little bit different.

Even with the heroin trade there was never that degree of violence. If there was a killing it was a mob killing, it was – in their way – justified by their rules. It was not indiscriminate, it was never against a family member. If Lucky Luciano didn’t like Carlo Gambino he wouldn’t kill Carlo Gambino’s wife or mother or child. He would go after Carlo and if he couldn’t get Carlo, he’d leave him alone. This was the way we had been educated to expect the way crime operates and all of a sudden we were visited by this alien variety of brutality and violence. I know it may sound strange coming from a country that has more violence by handguns very year than many others, nonetheless there are some levels and instances of violence that are absolutely out of hand. This was one of them – and it captured the imagination of the people. And then when the public found out that this was drug-related, it ushered in a whole new era of thinking about this drug… All of a sudden we realised that there was this growing criminal culture behind [cocaine] that was alien in both the literal and figurative sense.

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Interview with DEA Agent #1
Monday, November 8th, 2010

Context: Research for Cocaine: An Unauthorised Biography
Location: Washington DC
Date: 18th July 2002
Interviewee: DEA Agent #1

This interview, with a senior DEA agent who will no doubt wish to remain anonymous (if you’re reading this, recognise yourself, and would like me either to name you or to remove the transcript altogether, let me know!), took place in Washington DC in the summer of 2000.

The agent, who had nearly 30 years’ experience, was regarded as one of the Agency’s pre-eminent experts on cocaine cartels. He chats here about the rise and fall of the Medellin Cartel, and the subsequent rise of Cali. He then makes an extremely pertinent comment about Mexican cartels’ involvement with cocaine and appears to predict (entirely accurately, as it turns out) that Mexico was going to head the way of Colombia unless something was done about it. Ten years after the interview took place, exactly that has happened.

Download: Download Interview (PDF)

What is a drug cartel? Isn’t the term something of a misnomer? Can’t it generate publicity of the wrong sort?

The fact is there is a lot of debate over whether or not law enforcement should use the term ‘cartel’. ‘Cartel’ came into vogue I think in the late 70s. What happened is cocaine organisations started out rather small – there really wasn’t a cocaine industry in the United States in the early 70s, for example. It wasn’t the preferred drug of abuse. Preferred drugs of abuse were: marijuana, heroin was very popular, methamphetamine, uppers, downers, LSD, hallucinogens. Very popular in the early 70s – a carry-over from the 60s.

The Colombian organised crime groups begin to get involved on an important scale in the early 70s. Essentially they wrestled the business away from Chileans and others, who had been dabbling in it. But nobody was making a whole lot of money. It really was kind of a niche market for that particular drug [cocaine]. And I think in those days it might have been popular in the arts community and so on but at that stage cocaine wasn’t really a preferred drug of abuse. Of course, all that would change over the course of the following decade. And over the course of that decade, certain groups based in Medellin and Cali began to grab increasingly important shares of the cocaine market and essentially took over and perfected the business of cocaine trafficking in the United States. They were assisted I think in part by an epidemic of a drug called crack. When people first began to realise there was a way to smoke this drug, and what they didn’t realise when they began to smoke it is how addictive it was in that form.

So the cartels, these organised crime groups, had a little bit of luck in that this drug that kind of had a little niche market – the market had now expanded and there was a huge demand for the product in the US. All that coincided with two groups essentially – two or more but two were paramount in this business. And they were able, through traditional organised crime methods, to control the transportation. They controlled the wholesale industry both in Colombia and in the United States, and they began to expand and feed on this market that was demanding this drug in the form of crack. And so over the course of that time two groups emerged, the Medellin Cartel and the Cali Cartel. There were some smaller groups … in other parts of Colombia but the two pre-eminent organised crime groups in Colombia who surfaced as the billionaires in the 80s were from two opposing cities, Medellin and Cali.

Somewhere along the line someone coined the term ‘cartel’. I don’t know where but it seemed to fit because they were truly on top, they were able to regulate the amount of drugs and they were able to regulate price if they wanted to. But generally the market drove the price and it just became a popular term – it began to get popular usage. But are they the same as a traditional cartel like OPEC or something like this? No. And in fact certain law enforcement people felt that the term glamorised the trade and so they preferred to use more traditional verbiage for that – call them mafias or syndicates or organised crime groups, or whatever.

The leadership of the Medellin cartel – power was concentrated at that level of gangster. And much like your traditional organised crime groups they broke down very much like that. In my view the Medellin Cartel – Pablo Escobar, who would emerge as the boss of bosses of the Medellin cartel – established an organisation that ran not unlike the kind of organisation Al Capone ran. Negotiation always ended at the end of a gun. If you went along with him, we’ll become rich together. If not, and you have a disagreement, then somebody’s gonna die. And by the time Escobar died in ’92, he had probably sent to the grave certainly thousands of Colombian police officers, judges, magistrates, prosecutors – you name it. Presidential candidates – and thousands of Colombian citizens.

But they were ALL violent, right? Any more than others?

They were certainly all violent. The least violent were the Ochoas [of Medellin] but even so, they were violent as well… You can’t survive in that business if you’re not violent. This is not a business for a negotiator. Were they party to Escobar’s plan to declare war against his own government? I don’t know if they sat down and had a meeting and he said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna declare war against the government, are you with me or against me?’ – but certainly they didn’t oppose it and they were paying their taxes…

[Escobar had yet to rise to prominence in the early 1970s but] in those days we were working on groups from Medellin who would later become important traffickers (read Kings of Cocaine [by Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leen] – it does a good history no doubt. That may be the most accurate thing written about the cocaine cartels in the 70s and into the 80s.)

But at the time cocaine was seen as a benevolent drug – non-addictive, certainly. Were you and the DEA aware of the problem? Was there an awareness of the errors of the White House’s 1975 white paper?

… I was certainly aware and I think the bosses were aware and I think it was generally understood that this was gonna come back and bite us in the ass – by a lot of people.

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