We continue now with The Crimes of Patriots A True Tale of Dope,
Dirty Money & The CIA By Jonathan Kwitny....

General Edwin Black had the most thorough intelligence background of all the flag officers in Nugan Hand. He was a graduate of West Point and the National War College. In 1962, he paused to get a master's degree in international relations from George Washington University.

Black was an OSS veteran. He was Allen Dulles's right-hand man, and Richard Helms's boss. (Both went on to become CIA directors.) He played tennis and chess with them.

After the war he got involved in assignments like "military assistant to the deputy for psychological policy," and the military staff of the National Security Council under President Eisenhower. He was military advisor on Philippine base negotiations in 1956, twenty-two years before General Manor conducted his own round.

Going back to the field, Black was active in the U.S. Government's anti-China undercover operations in Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. When his friend, the American "businessman" and eccentric Third World operator Jim Thompson (widely assumed to be working with the CIA), mysteriously disappeared in Malaya's jungly Cameron Highlands in 1967, causing an international furor, Black was sent to lead the search. (He came up empty-handed.)

A specialist in "special forces"-type operations, General Black commanded all army troops in Vietnam in the early stages of U.S. involvement there. When the war became big and official, he took command of all U.S. forces in Thailand. Later, he was made an assistant division commander in Vietnam itself. He was made assistant army chief of staff for the Pacific Command, then left the army in 1970 (he said because he failed to get his promotion to major general in the prescribed time).

He ran the conservative and militantly anticommunist Freedoms Foundation for a while, then took no doubt more lucrative jobs with CIA-military contractors. Eventually, he settled in Hawaii for semi-retirement under the palms.

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