Theodore Shackley (1927-2002) joined the CIA in the early 1950s and rose to become station chief in Miami in 1962-65, when it was heavily focused on Castro’s Cuba, following the abortive Bay of Pigs operation. He oversaw the operation known as JMWAVE that was dedicated to overthrowing Castro’s government and was the largest CIA operation in the world.

In 1966-68, Shackley served as CIA station chief in Laos, where he oversaw the secret war of Hmong tribesman against the North Vietnamese and suspected communists. He allegedly paid them in part with the profits of the trade in opium, which the Hmong grew and which was flown to Thailand by the CIA’s Air America.

Shackley then became station chief in Vietnam, where his drug-smuggling operation ballooned after Florida mob boss Santo Trafficante, Jr. visited Saigon in 1968. The profits went to fund the assassination squads of Operation Phoenix, although Shackley himself was not in charge of those operations.

Shackley’s associates during this period included Thomas Clines, who oversaw the Hmong in Laos; Richard Secord, who coordinated the arms and drugs flights; Richard Armitage, who was a naval officer in Saigon and later an embassy employee in Thailand; Donald Gregg; and Felix Rodriguez.

In February 1972, Shackley returned to the US and became head of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division, which was focused on the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, which occurred on September 11, 1973. It has been claimed that Shackley coordinated with P2, which is said to have been implicated in the coup.

Meanwhile, Clines and Secord remained in Vietnam, where the excess profits of the heroin trade were allegedly smuggled out of the country and deposited in an account in the money-laundering [[Nugan Hand Bank]], which had been established in Australia in 1973. They also allegedly smuggled weapons out of Vietnam and stories them in Thailand. After the fall of South Vietnam in April 1975, they increasingly went rogue and kept both the money and the arms under their own control.

Around this time, Shackley and Clines sent Armitage to Iran to set up an unauthorized operation that would funnel drug money from Southeast Asia and create a covert assassination program for the Shah. In late 1975 or early 1976, [[Edwin Wilson]] of Air America was sent to head this program and train the secret police, SAVAK, in assassination techniques. Secord was also in Iran at this time. This operation helped lead to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979.

George H.W. Bush became CIA director in January 1976, and Shackley was made Deputy Director of Operations that May, with the expectation that he would eventually succeed Bush as director. However, when Jimmy Carter became president in January 1977, he replaced Bush with Stansfield Turner, who began dismantling the covert operations apparatus and pulled Shackley’s people out of Iran. Shackley himself was demoted at the end of 1977.

Over the next couple of years, Shackley, Clines, Wilson, Secord, and former CIA employee Frank Terpil were involved in various covert businesses, with a focus on Middle Eastern arms dealing. Wilson’s arms sales to Colonel Qaddafi eventually got them all in trouble and led to Shackley and Clines being forced out of the CIA in 1979.

Shackley still had hopes of returning to the CIA as director if Carter was defeated. He supported Bush’s presidential aspirations and continued to meet with Bush during the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign. There are rumors that he helped set up the October Surprise.

By then, Wilson had become involved in supplying arms to the Contras in Nicaragua and also allegedly in the cocaine trade. During the 1980s, Shackley, Clines, and Secord were all involved in the Reagan administration’s off-the-books support for the Contras, and allegedly in the arms and drugs trade as well.