Biographical note:

Douglas Valentine has lectured and appeared on TV and radio talk shows, testified as an expert witness, served as a documentary film consultant and worked as a private investigator. His previous books include The Hotel Tacloban, The Phoenix Program and TDY.

Country of final manufacture:

US

Main description:

The Strength of the Wolf presents for the first time a definitive history of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) from its birth in 1930 until its wrenching termination in 1968. Carefully and extensively documented, the book is based largely on interviews with former FBN agents, and in this respect The Strength of the Wolf represents a new chapter in American history, one that introduces a cast of fabulous characters.

Douglas Valentine tells how the FBN’s premier case-making agents penetrated the arcane world of international drug trafficking and, by uncovering the Establishment’s ties to organized crime, brought about their own demise. As the book reveals in startling detail, the CIA and FBI were often protecting the FBN’s major targets in the Mafia and the French Corsican underworld. The CIA and its Nationalist Chinese allies were found to be the largest drug-trafficking syndicate in the world, but for political and national security reasons, the FBN was prevented from investigating this overarching conspiracy.

Review quote:

“A thoroughly engrossing, thoroughly researched and thoroughly appalling look at what’s really behind our ill-fated ‘War on Drugs.’ If the history presented here is any model for the future, our grandchildren (and theirs) will be locked into the same hopeless position in which we find ourselves today: war without end.”—Gary Webb

“The Strength of the Wolf is a remarkable early history of America’s war on drugs, as well as the Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ war against the mafia—long before J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI even acknowledged its existence. Doug Valentine has performed an admirable and important public service by pulling all of this information together.”—Dan Moldea

“The Strength of the Wolf is a ground-breaking work of investigative reporting that kept me up half the night. An expose of the never-ending lap-dance between organized crime and the national security establishment, Doug Valentine’s book is a torch held high in the labyrinths of America’s secret history.”—Jim Houghan

“A rollercoaster ride of a read! Douglas Valentine carries us from a brutal murder in a New York hotel room to a squalid CIA power grab forty years later—by way of Lucky Luciano, Dallas, the jungles of Vietnam, and the apprenticeship of the Watergate burglars. A Herculean exploration of the dark world of drugs and law enforcement.”—Anthony Summers