Ingersoll, John

John Ingersoll (1930–) was the director of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), a position he held for the entire duration of that agency's existence from 1968 until 1973, when it was folded into the newly created Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). A career policeman, Ingersoll had begun as a patrolman (and later sergeant) in Oakland, California, in 1956, and became the International Association of Chiefs of Police's director of field services in 1961. After five years, [Page 384]he moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, to take a job as their new chief of police until called upon to direct the newly created BNDD.

The BNDD was placed in the Justice Department and formed by merging the Treasury Department's Bureau of Narcotics and the Food and Drug Administration's Bureau of Drug Abuse Control, and is somewhat emblematic of the transition from drug policy that was centered on revenue and consumer protection to drug policy with a police force. The DEA would be a move further in that direction, incorporating intelligence gathering, foreign policy, and financial intelligence. Ingersoll's appointment not only fit the law enforcement character of the new agency, it was a reaction to the widespread corruption that had been discovered in the Bureau of Narcotics. In Charlotte, Ingersoll had developed a reputation for being incorruptible and forthright, which was exactly what the federal government needed after a flurry of Bureau of Narcotics agents resigned amid investigations of their entanglements with drug dealers.

Ingersoll inherited a workforce that continued to have problems with corruption. Some of the corruption could be attributed to simple weakness in the face of temptation; more than many criminals, drug lords had plentiful cash on hand for bribes, a problem that had been faced during Prohibition and in Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) dealings with the Mafia. But some of it, Ingersoll felt, came from an emphasis on filling arrest quotas. The easiest way, and for high enough quotas the only way, to reliably fill those quotas was to use informants. While the FBI cultivated long-term relationships with informants, their motive in doing so was principally information gathering, rather than building up arrest numbers in the short term. Many of the Narcotics agents caught in the scandals that ended that Bureau had worked with informants to mutual benefit: the informant turned in other drug dealers whose arrests met the agent's quota, and the dealers who were thus arrested were naturally the informant's competitors, which benefited his own business.

Ingersoll's chief inspector, Patrick Fuller, had been a friend since their days in Oakland, but his experience was as an Internal Revenue Service investigator, and managing complicated matters of internal security in a new agency in which old cliques survived from its constituent agencies was beyond his capabilities. Ingersoll's worries did not ease over time, and he soon requested that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) engage in a covert operation to root out any corruption in the BNDD. Attorney General John Mitchell supported the suggestion, and the operation was quickly approved.

Undercover CIA officers were “hired” as new BNDD agents, and spied on the agency from within. Fuller himself did not know the identities of all the spies involved, and no records were kept, according to a subsequent Congressional report on CIA activities. There are indications that the CIA's real motive in so quickly agreeing to Ingersoll's request was to use its agents to access BNDD's intelligence on foreign drug traffickers; certainly the suspicion that the CIA was gathering intelligence on other entities within the federal government was one of the catalysts for the aforementioned Congressional investigation. Though the data suggests that corruption persisted in the BNDD, the CIA's operation never resulted in any dismissals.

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