Ronald Hadley Stark

[Magda Hassan]

Excerpts from Acid Dreams
The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond
Authors: Martin A. Lee, Bruce Shlain
Publisher: Grove Press
Date: 1985
Pages 213 - 215

As it turned out, Scully served a longer jail term than any other person associated
with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. At least twenty members of the Brotherhood
chose the fugitive route while drug charges were pending against them. One of those
who vanished was Ronald Stark, the mysterious entrepreneur who had assumed a
commanding role in the illicit acid trade. In November 1972 a team of IRS and BNDD
agents visited his drug lab in Brussels, but Stark was nowhere to be found. He was
later indicted—but never prosecuted—as a co-conspirator in the Sand-Scully case.
The fact that Stark was wanted on a drug rap in the US hardly put a damper on his
international escapades. He spent much of his time in Italy during the 1970S,
cavorting with Sicilian Mafiosi, secret service officials, and political extremists of the
far left and far right. Stark's antics took him far afield. Occasionally he traveled to
the Baalbek region of Lebanon, where he negotiated with a Shiite Muslim sect for
shiploads of hashish. Stark claimed to be a business representative of Imam Moussa
Sadr, a powerful Shiite warlord who controlled vast hashish plantations and a private
army of 6,000 men. The area under his dominion was said to include training camps
used by the Palestine Liberation Organization and other terrorist groups.

Back in Italy, Stark rented a small apartment in Florence. But he rarely stayed there,
preferring the posh hotels of Rome, Milan, Bologna and other cities. By day he
carried on as a smooth and successful businessman. At night he donned a pair of
faded blue jeans and a work shirt and mingled with student radicals and other
extremists. Moving in left-wing circles was nothing new for Ronald Stark. He had a
knack for popping up wherever trouble was brewing. An American expatriate bumped
into him on the streets of Paris during the peak of the Sorbonne uprising in 1968. In
London he frequented the clubs and bars that were hangouts for dissident elements,
and he made his first appearance in Milan during the "hot autumn" of 1969, when
massive student demonstrations and labor strikes nearly paralyzed Italy.
Furthermore, Stark was tight with the Brotherhood leaders who contributed money
to the Weather Underground for Timothy Leary's prison escape.
Whatever game Stark was playing took an abrupt turn in February 1975 when Italian
police received an anonymous phone call about a man selling drugs in a hotel in
Bologna. A few days later at the Grand Hotel Baglioni they arrested a suspect in
possession of 4,600 kilos of marijuana, morphine, and cocaine. The suspect carried a
British passport bearing the name Mr. Terrence W. Abbott. Italian investigators soon
discovered that "Mr. Abbott" was actually Ronald Stark. Among his belongings was
the key to a safe deposit box in Rome that contained documents on the manufacture
of LSD and a synthetic version of cocaine. There was also a vial of liquid that
scientists could not precisely identify (they figured it was something like LSD). Other
items seized by police included letters from a certain Charles C. Adams written on
stationery with the letterhead of the American embassy in London. The messages
from Adams, a foreign service officer, began with a confidential "Dear Ron," and
were addressed to Stark's drug laboratory in Brussels, which had been raided in the
fall of 1972 by a team of American agents.
If Stark's contacts with American embassy personnel were difficult to fathom, then
his association with some of Italy's most notorious terrorists was equally curious. In
the spring of 1976, while he was being held in Don Bosco prison in Pisa, Stark
befriended Renato Curcio, a top leader of the Red Brigades that had stalked Italy
since the early 1970S. Curcio and his radical cohorts apparently had no idea that
Stark was an American when they took him into their confidence. As soon as he
succeeded in penetrating the underground terrorist network, Stark asked prison
officials to arrange a meeting with the chief prosecutor of Pisa. He said that Curcio
had told him of a plot to assassinate Judge Francesco Coco of Genoa, who was
scheduled to preside over a trial of fifty Red Brigadesmen. There was also talk of
abducting a prominent Italian politician who lived in Rome. In June 1976 Judge Coco
was murdered, just as Stark predicted. (Aldo Moro, five times Italy's premier, may
have been the other victim. Stark's name would later surface in connection with the
Moro kidnapping and execution.)
Transferred to a jail in Bologna, Stark continued to expand his terrorist contacts.
During this period he received a steady flow of visitors from the British and American
consulates. (Curiously, the US government never pressed for his extradition, even
though he was wanted on drug charges related to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.)
Stark also communicated on a regular basis with representatives of the Libyan
diplomatic corps and had a series of meetings with Italian secret service personnel.
Documents show that he was in direct contact with General Vito Miceli, who received
$800/000 from the CIA during the early 1970S while serving as chief of Italian
military intelligence. Miceli was later implicated in a series of neo-fascist coup
attempts in Italy.

It was quite a juggling act, to be sure, and a judge in Bologna eventually sentenced
Stark to fourteen years' imprisonment and a $60,000 fine for drug trafficking. At his
appeals trial Stark changed identities once again, this time passing himself off as
"Khouri Ali," a radical Palestinian. In fluent Arabic he spelled out the details of his
autobiography, explaining that he was part of an international terrorist organization
headquartered in Lebanon, called "Group 14." Stark's appeal failed, and he was sent
back to jail. But Italian police took a renewed interest in his case after they captured
Enrique Paghera, another terrorist leader who knew Stark. At the time of his arrest
Paghera was holding a hand-drawn map of a PLO camp in Lebanon. The map,
Paghera confessed, had come from Stark, who also provided a coded letter of
introduction. The objective, according to Paghera, was to forge a link with a terrorist
organization that was planning to attack embassies.
In June 1978 Graziano Gori, a magistrate in Bologna, was assigned to investigate
and clarify Stark's ties to the US, the Arabs, Italian terrorists, and other mysteries. A
few weeks later Gori was killed in a car accident. The Italian government
subsequently charged Stark with "armed banditry" for his role in aiding and abetting
terrorist activities. But he never stood trial on these charges. True to form, Stark
dropped out of sight shortly after he was released from prison in April 1979 on
orders from Judge Giorgio Floridia in Bologna. The judge's decision was
extraordinary: he released Stark because of "an impressive series of scrupulously
enumerated proofs" that Stark was actually a CIA agent. "Many circumstances
suggest that from 1960 onwards Stark belonged to the American secret services,"
Floridia stated.
The facts about Ronald Stark raise more questions than they answer. Was he a CIA
operative throughout his drug dealing days? Or was the espionage link merely the
work of a brilliant con artist who played both ends off the middle to his own
advantage? An Italian parliamentary commission recently issued a lengthy report on
domestic terrorism that included a section called "The Case of Ronald Stark." The
commission asserted that Stark was an adventurer who was used by the CIA. But
proof as to exactly when his espionage exploits began is hard to pin down. If Stark
was connected to the CIA from 1960 on, as Judge Floridia suggested, then the entire
Brotherhood operation, with its far-flung smuggling and financial networks, must be
reinterpreted. "It could have been that he was employed by an American intelligence
agency that wanted to see more psychedelic drugs on the street," Scully
acknowledged. "Then again, he might have tricked the CIA, just like he fooled
everyone else."
Reflecting upon the sixties, a surprising number of counterculture veterans endorsed
the notion that the CIA disseminated street acid en masse so as to deflate the
political potency of the youth rebellion. "LSD makes people less competent,"
contends William Burroughs. "You can see their motivation for turning people on.
Very often it's not necessary to give it more than just a little push. Make it available
and the news media takes it up, and there it is. They don't have to stick their necks
out very much."

Pages 218 -219

But there's still the puzzling saga of Ronald Stark, which begs for some kind of
explanation. How does one distinguish between an international confidence trickster
and a deep-cover spy when both professions are based on pretense and deception?
Stark was a man who thrived in a clandestine netherworld where "facts are wiped
out by artifacts," as Norman Mailer wrote of the espionage meta-physic, and "every
truth is obliged to live in its denial." He appeared on the psychedelic scene like a
meteor and produced more acid than any other underground source from 1969
through 1972. While pursuing his exploits as an LSD chemist, he communicated on a
regular basis with American embassy personnel, and on numerous occasions he
hinted of ties with the intelligence community. At one point he told an associate that
he shut down his LSD laboratory in France on a tip from the CIA. He also haunted
the radical fringes of Paris, London, and Milan during the heyday of the youth
rebellion.

What does it all mean? Was Stark a hired provocateur or a fanatical guerrilla capable
of reconciling bombs and LSD? When did the CIA learn of his role as a drug dealer,
and was his activity tolerated because he passed information on the counterculture
and the radical left to the Agency?* Although it is highly improbable that the CIA
would have gotten involved in trafficking street acid as a matter of policy, it's not at
all certain that stopping the flow of black market LSD was a particular priority either.
Perhaps the best explanation is that certain CIA officials were willing to condone
Stark's exploits in the drug trade as long as he functioned as an informant.
Stark's name surfaced once again in 1982 when he was arrested in Holland on
charges of trafficking hashish, cocaine, and heroin. The following year he was
deported without fanfare to the United States, where he was still wanted on drug
charges stemming from the Brotherhood of Eternal Love conspiracy case. The entire
matter was handled so discreetly that the press never learned of his return. Stark
spent a few months in a San Francisco jail until charges were dropped by the US
Justice Department, which claimed that too many years had passed to prosecute the
case. In December 1984 he died of a heart attack, leaving others to ponder his
ambiguous legacy.
Above all Ronald Stark remains an extraordinary international enigma. "A genius, but
a tortured soul"—that was how an Italian magistrate described him. Even if he was
never anything more than a brilliant private operator, his remarkable career
illustrates the tangled web of espionage, crime, and extremist politics that is so
much a part of the secret history of LSD—a story as wild and perplexing as the drug
itself. Indeed, as Hunter Thompson wrote, "History is hard to know, because of all
the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of 'history' it seems entirely
reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes
to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the
time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened."
* The CIA’s continuing interest in the illicit drug trade is indicated in a once-classified document dated
March 24, 1969—a few months before Stark joined the Brotherhood. The document refers to the CIA’s
liaison with the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs: "It appears that the activities of the BNDD,
ongoing and planned, could under the appropriate arrangements provide valuable information to the
Agency in new drug effects, drug abuse and drug traffic areas. For this reason they will be followed very
closely."