Assignment in Quito

When George White, a moon-faced Californian of 44, confides in a Turkish floozy, a member of the Sicilian Mafia or a Marseille Chinese that he is in the market for dope, his listeners somehow seem to trust him, and lead him right to the big drug suppliers. Using this snare in two decades of prowling the world from Butte to Bahrein, U.S. Narcotics Agent White has got the evidence that has put thousands of peddlers behind bars. His wartime hitch as a lieutenant colonel in the Office of Strategic Services was no less interesting. At one point he stepped from the closet of a Calcutta fleabag rooming house, pistol in hand, just as a Japanese spy was about to knife a U.S. soldier. "I had to kill the spy on the spot," White recalls.

Recently, White drifted through the swinging doors of the dim, dark-paneled bar of Quito's Hotel Majestic. In the next few days he spent a lot of time at a bar table, occasionally speaking in a low voice to chance acquaintances. Soon shifty-eyed visitors began coming to see him. After that, White took to strolling the streets, inconspicuous in a wrinkled grey suit. From time to time, beside a convent wall or in a park, he met seedy individuals and received small packages in return for bills he peeled from a fat wad of U.S. $100s. At length, the seedy ones led him to houses where he paid big money ($5,000, all told) for big packages. Then, having learned the names and residences of Ecuador's busiest dope dealers, George White led the Quito cops in 48 hours of raids.

They bagged six men and a woman, and half a million dollars' worth of raw opium, heroin, morphine, cocaine and marijuana, most of it destined for the U.S. Some of the dope was foreign-made, apparently lifted from medical stocks sent by other countries as friendly help in 1949 when an earthquake hit Ecuador. But much of it came from the poppy fields which flourish under the snow-capped Andean volcanoes close to Quito. Impressed by White's raids, Minister of Government Camillo Ponce Enriquez last week promised to ask the next Congress for laws prohibiting poppy-growing. George White headed back toward his desk in Boston where, between traveling assignments, he is New England supervisor for the U.S. Narcotics Bureau.

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