Llanddewi Brefi is renowned for the miracles of St David and has been portrayed infamously on the Little Britain television series. But it also has another claim to fame.
Rather surprisingly, this small village in west Wales was the centre of the world LSD drug trade in the 1970s. In a new book by Lyn Ebenezer, he discloses who was making and taking the drug in the area and how the police’s so-called ‘Operation Julie’ managed to bust the largest drug ring in the world in 1977.
The author, who was a journalist on the Welsh newspaper Y Cymro at the time, tells how Llanddewi Brefi became a desired destination for pop-stars such as the Rolling Stones, Jimmy Hendrix and Eric Clapton. They’d been invited to the village by local resident David Litvinoff in the 1960s. The author recalls, “It is pretty certain that Bob Dylan stayed at Litvinoff’s house for six weeks during the summer of 1969, just after he’d been at the Isle of Wight pop festival. Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones admitted that he’d been to Llanddewi Brefi too and that whilst staying there he’d used every illegal drug in existence and some which weren’t in existence!”
However, the Operation Julie book deals mainly with the famous police raid which brought to a juddering halt the enormous drug network, which had produced pure LSD worth millions of pounds in rural Wales. In March 1977, the police arrested dozens of people and found six million tabs of LSD – the largest stash of illegal drugs ever found. More than 800 police officers took part in the operation and 120 people were arrested in total. LSD tabs with a street-value of £100 million were discovered. This was the largest police case of its kind and brought Llanddewi Brefi, Tregaron and Carno to world attention overnight.
Operation Julie includes a great deal of new information never published before and records recent interviews conducted with some of those who were involved. And as a local journalist in situ at the time, Lyn Ebenezer gives his own first-hand account and his insight into the affair. In his introduction to the book, he recollects:
“Those arrested were said to have been responsible for 90 per cent of the LSD produced in Britain and 60 per cent worldwide. That is the official line. It will become evident, however, that truth and fiction are still inextricably mixed over 30 years later. But the facts, incredible as they are, seem to outweigh the fiction. Here I include both… The story of Operation Julie is, if you believe the official spin, the story of an ideal that went wrong, greed and audacious enterprise on one side and of diligent, selfless and determined police work on the other. But it is also a story of political infighting and lasting bitterness. Stories abound of undiscovered stashes of LSD and hidden fortunes. There are tales of tip-offs by disgruntled police officers and even a royal connection…
“There remain many unanswered questions. There are, for instance, accusations that statistics were deliberately massaged in order to strengthen the case for a national drugs squad. And if chemist Richard Kemp had produced LSD worth £2.5 million during his seven years of production, as was alleged, why was it that only £11,000 of his money was ever discovered?
“Were the dangers of LSD exaggerated? Much was made of Kemp’s ability to produce the purest LSD in history. Surely, if it was the purest, was it not also the safest? After all, the dangers of LSD lie in its impurities. In fact, despite lurid newspaper accounts of the dangers of acid, no evidence whatever was produced to prove that Kemp’s LSD caused any deaths.
“There are accusations that some officers, the operation’s commander Dick Lee in particular, leaked doctored information to the press, especially to the red tops, as a means of strengthening the case for the formation of a national drugs squad. Papers like the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express in particular, following the sentencing, were laughably sensational. It is no coincidence that the only two books immediately published on Operation Julie appeared with the cooperation of those very newspapers. Dick Lee’s book Operation Julie (W H Allen, 1978) was co-written by Colin Pratt of the Express while Busted by Martyn Pritchard and Ed Laxton (1978), riddled with police and underworld parlance, was published by Mirror Books. Was it a coincidence that the journalist who first alerted me to the swoop was a Daily Express reporter?
“I have included a chapter on a fascinating character who appeared in Llanddewi Brefi seemingly out of nowhere at the end of the sixties. David Litvinoff was not directly involved with the Julie story, but was very much a part of the drugs scene. He attracted many pop stars including the Stones, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and possibly Bob Dylan to his house. Albeit unaware of the fact, he was the harbinger of the influx of free spirits to the area…
“My motive in writing this book is not to be judgemental. Largely it is, rather, a story of how a quiet area of mid Wales was changed completely by incomers that embraced a different culture and way of life. Yet many of those involved in the LSD conspiracy were accepted by the local community. Had they not been embraced – or at least tolerated – their illegal venture would never have lasted so long. It is still difficult to find anyone in the Tregaron and Llanddewi Brefi area that will condemn them. In fact, they are regarded as likeable rouges, much like the area’s own Robin Hood, the sixteenth-century robber and folk-hero Twm Shôn Cati.
“So, even though this book follows the main events of Operation Julie, it is a revised overview. It is also the story of rural communities that were changed completely, and remain completely changed. LSD may not have changed the world, as its proponents had hoped it would, but it did, albeit inadvertently, change forever a rural way of life.”
The book is published by Y Lolfa on 26 August 2010 and is available on their website www.ylolfa.com at £9.95.
