The CIA and Drugs, Inc.: a Covert History
Gary Webb was a good investigator. He linked a drug dealer in Los
Angeles, through Contra suppliers, to CIA officers and Republican
politicians. His editor let the story rip, and the “Dark Alliance”
series made a mighty impact on Black Americans, who saw it as evidence
that the ruling class was as racist as ever.
Webb stuck a stake in the evil heart of the national security state
and embarrassed the CIA’s contacts in the mainstream media. All of which
was unforgiveable. Pressure was applied, history re-written, and Webb,
in despair, apparently committed suicide.
The irony, of course, is that Webb had exposed only a small part of
the story. The fact of the matter is that the US government has always
managed large portions of the illicit, international drug business, and
was doing so long before the CIA came into existence.
Documented cases abound, like the Opium Scandal of 1927, in which a
“former” US Attorney in Shanghai provided a Chinese warlord with 6500
Mausers in exchange for $500,000 worth of opium.
Two years later, US Customs inspectors found a huge quantity of
opium, heroin, and morphine in the luggage of Mrs. Kao, the wife of a
Nationalist Chinese official in San Francisco. At which point Secretary
of State Henry L. Stimson hustled Chiang Kai-shek’s ring of drug dealing
diplomats out of the country.
The State Department likewise protected a ring of drug smugglers in
1934, and thus allowed heroin to pour into New Orleans. Two historians
said about the Honduran Drugs-For-Guns case: “the defense of the Western
hemisphere against the Axis powers…reduced to insignificance
clandestine attempts to link the managerial personnel of a major cargo
airline to smuggling.”
[i]
As it was in the beginning, it is now and ever shall be: the ruling
class’s power resides in its control of the criminal underworld; and
since 1947, it has been the CIA’s job to advance and protect the
conspiracy.
Consider the Federal Narcotic Bureau’s drug conspiracy case on Bugsy
Siegel, which included Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, both of whom had
provided services to the US government during the war. The conspiracy
had its inception in 1939 when, at Lansky’s request, sexy Virginia Hill
moved to Mexico and seduced a number of Mexico’s “top politicians, army
officers, diplomats, and police officials.”
[ii]
Hill came to own a nightclub in Nuevo Laredo and made frequent trips
to Mexico City with Dr. Margaret Chung, an alleged prostitute and
abortionist, honorary member of the Hip Sing T’ong, and the attending
physician to the Flying Tigers – the private airline the US government
formed to fly supplies to Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in Kunming, a city
described as infused with spies and opium. As the FBN was well aware,
Dr. Chung was “in the narcotic traffic in San Francisco.”
[iii]
Chung took large cash payments from Siegel and delivered heroin to
Hill in New Orleans, Las Vegas, New York, and Chicago. And yet, despite
the fact that West Coast FBN agents kept her under surveillance for
years, they could never make a case against her, because she was
protected by the American military establishment. Indeed, Siegel’s
murder in 1947 may have been a government hit designed to protect its
sanctioned KMT-Mafia drug operation out of Mexico. As Peter Dale Scott
observed,
right after Bugsy was squashed, Mexico’s intelligence service, the DFS,
formed relations with the top Mexican drug lord, at which point the CIA
“became enmeshed in the drug intrigues and protection of the DFS.” By
1950, Mexican drug lords were receiving narcotics from the
Lansky-Luciano connection, which stretched to the Far East.
The CIA’s involvement in the Far East drug trade began with its
predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services, which
supplied Iranian opium to Burmese guerrillas fighting the Japanese. This
is no secret: General William Peers, commander of OSS Detachment 101 in
Burma, confessed in his autobiography: “If opium could be useful in
achieving victory, the pattern was clear. We would use opium.”
[iv]
OSS chief William Donovan and Chiang’s intelligence chief, General
Tai Li, tried hard to control drug trafficking in China during the war.
To ensure security for KMT smuggling operations, the Americans sent a
team to Chungking to train Chiang’s secret political police force. The
head of the team, Charles Johnston, was described as previously having
spent fifteen years “in the narcotics game.”
[v]
Johnston’s team and Tai Li’s agents worked closely with Chiang’s
designated drug smuggler Du Yue-sheng. Tai Li’s agents escorted Du’s
opium caravans from Yunnan to Saigon, where the Kuomintang used Red
Cross operations as a front for selling opium to the Japanese. In so far
as national security always trumps drug law enforcement, this operation
was afforded the same immunity as OSS Detachment 101.
After the war, the Americans did nothing to stop the French from
importing tons of opium from Laos, and selling it on the black market to
finance their colonial war against the Vietnamese. During a visit to
Saigon in 1948, an FBN agent reported that opium was “the greatest
single source of revenue” for the French.
[vi]
CIA drug ops took a great leap forward in 1949, when Mao chased
Chiang to Taiwan, where KMT gangsters slaughtered thousands of people
and set up a worldwide drug ring. To facilitate this particular criminal
conspiracy in the name of freedom and democracy, US officials exempted a
subsidiary of William Donovan’s World Commerce Corporation from the
Foreign Agents Registration Act, so it could supply the KMT with
everything from gas masks to airplanes. This subsidiary was accused of
smuggling “contraband” to America.
Some of the “contraband” no doubt emanated from the KMT’s 93
rdDivision,
which had fled from Yunnan into Burma in 1949. In exchange for
launching covert raids into China, these enterprising KMT forces were
allowed to grow and export opium onto the black-market in Bangkok and
Hong Kong. In the same way the Israeli Lobby blackmails and bribes
Congress to achieve its criminal ends, the US China Lobby attacked KMT
critics and launched a massive propaganda campaign citing the People’s
Republic as the source of all the illicit dope that reached San
Francisco.
To facilitate the drug trade emanating from its KMT army in Burma,
the China Lobby raised five million dollars of private money, which the
CIA used to create its drug smuggling airline Civil Air Transport (CAT).
The aforementioned General William Peers, as CIA station chief in
Taipai, arranged for CAT to support KMT incursions from Burma into
Yunnan – and thus enabled the KMT to bring to market “a third of the
world’s illicit opium supply.”
[vii]
When Burma charged the KMT with opium smuggling in 1953, the CIA
requested “a rapid evacuation in order to prevent the leakage of
information about the KMT’s opium business.” The State Department
announced that KMT troops were being airlifted by the CAT to Taiwan, but
most remained in Burma or were relocated to northern Thailand with the
consent of Thailand’s top policeman and drug lord. US Ambassador William
J. Sebald wasn’t fooled by this chicanery, and rhetorically asked if
the CIA had deliberately left the KMT troops behind in Burma to continue
“the opium smuggling racket.”
[viii]
Suborning the Police
The story of the CIA’s drug empire is the biggest cover-up in
American history – even though the basic facts are available in books
like Al McCoy’s
The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia and Richard M. Gibson’s
The Secret Army.
Organizing the cover-up initially depended on the CIA’s ability to
suborn the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which, as the conflict in
Vietnam heated up, was forced to investigate the flow drugs from the Far
East to America. Thus, in 1963, FBN headquarters sent Agent Sal Vizzini
to Thailand to open an office in Bangkok. As Vizzini told me, “Customs
was already in Vietnam, but only under the aegis of helping the
soldiers. Apart from that, no one’s making cases in Vietnam, because the
CIA is escorting dope to its warlords.”
Vizzini’s assertion was validated on 30 August 1964, when Major
Stanley C. Hobbs was caught smuggling 57 pounds of opium from Bangkok to
a clique of South Vietnamese officers in Saigon. Hobbs had flown into
Saigon on the CIA’s new drug smuggling airline, Air America. Hobbs’s
court martial was conducted in secret and the defense witnesses were all
US army and South Vietnamese intelligence officers. The records of the
trial were dutifully lost and Hobbs was fined a mere three thousand
dollars and suspended from promotion for five years. As a protected CIA
drug courier, he served no time.
The FBN Commissioner wrote a letter to Senator Thomas J. Dodd asking
for help obtaining information about Hobbs. But Dodd was stonewalled
too, proving that the CIA is able to subvert drug law enforcement at the
highest legislative level in the nation.
Later in 1963, FBN Agent Bowman Taylor replaced Sal Vizzini in
Bangkok. Taylor was famous for slipping into Laos and making a case on
General Vang Pao, commander of the CIA’s private army of indigenous,
opium-growing tribesmen. Taylor didn’t know the identity of the person
he was buying from: he simply set up an undercover buy, got a flash roll
together, and went to “the meet” covered by the Vientiane police. But
when the seller stepped out of his car and opened the trunk, and the
police saw who it was, they ran away, leaving Taylor to bust the
felonious general alone.
“Yep, I made a case on Vang Pao and was thrown out of the
country as a result,” Taylor acknowledged. “The prime minister gave him
back his Mercedes Benz and morphine base, and the CIA sent him to Miami
for six months to cool his heels. I wrote a report to the Commissioner,
but when he confronted the CIA, they said the incident never happened.
“The station chiefs ran things in Southeast Asia,” Taylor stressed,
adding that the first secretary at the Vietnamese Embassy in Bangkok had
a private airline for smuggling drugs to Saigon, as the CIA was well
aware. “I tried to catch him, but there was no assistance. In fact, the
CIA actively supported the Thai Border Police, who were involved in
trafficking.”
Taylor shrugged. “The CIA would do anything to achieve its goals.”
The 118A Strategic Intelligence Network
Not only was the CIA protecting Vietnamese warlords, their Corsican
accomplices, and its private armies of opium growers in Laos, Burma and
Thailand, it was managing the caravan that moved opium to the world’s
biggest market in Houei Sai, Laos.
In 1991, in Chiang Mai, Thailand, I interviewed William Young, the CIA officer who set the operation up.
The son of an American missionary in Burma, Young had learned the
local dialects before he mastered English. During World War II, his
family was forced to move to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, where
Young’s father taught William Donovan the intricacies of the region’s
opium business.
Following a tour of duty with the US Army in Germany, Young was
recruited into the CIA and in 1958, posted to Bangkok then Chiang Mai.
From Chiang Mai, Young led a succession of CIA officers to the
strategically placed Laotian and Burmese villages that would eventually
serve as Agency bases.
It was Young who introduced General Vang Pao to his first official CIA case officer.
From his headquarters at the CIA airbase at Long Tieng, on the south
side of the opium-rich Plain Of Jars, Vang Pao conscripted 30,000
tribesmen, many as young as 13, into a secret army to fight the Pathet
Lao and its Vietnamese allies. In exchange for selling his people as
cannon fodder, he was allowed to make a fortune selling opium. Much of
the brokering was done at the village of Houei Sai in western Laos.
Pao’s front man was the chieftain of the local Yao tribe, but behind the
scenes Young set up deals between Pao, the top Laotian generals and
politicians, and the KMT generals inside Burma. The Burmese generals
operated clandestine CIA radio listening posts inside Burma, and in
return were allowed to move 90% of the opium that reached Houei Sai.
It was a happy arrangement until October 1964, when the Chinese
detonated an atomic bomb at Lop Nor. That seminal event signaled a need
for better intelligence inside China, and resulted in the CIA directing
Young to set up a strategic intelligence network at Nam Yu (aka Base
118), a few miles north of Houei Sai. The purpose of the 118A Strategic
Intelligence Network was to use a KMT opium caravan to insert agents
inside China. The agents placed by Young in the caravan were his
childhood friends, Lahu tribesmen Moody Taw and Isaac Lee. Young
equipped them with cameras, and while in China they photographed Chinese
engineers building a road toward the Thai border, as well as Chinese
soldiers massing along it. Knowing the number and location of these
Chinese troops helped the CIA plot a strategy for fighting the Vietnam
War.
Once the 118A network was up and running, Young turned it over to CIA
officer Lou Ojibwe, and after Ojibwe was killed in the summer of 1965,
Anthony Poshepny took charge. A Marine veteran who served with the CIA
in the Indonesia and Tibet, “Tony Poe” was the balding, robust model for
Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz in
Apocalypse Now! Poe also
served as a father figure to the junior CIA officers (including Terry
Burke, a future acting chief of the DEA) he commanded in the jungles of
Laos.
When I interviewed Poe in Udorn, Thailand in 1991, he said he “hated”
Vang Pao because he was selling guns to the Communists. But Poe was a
company man, and he made sure the CIA’s share of opium was delivered
from Nam Yu to the airfield at Houei Sai. The opium was packed in oil
drums, loaded on C-47s, and flown by KMT mercenaries to the Gulf of
Siam. The oil drums were dropped into the sea and picked up by
accomplices in sampans waiting at specified coordinates. The opium was
ferried to Hong Kong, where it was cooked into heroin by KMT chemists
and sold to the Mafia and Corsicans.
FBN Agent Albert Habib, in a Memorandum Report dated 27 January 1966,
cited CIA officer Don Wittaker as confirming that opium drums were
dropped from planes, originating in Laos, to boats in the Gulf of Siam.
Wittaker identified the chemist in Houei Sai, and fingered the local Yao
leaders as the opium suppliers.
By 1966, when FBN Agent Douglas Chandler arrived in Bangkok, the
existence of the CIA’s 118A opium caravan was a known fact. As Chandler
recalled, “An interpreter took me to meet a Burmese warlord in Chiang
Mai. Speaking perfect English, the warlord said he was a Michigan State
graduate and the grandson of the king of Burma. Then he invited me to
travel with the caravan that brought opium back from Burma.” Chandler
paused for effect.
“When I sent the information to the CIA, they looked
away, and when I told the embassy, they flipped out. We had agents in
the caravan who knew where the Kuomintang heroin labs were located, but
the Kuomintang was a uniformed army equipped with modern weapons, so the
Thai government left them alone.”
As described by Young and Poe, the 118A Strategic Intelligence
Network was the CIA’s private drug channel to its Mafia partners in Hong
Kong – people like Santo Trafficante, the Mafia boss the CIA hired to
kill Fidel Castro, and protected ever thereafter. The same thing is
happening today in Afghanistan, with the DEA providing cover for the CIA
and military, just as the FBN did in the 1960s.
Which brings me back to Gary Webb. The CIA wasn’t happy that Poe and
Young were talking. Poe was told to shut up after his chat with me, and
he did. But Young sold his story to a major Hollywood studio for
$100,000. And that was unforgivable.
On April Fool’s Day, 2011, Thai police found Bill Young’s corpse. It
had been perfectly arranged with a pistol in his one hand and a crucifix
in the other.
Maybe he was depressed too?
And it is seriously depressing, the fact our utterly corrupt
government, aided by its criminal co-conspirators in the mainstream
media, pretends as if the CIA doesn’t deal drugs.
Doug Valentine is the author of The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs, and The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics, and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA.
Notes:
[i] Douglas
Clark Kinder and William O. Walker III, “Stable Force In a Storm: Harry
J. Anslinger and United States Narcotic Policy, 1930-1962,” The Journal
of American History, Volume 72, No 4, March 1986, p. 919, note.
[ii] Ed Reid, The Mistress and the Mafia, p. 42.
[iii] Reid, Mistress, p. 90.
[iv] William Peers and Dean Brellis, Behind The Burma Road, Boston: Little Brown, 1963 p. 64.
[v] Milton Miles, A Different Kind of War, New York: Doubleday, 1967.
[vi] William O. Walker, Opium and Foreign Policy, University of North Carolina Press, 1991, p. 177.
[vii] Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite And The Origins Of The CIA, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992 p. 300
[viii] Walker, Opium, p. 210.
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