-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Drugs, the U.S., and Khun Sa
Francis W. Belanger©1989
Editions Duang Kamol
Siam Square,
Bangkok, Thailand
ISBN 974-210-4808
--[1]--
THE ROLE OF THE CIA
THE CIA AND THE DRUG INDUSTRY
The mid-1960s marked the peak of the European heroin industry, and shortly
thereafter it went into a sudden decline. In the early 1960s the Italian
government launched a crackdown on the Sicilian Mafia, and in 1967 the
Turkish government announced that it would begin phasing out cultivation of
opium poppies on the Anatolian plateau in order to deprive Marseilles heroin
laboratories of their most important source of raw material. But, unwilling
to abandon their lucrative narcotics racket the Corsican syndicatesand the
American Mafiashifted their sources of supply to Southeast Asia, where
surplus opium production and systematic government corruption created an
ideal climate for large scale heroin production.
And once again American foreign policy played a role in creating these
favorable conditions. During the early 1950s the CIA had backed the formation
of a Nationalist Chinese guerilla army in Burma, a group which still controls
as much as half of the world's opium supply, and in Laos the CIA created a M
eo mercenary army whose commander manufactured heroin for sale to, among
others, American GIs in South Vietnam. The State Department provided
unconditional support for corrupt governments known to be engaged in the
international drug traffic. In late 1969 new heroin laboratories sprang up in
the tri-border and where Burma, Thailand, and Laos converge, and
unprecedented quantities of heroin started flooding into the United States.
Nurtured by a seemingly limitless flow of heroin, America's total number of
addicts skyrocketed.
The bloody Saigon street fighting of April-May 1955 marked the end of French
colonial rule and the beginning of direct American intervention in Vietnam.
When the First Indochina war came to an end, the French government had
planned to withdraw its forces gradually over a two- or three-year period in
order to protect its substantial political and economic interests in southern
Vietnam. The armistice concluded at Geneva, Switzerland, in July 1954 called
for the French Expeditionary Corps to withdraw into the southern half of
Vietnam for two years, until an all-Vietnam referendum determined the
nation's political future. Convinced that Ho Chi Minh and the Communist Viet
Minh were going to score an overwhelming electoral victory, the French began
negotiating a diplomatic understanding with the government in Hanoi.
But America's moralistic cold warriors were not quite so flexible. Speaking
before the American Legion Convention several weeks after the signing of the
Geneva Accords, New York's influential Catholic prelate, Cardinal Spellman,
warned that:
"If Geneva and what was agreed upon there means anything at all, it means ...
taps for the buried hopes of freedom in Southeast Asia! Taps for the newly
betrayed millions of Indochinese who must now learn the awful facts of
slavery from their eager Communist masters!"
Rather than surrendering southern Vietnam to the "Red rulers' godless goons,"
the Eisenhower administration decided to create a new nation where none had
existed before. Looking back on America's post-Geneva policies from the
vantage point of the mid 1960s, the Pentagon Papers concluded that South
Vietnam" was essentially the creation of the United States.
The French had little enthusiasm for this emerging nation and its premier,
and so the French had to go. Pressured by American military aid cutbacks and
prodded by the Diem regime, the French stepped up their troop withdrawal. By
April 1956 the once mighty French Expeditionary Corps had been reduced to
less than 5,000 men, and American officers had taken over their jobs as
advisers to the Vietnamese army. The Americans criticized the French as
hopelessly "colonialist" in their attitudes, and the French officials
retorted that the Americans were naive. During this difficult transition
period one French official denounced "the meddling Americans who, in their
incorrigible guilelessness believed that once the French Army leaves,
Vietnamese independence will burst forth for all to see."
But America's fall from innocence was not long in coming. Only seven years
later, the U.S. Embassy and the CIA engineered a coup that toppled Diem and
left him murdered in the back of an armored personnel carrier. And by 1965
the United States found itself fighting a war that was almost a carbon copy
of Frances colonial war. The U.S. Embassy was wearisomely trying, but
effectually unable, to manipulate the same clique of corrupt Saigon politicos
that had confounded the French in their day. The U.S. Army looked just like
the French Expeditionary Corps to most Vietnamese, only instead of Senegalese
and Moroccan colonial levies, the U.S. Army was assisted by Thai and South
Korean troops. The CIA and the U.S. special
