-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- an excerpt from: The CIA's Black Ops John Jacob Nutter, Ph.D.©2000 Prometheus Books 59 John Glenn Drive Amherst, New York 14228-2197 www.prometheusbooks.com ISBN 1-57392-742-2 ----- My take is — it is a limited-hang-out apologist account, but then I am . . . Om K ----- Chapter 8 Just Say Yes: Covert Action and Drug Empires The story broke on 18 August 1996. Gary Webb, a reporter for the San Jose Merc ury News published "Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion," the first in a series of articles that seemed to charge that agents of the Central Intelligence Agency had facilitated, if not created, the crack epidemic that had swept America. Webb's story had three critical threads: first, that the drugs were sold to finance the contra war in Nicaragua; second, that this CIA operation was substantially responsible for the horrific crack epidemic in America; and third, that at the very least, the CIA knew of the operation, and at the very worst, the agency approved of it.[1] The charges hit all of America like a hammer; they hit the African American community like a bomb. Proponents of white conspiracy theories had a field day, accusing the U.S. government of creating and selling crack, a cheap and dreadfully addictive derivative of cocaine, as part of a plan to degrade and destroy Black America.[2] At the peak of the ensuing political storm, CIA Director John Deutsch chose a remarkable course: he appeared before a boisterous and hostile public forum in South Los Angeles to try to refute the charges. What made Deutsch's task all the harder was the established fact that CIA and American intelligence operatives have historically cooperated with and supported drug empires around the world. Under the guise of "national security," agencies of the U.S. government have provided security, weapons, protection from local law enforcement, covert or officially protected supply lines into the United States, immunity from prosecution (federal, state, and local), amnesty for convicted drug smugglers and dealers, and even the return of lawfully seized property used in or derived from drug activities. What makes CIA involvement even more damaging is that the agency has not merely used drug syndicates on occasion, or only exploited small organizations. Instead, many of the largest, most far-reaching, and most destructive drug trafficking operations have benefitted from the protection and support of U.S. intelligence agencies, including: o the French Connection o Laotian heroin and opium networks o Drug lords of the Golden Triangle (Burma) o the Afghan mujahedin o the Nicaraguan contras U.S. intelligence connections have been critical to the development of these drug empires and pipelines into the mainline of the United States. While it is unlikely that anyone in the CIA, especially among the responsible officers, promoted the production and selling of drugs, the agency would be very bad at its job if it was not aware of the drug connections of both its contract agents and its allies. There is a saying when a government official or operator has to do bad things to prevent worse things from happening: "You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs." When it comes to drug-dealing allies, however, another homily is more apt: "You can't lie down with dogs without picking up fleas." The result of lying with these dogs, however, has been far worse than flea bites. THE COLD WAR, U.S. INTELLIGENCE, AND THE FRENCH CONNECTION Across south Asia, from the craggy peaks of Afghanistan to the forested mountains of the Burmese Golden Triangle, the routine is remarkably similar. A farmer examines the green seed pod sitting atop a three-foot stem. Using a special curved knife shaped like a large claw, he scores the egg-sized pod with several parallel cuts, allowing the white milky sap to seep out. It quickly congeals into a dark-brown rubbery gum. When the pod is drained, the farmer uses the knife to scrape off the almost black goo, rolling it into a ball; another pellet of opium has been harvested. Not too many years ago, much of the crop would have been consumed locally, pinched off in tiny brown balls and fingered into a pipe. Most of it would have been smoked in the opium dens of cities with exotic names: Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Vientiane, Hong Kong, Peking,[3] Karachi, Jalalabad, or Istanbul. Today, however, though the rubbery ball looks brown, it is in fact gold. It will be transported to a local lab, where it will be processed into morphine weighing about 10 percent of the original opium. Loaded into a larger pack, it is hauled, often by mule train, over rugged mountain passes, to a sophisticated chemical lab. There the crystalline morphine is processed through several more stages, eventually emerging as "No. 4" heroin, a white flaky powder anywhere from 80 to 99 percent pure.[4] It is now ready to be shipped to America. For the first two and a half decades after World War II, the shipment would probably have been handled by a legendary syndicate, the "French Connection." This was the name of a massive corporate organization based in Sicily and Marseilles that emerged after World War II to control the bulk of the world market for heroin. What most Americans know about the French Connection they learned from the movie of the same name, starring Gene Hackman. What few Americans know, however, is that the French Connection was established with pivotal help from U.S. intelligence agencies. As Allied forces struggled across Sicily in 1943, they were aided by members of the Sicilian Mafia, who served as guides, scouts, and interpreters. Under Mussolini's fascists, the Mafia had nearly been wiped out, but their service to the Americans was to be rewarded handsomely; Mafia figures were awarded offices in the occupation forces and government, and in many cases given more political power than they'd had before the war. Vito Genovese himself served as an interpreter at Allied headquarters, while the head of the Sicilian Mafia, Don Calagero Vizzini, literally rolled across Sicily riding on George Patton's tanks, drumming up Sicilian support for the Americans. As the local force most likely to enforce public order, it must have seemed natural to the Allied occupation forces to turn to the Mafia.[5] Soon mafiosi were mayors, chiefs of police, and essentially the government of Sicily. The Mafia was back in business. All it lacked was a man of vision. The man looked up at the hills of Sicily. It was 1946, and the war was over. He had left the island decades before, heading for the golden streets of America. Now America had cast him out. He had made a fortune in America from bootlegging, prostitution, and drug peddling, and for this he was expelled by his adopted land. He may have been cast out, but he wasn't through; his name was Lucky Luciano. Although he was back in Sicily, Luciano was hardly back to square one. Working through contacts in Beirut, Lucky organized a heroin production and trafficking enterprise that was remarkable in many respects, not the least of which was that it was able to control major heroin production and shipping for over a decade without suffering a major seizure or arrest. What really made the operation, though, was the connection Luciano established between the Sicilians and the Corsican Mafia, the Unione Corse, a syndicate of uncommon restraint and skill, operating in small, tightly knit clans, specializing in heroin smuggling, art theft, and counterfeiting.[6] Moreover, the Corsicans ran (and still run) a truly international organization, controlling most ventures from their base in Marseille (not, oddly, Corsica). Like the Sicilian Mafia, the Unione Corse was substantially aided by U.S. intelligence. The Corsicans had nearly caused their own annihilation by siding with the Vichy regime during the war, but were soon rehabilitated with a substantial helping of American money and tolerance. In 1947, the French Communist Party imposed a boycott of U.S. Marshall Plan aid, and Party control of the dockworkers in the critical port of Marseille kept American goods sitting in the holds of cargo ships. To break the back of the Communist strike, Office of Policy Coordination (OPC, the precursor to the covert action arm of the CIA) operatives established a relationship with the Corsicans, who largely controlled the socialists. Backed by the CIA, Corsican strongmen engaged in a bloody street war with the Communists, eventually breaking the strike. In 1950, the Corsicans were organized and paid by the CIA to break yet another strike, receiving millions of covert dollars from the CIA. The support of the CIA not only paid financial dividends, but also practically gave the waterfront to the Corsicans. All cargo in and out of Marseilles either went through Corsican hands or it didn't go at all. For the Corsicans, as with the Sicilians, anti-Communism had resulted in (1) a substantial payoff from the Americans, and (2) survival, prosperity, and power for a criminal syndicate that had nearly been eradicated some months before.[7] Once linked with the Sicilians, a relationship established by Luciano, the Corsicans quickly dominated the American heroin market; at its crest in 1965, the French Connection sent about 4.8 tons of high-grade heroin to the United States.[8] Luciano, working through Meyer Lansky in the States, quickly became a multimillionaire. Even the crackdown on Turkish opium growers in the mid1960s failed to stifle this organization. The Mob simply turned to another source. In 1968, Santos Trafficante made a "diplomatic drug tour" of Asia, where he connected with the Golden Triangle. Smuggling routes were rearranged and the Sicilian/Corsican alliance continued to prosper. For twenty-five years, this connection provided the bulk of the heroin pumped into American veins. Ultimately, the rise of a second generation of Corsicans brought down the French Connection. Until the late 1960s, the Unione Corse had secured their base in France by scrupulously refusing to sell heroin there; thus, they weren't a target for French law enforcement. A new cohort of Corsicans took power, however, in the mid- and late 1960s. By this time, the United States was engaged in a serious effort to stem the flow of heroin; the "import" business into America became more dangerous, difficult, and costly. To the new Corsican leaders, it was far easier to sell the heroin right in France, where it was made; the French Connection became a problem for France itself. The government responded, waging a war on the Marseilles drug labs that almost eradicated them by the mid-1970s.[9] The French Connection was dead, but it had inflicted horrendous costs on America. Heroin use in the United States exploded in the aftermath of World War II, increasing from about 20,000 addicts in 1945 to 60,000 in 1952, and to about 150,000 in 1965.[10] According to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, about 80 percent of this heroin came from the Corsicans.[11] The stake in the heart is that the organized-crime syndicates who promoted and provided this narcotic had survived through the cooperation and protection of American intelligence. Both the Union Corse and the Sicilian Mafia were on the ropes by the end of World War II. By playing on the fear of Communism and the almost blank check this gave them, these two associations not only survived and prospered, they helped poison a good number of Americans. COLD WAR, GOLD TRIANGLE The retreating soldiers were dirty, hungry, exhausted. They had been waging a fighting withdrawal through jungle—over mountains, across rivers-struggling to keep their army, their families, and their cause intact. For over twenty years they had fought, first the Japanese, then the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of Mao Tse-tung. In the beginning, there were tens of thousands of soldiers. Now a few hundred backed against the border, having lost their final bastion in China's Yunnan Province. This was not just any border, however; it was the place where China, Burma, Laos, and Thailand came together. The army, tattered remnants of Chiang Kai-Shek's nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) 97th and 193rd divisions staggered across the border into Burma. Unmolested by the Red Chinese, the KMT quickly established itself as the de facto government of this corner of Burma, in the face of a distant Burmese army too feeble to resist. It was 1950, and by the end of the year, Li Mi, the KMT general in charge, would hatch plans to invade southern China. Fearful that the red tide of Communism would sweep across all of Southeast Asia, President Truman authorized the OPC to beef up the KMT army in Burma and begin OPERATION PAPER, a supply and training project. Logistics were provided by Civil Air Transport (CAT), the soldier-of-fortune airline that would eventually gain fame as Air America.[12] Brandishing new American arms, the KMT army invaded Yunnan in April 1951, but were thrown back within a week. In the summer of 1952, Li Mi led some two thousand KMT troops about sixty miles into China, but they were again repulsed by the PLA without much difficulty.[13] Two ineffective "liberations" did not endear the Burmese KMT forces to America or the CIA; it merely irritated the Red Chinese as well as the Burmese government, who feared the KMT forays would give Mao an excuse to hurl his endless hordes into northeast Burma. As Li Mi's outfit proved incapable, American funding dried up. For the KMT troops and their families, there was no bolt-hole, no final redoubt, no asylum in America. To safeguard themselves and their newfound lives, the army fanned out, seizing as much territory as possible; against Mao's army they were ineffective, but compared to Burmese troops they were tigers. Within months, the KMT was the de facto government of the Shan States, the heart of the Golden Triangle, which produced the bulk of the world's opiates. If the American government would not support the KMT, heroin profits would keep the dollars flowing.[14] To make ends meet, the KMT imposed an "opium tax" on the thousands of small farmers who produced the stuff. In turn, the farmers planted more poppies to make up for the new tax; the result was an explosion in opium production. This created a huge surplus of opium and morphine base for export, a surplus that would eventually hit the streets of America. It was these drug lords that connected with Santos Trafficante in 1968, and they would supply the American (and world) habit for roughly the next two decades. By the early 1980s, the Golden Triangle was completely controlled by descendants of the KMT army; the former allies produced about 60 percent of the heroin sold in the United States. The drug lords of the Triangle controlled large, well-equipped armies and most of the important Burmese politicians. Even with the capture of the headquarters of the Shan United Army in 1994 and the "surrender" of chief drug lord Khun Sa, the Golden Triangle still supplied over half of the world's opium production in 1995.[15] LAND OF A MILLION ELEPHANTS Experienced CIA hands knew one thing about Laos: You could have a war against the Communists or a war against the drugs, but not both. If one wanted the Hmong to mobilize and fight, the cooperation of the Hmong warlords was necessary, and to the existing warlords, opium was the source of not only money, but of their power. It was, in other words, impossible to find (or create) Hmong leaders who were not involved, to some extent, in opium production. While there is considerable dispute about the involvement of the Hmong in the drug export trade, it is commonly accepted that the Hmong leader Vang Pao maintained a stash of opium against the day the Hmong might be abandoned by the Americans or forced to flee Laos. The war itself also steered the mountain folk to poppy growing, as it took a substantial toll on Hmong agriculture. The Hmong understood that poppies were hardier than corn, rice, and other subsistence crops and could survive with less tending—a necessary trait, as the warriors often left to fight and the villages were forced to flee from time to time. Most importantly, the Americans would supply food, but they would not provide opium. Finally, as the war dragged on and the Hmong agricultural force became depleted by the heavy battle casualties of the late 1960s, Hmong families required crops that produced the greatest income for the smallest amount of labor: opium was it, hands down. Perhaps the most recognized legacy of the Secret War in Laos is Air America, the descendent of Civil Air Transport and subject of the movie of the same name. Today, the very name "Air America" evokes the connection between drugs and covert action. In one way, this is too bad, for the Air America pilots who flew aging aircraft through sheets of gunfire in the 1960s were among the most courageous flyers to ever strap aircraft to their posteriors. While most former Air America personnel will deny it, it is also a sad fact that some Air America pilots did make drug runs; flying in rice and ammo, setting down on a Mountainside on a strip the size of a Band-Aid, taking off again with foul-smelling containers of dark brown resin in the cargo bay. We cannot know for sure how much opium was flown out of villages in Laos, and how much of that ended up on Main Street, U.S.A. Considering the number of sorties flown by Air America planes each year, however, if even a small percentage transported opium, the tonnage may have been enormous. Far more damaging than either Hmong opium production or Air America transport, however, is a covert activity still relatively unknown and unacknowledged. Simply keeping foreign agents of influence on the CIA payroll is one of the less sexy aspects of covert action, but for the running of heroin into Vietnam and the United States, it was critical. During the late 1950s and the 1960s, many of the men who controlled opium trafficking in Laos were on the CIA's payroll. In 1959, Phoumi Nosovan, a rightist politician, was selected by the CIA to serve as the bulwark against Communism in Laos. By the end of the year, Phoumi was both a cabinet minister and a general, receiving substantial sums of U.S. money to organize the anti-Communist movement. Phoumi refused, however, to become part of a coalition government with Laotian "neutralists" when the Kennedy administration sought to place Laos out of competition by allowing a nonaligned government. Cut off from U.S. funding, he turned to opium trafficking. By 1963, Phoumi's empire was netting around $100,000 a month in opium shipped to Vietnam alone, some grown in Laos and some merely transshipped from Burma.[16] When Phoumi was overthrown in 1964, his aide, Rattikone Ouane, took over, eventually forging an alliance with the KMT remnants in the Golden Triangle. Under Ouane's direction, the Laotian/Burmese connection flooded South Vietnam with cheap heroin, establishing and encouraging the addiction of thousands of American soldiers who then brought the habit home with them. THE GREAT GAME The olive drab paint on the tank barely showed through the dust as it grunted across the border; it had been the last Soviet armored vehicle in Afghanistan, and now there were none. There had been others behind it, but they were flaming wrecks somewhere back up the road. Like the tanks, the Soviet incursion to preserve a socialist regime was also a flaming wreck, shot down by Egyptian and Chinese AK-47s and American Stingers. Although the Afghans had "won," and although they had been generously supported by the United States, the various mujahedin factions certainly did not adopt American values and goals. Instead, the "liberated" Afghans turned to flooding America's streets with heroin. In the mid- and late 1990s, the United Nations Drug Control Programme estimates that there were about one million Afghans producing opium, and that Afghanistan was responsible for about 40 percent of the world's opium supply. The "Golden Crescent" virtually replaced the Myanmar (formerly Burma) as the world's largest opium supplier. One might have thought that when the strictly Islamic Taliban emerged as the government of the country, along with beating unveiled women and inadequately bearded men, they might have stamped down on opium production, a decidedly un-Islamic occupation. Instead, roughly 96 percent of Afghanistan's opium came from regions under Taliban control.[17] During the war with the Soviets, the Afghans discovered that a guerrilla war could be fought much more effectively if the guerrilla economy focused on opium production instead of food production. Even with generous support from the United States, several wealthy Islamic governments (e.g., Saudi Arabia), and some generally anti-Soviet regimes (e.g., China and Egypt), it was still necessary to supply food and minimal survival requirements to millions of Afghan families whose men were engaging the Red Army in prolonged guerrilla operations. The poppy is a hardier plant than most foodstuffs, and the profits are liquid. A small plot of poppies can provide food and guns. During the war of liberation, Afghan opium production in general increased exponentially; the Afghan share of the world market rose to about 40 percent, and at the end of the 1990s the land of the Pathans rivaled the Golden Triangle. While the legacy of the liberation, civil war, rages on, there is little "economic development" occurring. Afghan families can expect a meager income of perhaps $100 per capita engaging in regular commerce, and agriculture; they can make fifty times this amount (at a modest estimate) with a small poppy field. Such prosperity cannot be unlearned; you cannot unbite the apple. In the long run, Afghanistan is (and will continue to be) a prime example of the problems with covert marriages of convenience. Not at all influenced by American values, the Afghans exploited American money and technology to achieve an important U.S. goal: to bleed and defeat the Soviet Union. Once that was accomplished, the alliance degenerated as quickly as that between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1945. Now Afghanistan is ruled by Islamic militants who have been well armed and trained by the United States and friends; its economy is largely run on opium, which provides virtually all of its foreign exchange and an estimated 30 percent of the monetary GDP. COCAINE, COWBOYS, AND CONTRAS The men stood by the dirt and grass airstrip, waiting for the sound of approaching aircraft. The ground was littered with the last of their American cigarettes; here in Costa Rica, there was no need to fieldstrip the butts. Within a minute, the Cessna 402-B zoomed over the clearing, took a half-turn at the far end, and came in to land. As it bumped to a halt, the men in the green fatigues jumped into action, for time was important. The aircraft had to get in and out. The door of the plane opened, and the pilot, Gary Betzner, stepped out for a moment to stretch his legs. As he did, the awaiting Norte Americano strode forward to greet him; his name was John Hull, and he owned this enormous spread of Costa Rican forest. Both men watched as crate after crate of weapons, ammo, and military supplies were manhandled from the cargo compartment of the Cessna. When the cargo bay was empty, neither man was surprised when the loaders turned to a nearby pile of duffle bags and began stacking them into the plane: Betzner counted seventeen duffles and five or six boxes. Within minutes, he was rolling, the aircraft clearing the end of the runway, and the airstrip melting into the lush tropical forest. Within hours, the Cessna reentered American airspace; there was no challenge, and the veteran smuggler had completed another run, cooly bringing in his shipment to Lakeland, Florida. Another load of contra cocaine was about to enter the bloodstream of America.[18] "The ends justify the means," said Enrique Bermudez, and he meant it. He was first commander of the Nicaraguan contras, and the means involved shipping cocaine to finance the war against the Sandinistas. To win his war and regain his power, Bermudez, a former officer in Anastasio Somoza's brutal National Guard, was willing to dump as much cocaine as necessary into American neighborhoods. He was a man who lived his credo. Around 1980, cocaine became the drug of choice in America, acquiring a drug "market share" of about 37 percent. Between 1982 and 1985, the number of cocaine users in the United States increased nearly 40 percent.[19] These are also the years when the contras became involved in cocaine trafficking. This is perhaps coincidental, although one might think that the increasing street supply, in no small part provided by "secure" contra airlift, had something to do with the fact that by about 1985, crack was actually selling at less than cost. In Central America, it is inevitable that a large-scale guerrilla war will become entangled in drug trafficking. Central America is the primary staging area for drug shipments to the big market, the United States. Well before the contras or Sandinistas, there were mule trails and narrow, perilous jungle landing strips, and dangerous men who knew the ways of the underground. The smugglers comprised an existing supply line, and the contras and their American supporters were quick to take advantage; once more, they proved out the adage that a supply line flows both ways. There are two important ironies that come from the contra-cocaine connection. First, President Reagan understood that the American people viewed drug abuse and trafficking as a bad thing; to that end, his public statements often tried to link the Nicaraguan Sandinista regime to drug dealing. In his zeal, he went so far as to expose a government informant so that he could present photographs of a Sandinista official working with cocaine smugglers.[20] The irony is that there was practically no evidence of Sandinista cocaine trafficking, while Reagan's cherished "freedom fighters" were pumping tons of white corruption onto America's streets. The second rich yet sad irony is that many Americans, and others, believe that the CIA was behind the contra drug operations. In fact, the contras probably turned to drug trafficking, as they turned to the Secord/North Enterprise, because the agency itself and individual CIA officers were generally law-abiding. Bill Casey came to the CIA with a buccaneering vigor, but found that the operating environment of the Company had changed; CIA officers complied with disclosure laws. Casey was faced with a dilemma: If he established a CIA operation to support the contras in violation of the law, agency officers would be obligated to inform the Congressional Oversight Committee (Casey, too, was obligated, but could probably could have mumbled his way through, as he did on occasion). On the other hand, he felt that the cold war and his own morality required him to sustain the contras. To resolve this, the director of Central Intelligence established a hip-pocket private program that evaded both the control of Congress and of the ClA's own internal control mechanisms.[21] It was the secret National Security Council operations, not those of the CIA, that provided the contras with secure drug pipelines into the United States. The extent of contra drug trafficking is impossible to pin down precisely; given the weight of the evidence, however, it seems reasonable to say that as cocaine traffickers, the contras played a substantial role in the amount of "snow" on America's streets. We can also say with a degree of certainty that U.S. government officials knew the contras and their supporters were doing this; anyone can view the pages in Ollie North's notebook and see where he noted that at least some contra money was coming from drugs. National Security Council Officer North not only chose to overlook it, but continued to allow clandestine shipment of drugs into the United States by virtue of taking no steps to stop it. It is unlikely that CIA intelligence officers did not know of contra drug dealing, as one could scarcely move around the clandestine world in those years without tripping over the evidence. Whatever efforts were made to act on this information or pass it on remain agency secrets. Moreover, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) certainly knew of some of the contra drug running and tried to stop it; they were simply told to sit down and shut up. Finally, the media publicized the issue enough so that, at the very least, inquiries could have been made, should the secretary of state or DCI been so inclined. In the end, the operating ethos of the contra supporters was characterized exactly right by Enrique Bermudez: "The ends justify the means." DRUG EMPIRES: AN OFFER YOU CAN'T REFUSE? There are enormous benefits to exploiting drug syndicates and cartels in covert-action programs. Many of the features that make "ordinary" organized crime useful-if not attractive-to intelligence agencies also apply to drug organizations. Operating underground drug empires have established intelligence nets, "own" numerous powerful individuals (politicians, military men, judges, police, intelligence officers, gunrunners, document dealers, and so on), and usually maintain well-armed private armies. Further, drug producers, smugglers, and buyers are by their very nature anti-Communist. The control over every aspect of individual life represented by a Communist regime is anathema to the drug producers, who are, above all, entrepreneurs. Right-wing dictatorships can be accommodated with some cash in the right pocket, but the kind of totalitarian regimes generally established by Communists leave no room for either vice or private enterprise. Drug syndicates, in this light, tend to be reliable allies, for they have nowhere else to turn. Thus, for much of the cold war, partnership between U.S. intelligence and drug organizations was viewed as a natural collaboration. Finally, one might also claim, based on historical evidence, that the alliance with drug syndicates, however unfortunate, has been justified by the outcome of the cold war in general and of specific regional conflicts in particular. U.S. support for the Afghans during the 1980s was undeniably critical in kicking the Soviets out of the country; it probably had some effect on the dissolution of the Soviet Union as well. Without the contras, others argue, Nicaragua might still be a Communist state. Moreover, while the United States did not emerge victorious, in the traditional sense, in Southeast Asia, the fierce war in Laos bled the Communists so badly they were forced to stop there rather than sweeping on through Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. France, critical to the coherence of Western Europe, did not fall to the Communists, in part because of CIA support of the Corsicans on the Marseilles docks. It is thus critical to understand, some might say, that in the big picture, the costs of the drug syndicate alliances were both necessary and, indeed, paid off. YOU KNEW I WAS A SNAKE WHEN YOU PICKED ME UP . . . AGAIN It is hard to argue against all this, yet it would also be hard to imagine a more costly way to wage the cold war. The price of drug abuse to the United States, its people, and its families, is almost inestimable. The monetary expense alone of drug abuse includes the costs of: omedical and emergency room treatment; opolice time and additional officers; oincarceration of drug dealers, smugglers, and those who have committed drug-motivated property and violent crimes; ointerdiction (Coast Guard, DEA, Customs Service, U.S. military); oU.S. support of antidrug efforts overseas; olost productivity from affected individuals; oindirect costs of drug crime, such as higher insurance and security costs; and othe development of organized crime and its attendant costs. All these together run into the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. This does not even include the human wreckage: otens of thousands of dead Americans; omillions of individual lives ruined; omillions of families shattered; othe death, danger, and trauma inflicted on law enforcement and medical personnel; ofear of walking neighborhood streets; othe millions of people injured and traumatized every year by drug-moti-vated crimes, in which the criminal is either on drugs or seeking money to buy more; and othe corruption in government, law enforcement, and legal system engen-dered by the enormous influx of drug money. It would be unfair and almost certainly factually wrong to lay all this at the feet of American intelligence. Left-wing writers often end up charging that the CIA is responsible for the various drug epidemics that have ravaged America. This would be hard to establish, and is almost certainly untrue. Drugs were being abused and smuggled into the United States long before the CIA was created; drug abusers would seek out their pleasure in any event, and drug producers and smugglers would try to meet this demand, and, to a degree, would succeed. It would also be wrong, however, to assert, as many right-wing writers do, that American intelligence bears no responsibility. The Sicilian and Corsican Mafia were battered until the CIA/OPC picked them up; the Golden Triangle was a collection of small-time farmers until the KMT "Shan army" organized the production and collection of opium; opium from Laos would have arrived in the U.S. at a much slower rate and lower volume were it not for the air transportation provided by CIA aircraft; Afghanistan was not a major opium exporter until CIA support began to arrive; anti-Communist regimes and movements in Latin America receive CIA support while at the same time exploiting the drug-export economy themselves, often for personal gain rather than to sincerely aid their cause. American support for drug trafficking organizations also deprived the United States of its moral standing on international drug issues; perhaps not so much globally as within certain regions. While the State Department and the DEA were pressuring countries such as Turkey, Laos, Thailand, Pakistan, Burma, and Colombia to stamp out their drug producers, the CIA was often funneling money, arms, ships, aircraft, and training to the very same drug organizations. To the foreign governments, it must have seemed as if the anti-drug message was accompanied by a very obvious wink. Who could chastise France for tolerating the heroin labs in Marseille when America's own CIA supported the syndicate that owned the facilities? Who could blame Colombia for not pursuing the Medellin Cartel—a primary source for contra cocaine transshipped to the United States—when so much of Pablo Escobar's product was slipping into the United States on contra nationalsecuritty-exempt aircraft? As long as the CIA continues to deal with drug syndicates, the moral standing of the United States to condemn other governments for tolerating drug production is exactly zero—or perhaps less, as such behavior only reinforces foreign perception of the U.S. government as hypocritical and self-serving. America paid a substantial cost, too, in the development of organized crime. Drug profits have been an enormous windfall to the various criminal organizations; most could not exist without it. Sadly, some of these very syndicates, verging on extinction, were revived by the support of American intelligence agencies. Without the CIA, the drugs would still have been produced; without the CIA, they still would have been shipped to America. Without the CIA, however, the process would have been much less efficient. The drug producers would not have become so centralized in the Golden Triangle and the Golden Crescent. The transportation routes would have been substantially more perilous if the national security blanket had not been thrown over them. High-level drug traffickers would have gone to jail (or gone much earlier) if the DEA had not received so many "hands off' orders from American intelligence agencies. IS THE LEARNING CURVE FLAT? DRUGS AND COVERT ACTION No one has made a serious effort to assess the cost of covert action to the United States. In particular, it would be difficult—but not impossible, in my opinion—to estimate the proportion of America's drug problems that were caused or exacerbated by the covert activities of intelligence agencies. This does not mean, however, that nothing can be learned.[22] One of the ironies of the CIA's involvement with the drug traffickers is that the narcotics syndicates are often the only groups that don't need American money to fight insurgencies. In many cases, insurgents began as regular proxy armies supported by the CIA—e.g., the KMT or the contras—and to some extent turned to drug trafficking because CIA largesse was cut off. In retrospect, it is practically an virtual iron law that indigenous forces from regions with high drug agriculture potential will either turn to drug production themselves or else co-opt existing drug growers. In the latter case, the takeover of drug agriculture by an armed force has always meant the centralization of drug production, increased agricultural efficiency, expansion of drug growing acreage,[23] and a more effective export system. In the long term, it would be wise to consider such possibilities before committing the United States to support of a proxy force in one of these areas. It is quite tempting for intelligence operators to adopt a casual attitude toward drug trafficking by friends. In many of the historical cases, opium or coca was indeed part of the local culture. Moreover, a laissez-faire attitude about this often allows covert wars to be carried out on the cheap: Insurgents don't need as much money from Washington if they have a few million in heroin profits flowing in. Intelligence officers who fight winning, frugal wars figure to go far at Langley. This is an extremely dangerous and deceptive argument, however. One cannot expect one's erstwhile allies to suddenly change long-established cultural norms, at least if one wants to keep them as allies. Narcotics export, on the other hand, is scarcely an established tradition. It may be necessary for survival or prosperity in lands ravaged by poverty and war, but it is nonetheless a fairly recent phenomenon. Even if it wins, a U.S.-supported regime or insurgent group may find it preferable to establish its own autonomy by taxing drug traffickers rather than stamping them out; this way, they can eliminate their reliance on the United States government. The expectation that a victorious ally adopt American values and policies fails to recognize a fundamental tenet of covert action: "Allies" have their own agendas. Further, if the covert action is worth fighting, it should be worth funding. Whether or not the president, the DCI, or a lieutenant colonel in the White House basement likes it, money for covert action must be appropriated by Congress. Any other mechanism is extraconstitutional; any resulting action is simply the foreign policy of the people who pay for it, not the foreign policy of the United States of America. What makes drug organizations different from other organized crime organizations, from the covert action perspective, is the fabulous amount of money they command. "Ordinary" crime syndicates carry on a lucrative business and can bribe or threaten individuals when necessary. It has been estimated, though, that drug cartels spend more than $100 million annually on bribes. This is not only a temptation to cops, judges, customs officers, and so forth; it must be a temptation to intelligence officers and contract agents who work with groups involved in drug trafficking. CIA officers, and generally contract agents, are reasonably well paid, and the government pension provides a good retirement. This is nothing, however, compared to what an agent can make off a single shipment of heroin or cocaine, not to mention the potential payoff for arranging security for a steady drug pipeline. No CIA officer has ever been convicted of drug trafficking, but contract agents have a decidedly less sterling record. From the government officials on the CIA payroll (e.g., Manuel Noriega, Phoumi Nosovan of Thailand) to the rogue pilots of Air America to the contras and the mujahedin, drug money has corrupted operations; CIA and intelligence expertise and support has made the allies' drug syndicates much more secure and efficient. Much as the fatally flawed, brittle steel in the hull of the Titanic, cooperat ion with drug syndicates is an inevitable time bomb. Losing a covert war with drug traffickers as allies is bad-they'll need to stock up on cash before the war ends, and afterward will need a new base of operation, thereby spreading corruption to a new locale. If we support them and win, we have merely put drug traffickers in new positions of power, perhaps even legitimized them. Win or lose, cooperation with U.S. intelligence gives drug organizations resources' money, connections, security, clandestine or "protected" routes into the United States, and cover from prosecution. In the end, win or lose in local wars, working with the drug syndicates is an offer you can't accept. NOTES 1. In fact, Webb never says that the CIA sold the drugs, nor claims explicitly that the promotion of crack and the protection of drug lords was official agency policy. See Gary Webb, "Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Epidemic," San Jose Mercury News, 18 August 1996. It can be found at http: www. sj mercury. com/drugs. 2. See, for example, Louis Farrakhan's Final Call, which includes articles about the Webb series and interpretations such as "Betrayal of the Highest Order." (See Finalcall.com, October 1996.) 3. I use Peking here because in the days when opium use was pandemic in China, the city was called Peking. With the coming of the Communists, the opium habit was mostly eliminated in China (mostly by eliminating opium users), and later the Western pronunciation of the city was changed to Beijing. 4. See Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Brooklyn, N.Y: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991), pp. 20-23. 5. See ibid., pp. 36-38. 6. Ibid., pp. 46-48. 7. Ibid., pp. 46-63; Tom Braden, "I'm Glad the CIA is 'Immoral,' " Saturday Ev ening Post, 20 May 1967, pp. 10-14. 8. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, "The Heroin Labs of Marseille," Drug Enforcement (fall 1973): 11-13. 9. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, pp. 67-70. 10. Ibid., p. 38. 11. John T Cusack, "Turkey Lifts the Poppy Ban," Drug Enforcement (fall 1974): 3. 12. The Flying Tigers were American soldiers of fortune who flew for the Chinese against the Japanese invaders from 1937 through 1940. Many of them were American Army Air Corps or Navy pilots who resigned from the U.S. Army to fight in China. This was a U.S. government-sanctioned covert operation. 13. See John Prados, President's Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations Since World War II (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1986), pp. 73-77. 14. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, pp. 171-73. 15. Thomas Constantine, "The Threat of Heroin to the United States," testimony before the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, Subcommittee on National Security, International Affairs, and Criminal justice, September 19, 1996. This refers to world production, not American consumption. 16. See McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, p. 302. 17. See "Afghanistan's Gold," The Middle East (September 1997): ppTK. 18. See Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, Drugs, Law Enforcement, and Foreign Policy, 100th Cong., 2d sess., 1988, S. Rept. S100-165, pp. 53-55. 19. All these figures are of course estimates. The market share is measured in dollars spent on illicit drugs in the United States; see William French Smith, "Drug Traffic Today: Challenge and Response," Drag Enforcement (summer 1982): 2-5. For the number of cocaine users, see U.S. Comptroller General, Con trolling Drug Abuse (March 1, 1998): 7-9. 20. The informant was Barry Seal, an extraordinary pilot who became a DEA informant, by some accounts the best undercover agent the DEA ever had. Seal's exposure probably led to his murder by cartel hit men. His story was dramatized in the HBO movie Double-Crossed. 21. That is to say, evaded the controls in practical terms; in legal terms, he evaded the law by dying, for the operation was patently illegal. 22. Many people assume that since one cannot precisely measure the variables involved in intelligence-related drug trafficking, any attempt to estimate these costs is useless. Nothing could be further from the truth. One can work with estimates to produce a model, and then sensitivity test the model; use the most conservative estimates for a "low" figure, "high" estimates for the upper limit, and "likely" estimates for the most probable effect. It's hard, but not impossible. The alternative, of course, is to simply make whatever assumption one wishes for the most political advantage. 23. Internationally, this is usually measured in hectares. pps. 178-192 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. 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