American War Machine

Безопасность Америки будет лучше обеспечена, если она постарается соответствовать своим собственным идеалам, соблюдать внутренние и международные законы, а также Устав и конвенции ООН. Это, конечно, означает замену нынешних военных усилий в Центральной Азии на другие, менее жестокие меры.

Но пока что при Обаме, как и ранее при Буше, Вашингтон движется в противоположном направлении. Афгано-пакистанский конфликт обостряется, а война с терроризмом может быть распространена на Йемен. Продолжается наступление на американское общественное государство, которое мы наблюдали после 11 сентября. Чрезвычайное положение, объявленное Бушем в сентябре 2001 года, также продлевается Обамой без обсуждения в Конгрессе, несмотря на законодательное требование о таком рассмотрении Конгрессом.64 Мусульмане продолжают содержаться под стражей в условиях, противоречащих конституционным гарантиям хабеас корпус.

Американцы избрали своего первого афроамериканского президента, потому что поверили в обещание перемен, которое он им дал. Но очевидно, что потребуются беспрецедентные народные усилия, чтобы добиться изменений в мышлении военной машины США, ориентированной на глобальное доминирование.

Расширение мирового производства наркотиков как результат вмешательства США

Правда заключается в том, что со времен Второй мировой войны ЦРУ, не встречая противодействия со стороны истеблишмента, пристрастилось к использованию активов наркоторговцев, и нет никаких оснований полагать, что оно начало избавляться от этой зависимости. Разрушительные последствия использования ЦРУ и защиты наркоторговцев можно увидеть в статистике производства наркотиков, которое растет там, где вмешивается Америка, и снижается, когда американское вмешательство заканчивается.

Как за непрямой американской интервенцией 1979 года последовал беспрецедентный рост производства опиума в Афганистане, так и после американского вторжения 2001 года ситуация повторилась. Посевы опийного мака в гектарах выросли более чем в два раза - с 91 000 гектаров в 1999 году (сокращенных талибами до 8 000 в 2001 году) до 165 000 в 2006 году и 193 000 в 2007 году. (Хотя в 2008 году посевы сократились до 157 000 гектаров, это объясняется главным образом прежним перепроизводством, превышающим то, что мог поглотить мировой рынок).

Никого не должно было удивлять это увеличение: оно лишь повторяло резкий рост в каждом другом районе производства наркотиков, где Америка принимала военное или политическое участие. Это неоднократно демонстрировалось в 1950-х годах в Бирме (благодаря вмешательству ЦРУ, с 40 тонн в 1939 году до 600 тонн в 1970 году)65 , Таиланде (с 7 тонн в 1939 году до 200 тонн в 1968 году) и Лаосе (с менее чем 15 тонн в 1939 году до 50 тонн в 1973 году)66.

Самый ироничный случай - это Колумбия, где интервенция американских войск с конца 1980-х годов была ошибочно оправдана как часть "войны с наркотиками". На конференции в 1990 году я предсказал, что за этим вмешательством последует рост производства наркотиков, а не его сокращение.67 Но даже я был удивлен масштабами последовавшего роста. С 1991 по 1999 год производство коки в Колумбии утроилось (с 3,8 тысячи до 12,3 тысячи гектаров), а посевы опийного мака выросли в 5,6 раза (с 13 тысяч до 75 тысяч гектаров).68 Единого объяснения такому росту наркопроизводства нет. Но очень важно, чтобы мы признали американское вмешательство неотъемлемой частью проблемы, а не продолжали искать в нем решение.

Сейчас в Вашингтоне принято считать, что производство афганских наркотиков является основным источником всех проблем, с которыми Америка сталкивается сегодня в Афганистане. Ричард Холбрук, ныне специальный представитель Обамы в Афганистане и Пакистане, написал в 2008 году в своей статье, что наркотики лежат в основе проблем Америки в Афганистане и что "разрушить наркогосударство в Афганистане крайне важно, иначе все остальное потерпит неудачу".69 Это правда, что, как показала история, наркотики поддерживают джихадистский салафизм гораздо сильнее, чем джихадистский салафизм поддерживает наркотики.70

Но в настоящее время правительство и политика Америки способствуют наркотрафику и вряд ли смогут его остановить. Так называемая война с терроризмом и, в частности, война в Афганистане - лишь последняя глава в этой мрачной истории.

Заключительные слова

Это была книга о несовершенном, но пагубном, убийственном, постоянном и зачастую преступном взаимодействии между силами тайных операций и наркоторговлей - взаимодействии, которое я назвал глобальной наркосвязью. Я утверждал, что эта глобальная связь с наркотиками (включая любые вспомогательные темные силы, работающие вместе с ней) была серьезно недооцененным фактором в глубинных событиях Америки, в американской политике и особенно в войнах и других иностранных авантюрах американской военной машины. В результате ранних несанкционированных решений небольших групп, использующих секретность в качестве прикрытия и наркоторговцев в качестве активов, американская военная машина выросла до способности неоднократно провоцировать упреждающие войны в Юго-Восточной Азии и Афганистане, войны, которые были обманчиво замаскированы, с помощью обманчивых глубинных событий, как ответы на провокации противника. В случае с Афганистаном особенно примечательно, что трагедии войн в Лаосе и Вьетнаме были охотно и сознательно продлены или повторены последующими президентами, включая президента Обаму, которые пришли к власти, обещая перемены.

Если я изобразил американскую политику как глубоко запутавшуюся в путах глубоких и могущественных сил, влияние которых слишком мало признается, это не значит, что американская политическая система потеряла надежду. Моим мотивом для написания книги была надежда на спасение этой пострадавшей нации - и всего мира, - а не оправдание разочарования и отчуждения.

Как я уже писал в книге "Дорога к 11 сентября", я считаю, что мы должны добиваться большей интеграции в американском гражданском обществе, прежде чем мы сможем рассчитывать на серьезное изменение направления американской политики в сторону от постоянной войны. Это не означает, что я считаю нынешний политический истеблишмент полностью неисправимым или обреченным.

Я мог бы похвалить некоторые важные действия каждого из послевоенных президентов Америки, даже некоторых из тех, чей приход к власти был наиболее заметно сформирован элементами американской военной машины и ее тайными силами. В зависимости от того, какие события последуют в ближайшие десятилетия, вполне возможно, что американский двадцатый век (подобно британскому девятнадцатому или римскому второму веку) запомнится как эпоха предотвращения больших войн, даже когда велись дорогостоящие и ненужные малые войны.

Если это окажется вердиктом истории, то мы должны признать следующее:

- Трумэн, который, санкционировав операцию "Бумага", отозвал Макартура из Кореи в 1952 году и противостоял требованиям применить ядерное оружие в этой войне;

- Эйзенхауэр, который в 1954 году, ранее угрожая применить ядерное оружие в Корее, отказался от военного вмешательства в защиту французов при Дьенбьенфу;

- Кеннеди, который во время эскалации во Вьетнаме отклонил серьезные предложения о ядерном ударе по России, вторжении на Кубу и вводе 60 000 американских войск в Лаос;

- Джонсон, который инициировал первые открытые военные действия против Северного Вьетнама, но при этом противостоял опасным предложениям по их эскалации и расширению;

- Никсон, который, расширяя и усиливая войну во Вьетнаме, вступил в болезненный процесс нормализации отношений как с Китаем, так и с Советским Союзом;

- Картер, который продолжил тот же процесс; и

- Рейган, достигший взаимопонимания с Советским Союзом, который он когда-то осуждал как "империю зла".

Даже за последние два десятилетия (о которых мы все еще не очень хорошо осведомлены) мы должны отдать должное следующему:

- Джордж Буш-старший, который и инициировал войну в Персидском заливе, и противостоял давлению с целью превратить ее во вторжение и оккупацию Ирака;

- И, да, Джордж Буш-младший, который и безвозмездно вторгся в Ирак, и в 2006-2007 годах отвернул вполне реальное давление неоконсерваторов с целью разбомбить (а возможно, и разбомбить) ядерные объекты Ирана.

Никто не может рассказать всю историю этой сложной страны и ее политики. Но можно с уверенностью сказать, что нарративы о могуществе США, которые полностью окрашены в один цвет, будь то оптимистичный или пессимистичный, являются бесполезно односторонними. Силы военной машины неоднократно заставляли эту страну вступать в упреждающие войны, но иногда эти же силы удавалось сдерживать. Короче говоря, публичное государство и военная машина, хотя и переплетены между собой, не идентичны (даже если эти отношения напоминают отношения Филиппа пьяного и Филиппа трезвого).

Многие авторы решили решить этот вопрос, предложив американскому правительству и его так называемой демократической системе не три, а два "ура". Сам я, несмотря на все, что я написал в этой книге, хотел бы в заключение предложить хотя бы одно.

Два других аплодисмента я предлагаю американскому народу. Правда, постепенное укрепление демократии в этой стране привело к появлению не только нелепых кандидатов, но и вредных причин, разжигающих ненависть. Тем не менее, одно аплодисменты американскому народу в целом за его общую гуманность и невосприимчивость к джингоизму.

Другой аплодисмент - тем миролюбивым американцам, которые в разгар холодной войны подарили нам яркие примеры того, как можно существенно изменить общество путем ненасильственного убеждения снизу. Я имею в виду, прежде всего, движение за гражданские права, которое положило конец открытому узаконенному расизму в этой стране и помогло вдохновить другие подобные движения, некоторые успешные, а некоторые пока безуспешные, по всему миру. Но мы можем добавить сюда и антивоенное движение - первый в истории пример, когда мобилизованное общественное мнение смогло ускорить окончание невыигрышной войны.

Более века земля и народ Америки давали надежду и вдохновение народам других стран, стремящимся к свободе. Так может быть и впредь - но только в том случае, если мобилизованная американская общественность сможет вернуть правильные приоритеты в свою разрушенную политическую систему, развращенную наркотиками и войной.

Примечания

Introduction

1. He attached great importance to the fact that, while much of the steel door was burned away, the wooden floor of the car was barely charred.

2. I narrated this recovered memory first in my poem Coming to Jakarta (New York: New Directions, 1989), 147–48, and then a second time a decade later in Minding the Darkness (New York: New Directions, 2000), 138.

3. Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Traffic (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press, 2003), xii, quoting Scott, Coming to Jakarta, 147–48. I believe that when I first checked with McCoy about this in 1990, his memory ended with our descending the stairs from the veteran’s home “to see something.”

4. David E. Kaplan, “Spying on the San Diego Street Journal (and other Americans),” U.S. News & World Report, January 9, 2006, http://www.todaysalternativenews

.com/index.php?event=link,150&values%5B0%5D=&values%5B1%5D=2668: “Among the Street Journal’s reporters was a young Lowell Bergman, whose later exploits as a 60 Minutes TV producer would be portrayed by Al Pacino in the movie The Insider. ‘We were targets along with a lot of other people,’ recalls Bergman. ‘By 1971 we’d all left town.’”

5. George O’Toole, The Private Sector (New York: Norton, 1978), 145, quoted in Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 269. America in the 1960s and 1970s was engulfed in mass violence. The government’s resort to it in proxy operations was not wholly gratuitous; like many of the groups it targeted, it sincerely believed that revolution here was imminent or had already begun. But the two incidents I have just described, against nonviolent antiwar groups, must be described as surplus violence, inviting and perhaps even designed to provoke a violent response. At some point, elements of the antiwar Students for a Democratic Society did eventually—as the so-called Weathermen—resort to bombs themselves. A full history of the antiwar movement will have to assess the extent to which gratuitous government violence was a factor in leading to the Weathermen’s formation.

6. “Those investigating American Indian history and U.S. history more generally have failed to reckon with the violence upon which the continent was built” (Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006], 3).

7. Graham Adams, Age of Industrial Violence 1910–1915: The Activities and Findings of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971).

8. Scott, Minding the Darkness, 137.

9. I suspect in fact that most readers will be tempted to reject and forget my anecdote of the bombed car door as something that simply “doesn’t compute” with their own observations of America.

10. Although this is a topic too broad for this book, I would suggest that three sorts of deep events, most of them still hotly debated, date further back in U.S. history than those associated with the postwar global dug connection: 1) provocations and/or deceptions leading to war, such as the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania in 1915, which was instrumental in bringing America into World War I; 2) intrigues inducing policy change, as when a Supreme Court decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886) was converted (by a court reporter who happened to be a former railroad president) into a “ruling” that corporations are persons protected by the Fourteenth Amendment (see Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights [New York: Rodale Books, 2002]); and 3) plots for leadership change, such as the alleged murder by arsenic of President Zachary Taylor in 1850 (see Michael Parenti, History as Mystery [San Francisco: City Light Books, 1999], 304), the Lincoln assassination, or General Smedley Butler and the so-called Business Plot of 1935.

11. E.g., New York Times, June 6, 1971; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 286–87.

12. Among the CIA veterans interviewed by McCoy at this time were Edward Lansdale (June 17, 1971, Alexandria, Virginia), Lucien Conein (June 18, 1971, McLean, Virginia), Bernard Yoh (June 15, 1971, Washington, D.C.), and William Young (September 8 and 14, 1971, Chiangmai).

13. Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (Palo Alto, CA: Ramparts Press, 1977), 46–49; Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 179.

14. J. Patrice McSherry, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 42, 71.

15. Naomi Klein, in her otherwise shrewd analysis, oversimplifies when she calls the murder “Pinochet’s most outrageous and defiant crime since the coup itself” (Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism [New York: Metropolitan/ Henry Holt, 2007], 99).

16. Peter Kornbluh, “Kissinger Blocked Demarche on International Assassinations to Condor States,” National Security Archive, April 10, 2010, http://www.gwu

.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB312/index.htm.

17. Peter Dale Scott, “Miami-Dade Reversal—A Cuban Terrorist Payback to Bush Family?” Pacific News Service, December 7, 2000.

18. New York Times, October 12, 1976.

19. Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005), 81.

20. John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 424. Foreign Affairs Senior Fellow Kenneth Maxwell writing in 2004 for the Council on Foreign Relations reached the same conclusion. He noted that “other assassinations of opposition figures planned by Condor in Europe were in fact prevented because the United States tipped off the governments in question (France and Portugal) in advance” (David Maxwell, review of Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (“Fleeing the Chilean Coup,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2004), http://www.foreignaffairs.org/

20040101faresponse83116/william-d-rogers-kenneth-maxwell/fleeing-the-chilean

-coup-the-debate-over-u-s-complicity.html). Maxwell was here simply epitomizing the detailed arguments put forward earlier by John Dinges and Peter Kornbluh. Yet both the Council on Foreign Relations and its president, Richard Haass, arguably moderates in today’s distorted political spectrum, allowed a blustering denial to be published by Kissinger associate William D. Rogers and then refused Maxwell the chance to document his charges. Maxwell eventually resigned.

21. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: The CIA, Drugs, and Armies in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 30–31, 33.

22. Robert Hutchison, Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei (New York: St. Martin’s/Griffin, 2006), 262–65; David Yallop, In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2007).

23. Scott, Deep Politics, 99–106 (banana companies), 154–59 (newspaper circulation wars); Thomas Repetto, American Mafia: A History of Its Rise to Power (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 206–10 (Henry Ford), 198–206 (entertainment).

24. Thomas Repetto, Bringing Down the Mob (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 78–81.

25. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 279, citing Hank Messick, Lansky (New York: Putnam’s 1971), 89. Cf. Shanghai Power Company (American and Foreign Power) and Tu-Yueh Sheng of the Chinese Green Gang (Scott, Coming to Jakarta, 95–96).

26. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Free Press, 1964), 154.

27. Ovid Demaris, Captive City (New York: Pocket Books, 1970), 34–35.

28. Amy B. Zegart, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 189, citing Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 172.

29. Thomas Etzold and John Gaddis, Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy 1945–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 125.

30. U.S. Congress, House, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, IC 21: The Intelligence Committee in the 21st Century (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1996), 205, quoted by John Kelly, “Crimes and Silence: the CIA’s Criminal Acts and the Media’s Silence,” in Kristina Borjesson, Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (New York: Prometheus Books, 2002), 311.

31. OPC’s rollback efforts in the Ukraine and Albania were by contrast ill-supported failures.

32. Seymour M. Hersh, “Preparing the Battlefield,” New Yorker, July 7, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh; Syed Saleem Shahzad, “Where Pakistan’s Militants Go to Ground,” Asia Times, October 23, 2009, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KJ23Df03.html. Hersh writes that JSOC’s “strategy of using ethnic minorities to undermine Iran is flawed.” In later chapters I shall similarly criticize the CIA’s use of Hmong in Laos and Tajiks in Afghanistan. JSOC was also involved in the chasing down of Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, a feat achieved with the assistance of Colombia’s Cali Cartel.

33. Adam Ciralsky, “Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy,” Vanity Fair, January 2010,

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/01/blackwater-201001.

34. Jeremy Scahill, “The Secret US War in Pakistan,” The Nation, November 23, 2009, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091207/scahill.

35. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004), 90; cf. Prados, Safe for Democracy, 489.

36. Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 133.

37. Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 133n.

38. U.S. Congress, Senate, The BCCI Affair, a Report to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from Senator John Kerry, Chairman, and from Senator Hank Brown, Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, December 1992, 102nd Cong., 2nd sess., Senate Report No. 102-140, “BCCI, the CIA, and Foreign Intelligence,” 320, http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/11intel.htm; Alan A. Block and Constance A. Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire: Global Banking, Money Laundering, and International Organized Crime (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 27–33, 83–85; Wall Street Journal, October 23, 1991; Scott, The Road to 9/11,95, 108, 325.

39. In 1978, when the United States terminated economic assistance to Pakistan because of its nuclear program, Abedi had come to Zia’s rescue with emergency loans from BCCI (Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 80–81).

40. Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 153.

41. Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 133.

42. Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons (New York: Walker and Co., 2007), 125.

43. Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (New York: Penguin, 2008), 249.

44. Jonathan Beaty and S. C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI (New York: Random House, 1993), 66. Those interested in BCCI should also read the defense of the bank by Abid Ullah Jan, From BCCI to ISI: The Saga of Entrapment Continues (Ottawa: Pragmatic Publications, 2006).

45. Beaty and Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank, 48–50; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 479–80. Fazle Haq was the governor of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province; at the same time he was also an important CIA contact and supporter of the Afghan mujahideen, some of whom—it was no secret—were supporting themselves by major opium and heroin trafficking through the North-West Frontier province. By 1982, Fazle Haq would be listed by Interpol as an international narcotics trafficker. However, after lengthy correspondence with Fazle Haq’s son, I am persuaded that there are no known grounds to accuse Fazle Haq of having profited personally from the drug traffic. See “Clarification from Peter Dale Scott re Fazle Haq,” 911Truth.org, http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090223165146219.

46. M. Emdad-ul Haq, Drugs in South Asia: From the Opium Trade to the Present Day (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 204–5, quoted in McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 480.

47. Levy and Scott-Clark, Deception, 128.

48. Washington Post, November 11, 2007, B01.

49. Guardian, May 31, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/31/

nuclear.internationalcrime. According to David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector in Washington, the network member, Urs Tinner, was recruited by the CIA from 1999 to 2000 and “was on the CIA payroll for a very large sum of money.”

50. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 129 (Casey); Prados, Safe for Democracy, 489 (Langley).

51. Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 131–34.

52. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, World Drug Report, 2004, http://www.unodc.org/pdf/WDR_2004/Chap3_opium.pdf.

53. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 162, 191, 286–87. McCoy’s estimate of the Kuomintang’s impact on expanding production is extremely conservative. According to Bertil Lintner, the foremost authority on the Shan states of Burma, “The annual production increased from a mere 30 tons at the time of independence [1945] to 600 tons in the mid-1950s” (Bertil Lintner, “Heroin and Highland Insurgency,” in Alfred W. McCoy and Alan A. Block, War on Drugs: Studies in the Failure of U.S. Narcotics Policy [Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992], 288). Furthermore, the Kuomintang’s exploitation of the Shan states led thousands of hill tribesmen to flee to northern Thailand, where opium production also increased.

54. State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan, “Opium Production in Afghanistan (1980–2005),” http://www.az-customs.net/en/hq15.htm.

55. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 464.

56. Beaty and Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank, 295.

57. Council on Foreign Relations, “Afghanistan Opium Survey, 2007,” August 2007, http://www.cfr.org/publication/14099/afghanistan_opium_survey_2007.html.

58. Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 33.

59. San Francisco Chronicle, March 8, 1997, A10. Francois allegedly controlled the capital, Port-au-Prince, with a network of hirelings who profited on the side from drug trafficking.

60. Time, November 29, 1993, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/

0,9171,979669,00.html: “The shipments continued, however, until Guillen tried to send in 3,373 lbs. of cocaine at once. The DEA, watching closely, stopped it and pounced.” Cf. New York Times, November 23, 1996 (“one ton”).

61. CBS News Transcripts, 60 Minutes, November 21, 1993.

62. Wall Street Journal, November 22, 1996. The information about the drug activities of Guillen Davila and François had been published in the U.S. press years before the indictments. It is probable that, had it not been for the controversy aroused by Gary Webb’s Contra-cocaine stories in the August 1996 San Jose Mercury, these two men and their networks would have been as untouchable as other kingpins in the global CIA drug connection whom we shall discuss, such as Miguel Nassar Haro in Mexico.

63. Chris Carlson, “Is the CIA Trying to Kill Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez?” Global Research, April 19, 2007.

64. Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Pack: The People, Politics and Espionage Intrigues That Shaped the DEA (Springfield, OR: TrineDay, 2009), 400; Time, November 23, 1993. McFarlin had worked with antiguerrilla forces in El Salvador in the 1980s. The CIA station chief in Venezuela, Jim Campbell, also retired.

65. Peter Dale Scott, “Washington and the Politics of Drugs,” Variant 2, no. 11 (Summer 2000): 3–6; Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, vii–xiv.

66. CBS, 60 Minutes, November 21, 1993. Cf. Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 400.

67. At the time, the CIA was plotting, successfully, to bring down Pablo Escandar, chief of the Medellín cartel, using the assistance of the drug-trafficking death squad leader Carlos Castaño, who was working for the rival Cali cartel (Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 88).

68. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 89, citing Paul Eddy, The Cocaine Wars (New York: Norton, 1988), 342 (Blum).

69. “Afghan Drug Trafficking Brings US $50 Billion a Year,” RussiaToday, August 20, 2009, http://russiatoday.com/Top_News/2009-08-20/afghanistan-us-drug

-trafficking.html. Cf. “Russian State TV Suggests USA Involved in Drug-Trafficking from Afghanistan,” RAWANews, February 18, 2008, http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2008/02/17/russian-state-tv-suggests-usa-involved-in-drug-trafficking-from

-afghanistan.html.

70. David Bromwich, New York Review of Books, November 20, 2008, 33.

Chapter 1: Sanctioned Violence, the

Dominance Machine, and the Overworld

1. Gareth Jenkins, “Susurluk and the Legacy of Turkey’s Dirty War,” Terrorism Monitor, May 1, 2008, http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article

.php?articleid=2374142.

2. Martin A. Lee, “Turkey’s Drug-Terrorism Connection,” ConsortiumNews, January 25, 2008, http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/012408a.html.

3. Lucy Komisar, “The Assassins of a Pope,” Albion Monitor, April 6, 1997, http://www.monitor.net/monitor/9703b/turkeycia-sidebar.html: “Both had worked together in a previous assassination effort. In 1979, Ali Agca killed a Turkish newspaper editor. Catli was in on the plot. When the police arrest[ed] Agca, they found a false passport belonging to Catli. Catli then reportedly helped organize Agca’s escape from an Istanbul military prison, and some have suggested Catli was even involved in the Pope’s assassination attempt.” In 1998 Le Monde diplomatique alleged that Abdullah Çatli had organized the assassination attempt on the pope “in exchange for the sum of 3 million German marks” for the Grey Wolves (“Turkey’s Pivotal Role in the International Drug Trade,” Le Monde diplomatique, July 1998).

4. Ertugrul Kurkcu, “Turkey: Trapped in a Web of Covert Killers,” Covert Action Quarterly 61, http://mediafilter.org/CAQ/caq61/CAQ61turkey.html.

5. Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Pack: The People, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA (Springfield, OR: TrineDay, 2009), 140.

6. Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 2005), 228–30; Kurkcu, “Turkey.”

7. Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, 229.

8. Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, 230.

9. Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, 230, quoting from Directive ST 31/15 for Operations against Irregular Forces.

10. Sibel Edmonds has charged that “in 1989, while ‘most wanted’ by Interpol, [Catli] came to the U.S., was granted residency, and settled in Chicago, where he continued to conduct his operations until 1996” (American Conservative, November 2009, http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/nov/01/00006). Other charges by Edmonds in the same article have since been corroborated by John M. Cole, a former FBI counterintelligence and counterespionage manager.

11. “Turkey’s Pivotal Role in the International Drug Trade,” Le Monde diplomatique, July 1998; cf. Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, 108–9, 237–38, 298; Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986), 147.

12. Hugh Shaughnessy, “Revealed: Pinochet Drug Smuggling Link,” Observer, December 10, 2000, http://www.guardian.co.uk/chile/story/0,,1026866,00.html; Rodrigo de Castro and Juan Gasparini, La Delgada linea blanca (Buenos Aires: Ediciones B Argentina, 2000). Cf. Guardian, July 11, 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/jul/11/chile.drugstrade: “Augusto Pinochet’s $26m (£14m) fortune was amassed through cocaine sales to Europe and the US, the general’s former top aide for intelligence has alleged. In testimony sent to Chilean Judge Claudio Pavez, Manuel Contreras alleges that Pinochet and his son Marco Antonio organised a massive production and distribution network, selling cocaine to Europe and the US in the mid-1980s. According to Contreras, once Pinochet’s ally and now a bitter enemy, Pinochet ordered the army to build a clandestine cocaine laboratory in Talagante, a rural town 24 miles from Santiago. There he had chemists mix cocaine with other chemicals to produce what Contreras described as a ‘black cocaine’ capable of being smuggled past drug agents in the US and Europe.”

13. In August 2009 there were 637,000 Google hits for “shadow government USA.” Some of these referred to groups inside government, some referred to groups outside government, and many included both. This lack of clarity is appropriate for the deep state phenomenon as well.

14. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 6–7, 10–11, 29, 383, 395.

15. Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, “Inside the Military Media Industrial Complex: Impacts on Movements for Peace and Social Justice,” DissidentVoice, December 22, 2009, http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/12/inside-the-military-media-industrial

-complex-impacts-on-movements-for-peace-and-social-justice. Phillips and Huff acknowledge their debt to C. Wright Mills’s classic The Power Elite.

16. Len Colodny and Tom Schachtman, The Forty Years’ War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, from Nixon to Obama (New York: Harper, 2009), 275; Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005), xiii; L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team: the CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973).

17. At the end of this book I shall describe the activity of a small number of key individuals who act as drug traffic protectors, shielding the kingpins of the U.S. drug connection from arrest or public scrutiny. They are an important aspect of the U.S. war machine but by no means central to it.

18. Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), 153–91.

19. Richard Viguerie, a cofounder of the Moral Majority that helped elect Reagan in 1980, had first emerged as a fund-raiser for the Young Americans for Freedom and then as a key player in the Far East Lobby’s campaign to block U.S. recognition of communist China. In 1977 he earned nearly a million dollars from a direct-mail campaign on behalf of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church (Sara Diamond, Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right [Boston: South End Press, 1989]); Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 318, citing Joseph Trento, Prelude to Terror, 171–72. Cf. Scott, Deep Politics, 237–38).

20. Phillips and Huff, “Inside the Military Media Industrial Complex.” I have slightly amended the reference to Anschutz, who acquired the Weekly Standard from Rupert Murdoch only in June 2009. Cf. Dick Smillie, “The Stealth Media Mogul,” Forbes, June 29, 2009, http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/28/anschutz-weekly-standard

-business-media-examiner.html: “Anschutz’s latest acquisition, The Weekly Standard, loses an estimated $5 million annually.”

21. Jon Gorvett, “Turkey’s ‘Deep State’ Surfaces in Former President’s Words, Deeds in Kurdish Town,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2006, http://www.washington-report.org/archives/Jan_Feb_2006/0601037.html. The ongoing crisis pitting Turkish Islamists against secularists has complicated this duality still further: “Each side accuses the other of operating a ‘deep state,’ or shadow government activities. The secularists accuse the AK party of quietly seeking to overhaul Turkey’s secular order, while the ruling party says the secular establishment will do anything to maintain that order—even a coup d’etat or murder” (Gulnoza Saidazimova, “Turkey: Constitutional Crisis Pits ‘Deep State’ vs. ‘Deep State,’” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, March 26, 2008, http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1079691

.html).

22. Ruth Goring, “Executing Justice: Which Side Are We On? An Interview with Colombian Human Rights Activist Padre Javier Giraldo, S.J.,” Equipo Nizkor, April 2003, http://www.derechos.org/nizkor/colombia/doc/giraldo1.html.

23. Although “war machine” is a more helpful term for those not familiar with what I am describing, “dominance machine” is more accurate. The aim of the machine is not really “perpetual war for perpetual peace,” as the disenchanted critic Harry Elmer Barnes once wrote. The machine aims—or professes to aim—at perpetual dominance, supported by periodic wars when necessary.

24. John Nichols, “Obama’s Campaign Merits a Peace Prize,” The Nation

(blogs), October 10, 2009, http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/482916/obama_s

_campaign_merits_a_peace_prize.

25. The National Emergencies Act, one of the post-Watergate reforms, specifies that “not later than six months after a national emergency is declared, and not later than the end of each six-month period thereafter that such emergency continues, each House of Congress shall meet to consider a vote on a joint resolution to determine whether that emergency shall be terminated” (50 U.S.C. 1622, 2002). Yet in nine years Congress has not once met to discuss the state of emergency declared by George W. Bush in response to 9/11. Appeals to the Congress to meet its responsibilities have fallen on deaf ears (cf. Peter Dale Scott and Dam Hamburg, “To All Readers: Help Force Congress to Observe the Law on National Emergencies!!!” 911Truth.org, March 24, 2009, http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090324183053848).

26. Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2003), 240.

27. “I never had any thought . . . when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations” (Washington Post, December 11, 1963, A11, quoted in Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967], 63).

28. Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press, 2003), 166. McCoy’s sources for his claims are two trade books, both of which clearly relied on CIA sources (David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government [New York: Random House, 1964], 130–31; Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA [New York: Knopf, 1979], 81–82).

29. David Wise, a veteran intelligence reporter, Time, February 3, 2003. The act, which created both the National Security Council and the CIA to advise it, also empowered the CIA to “perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence

. . . as the National Security may from time to time direct” (Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence [New York: Knopf, 1974], 8).

30. An anecdote will illustrate Dulles’s easy relationship to the overworld: “On 21 January 1953, Allen Dulles, insecure about his future in the CIA under the newly elected Eisenhower, had met his friend David Rockefeller for lunch. Rockefeller hinted heavily that if Dulles decided to leave the Agency, he could reasonably expect to be invited to become president of the Ford Foundation. Dulles need not have feared for his future. Two days after this lunch, the New York Times broke the story that Allen Dulles was to become Director of Central Intelligence” (Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper [London: Granta, 1999], 140–41).

31. Joseph J. Trento, The Secret History of the CIA (New York: Random House/Forum, 2001), 44–47.

32. Trento, The Secret History of the CIA, 44.

33. Trento, The Secret History of the CIA, 44, citing Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994). Grose’s biography is a bowdlerized rewrite of a long-delayed manuscript by former CIA officer Richard Harris Smith, with whom I was in occasional contact a quarter century ago. Smith authorized me to cite by name his book manuscript, then supposedly about to be published, in supporting the claim that the CIA had put $20,000,000 into supporting the allegedly moderate Muslim Masjumi and PSI parties in the 1957 Indonesian election (Peter Dale Scott, “Exporting Military Economic Development: America and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965–67,” in Ten Years’ Military Terror in Indonesia, ed. Malcolm Caldwell [Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1975], 209–61). This important claim will not be found in the Grose rewrite.

34. Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 109–10, 197. In this same period the FBI had Donovan under surveillance, suspecting “that he had taken some steps toward formation of an anti-Communist intelligence service [on the model of] a private concern financed by oil and industries before the war” (Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan [New York: Times Books, 1982], 821–22).

35. Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), 82–83; cf. Burton Hersh, The Old Boys (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 185. The five were Kingman Douglass, managing partner of Dillon, Read; William H. Jackson and Frank Wisner of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn; Paul Nitze of Dillon Read; and former DCI Admiral Sidney Souers, who in 1946 retired to become a St. Louis investment banker.

36. Helms, A Look over My Shoulder, 99. The two were William H. Jackson and Mathias Correa.

37. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 187, 200–201. The seven included William H. Jackson and Frank Wisner of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn, both listed in the New York Social Register.

38. Hersh, The Old Boys, 301, quoting Polly (Mrs. Clayton) Fritchey.

39. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 178.

40. Thomas Etzold and John Gaddis, Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy 1945–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 125.

41. Scott, The Road to 9/11, 15.

42. See chapter 6; see also Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 1–3, 59–68.

43. Schell, The Unconquerable World, 240.

44. Scott, Deep Politics, 174–78, Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs (London: Verso, 2004), 76, 98–99, 112.

45. Norman Lewis, Naples ’44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005), 109–10.

46. Tim Newark, “Fighting the Mafia in World War Two,” AmericanMafia.com, May 2007, http://www.americanmafia.com/Feature_Articles_388.html. Cf. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 35–36; Scott, Deep Politics, 8.

47. Gaia Servadio, Mafioso: A History of the Mafia from Its Origins to the Present Day (New York: Dell, 1978), 88.

48. Scott, Deep Politics, 8. In 1982 a major electrical power plant in New York City was named after him.

49. Amy B. Zegart, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 189; Scott, The War Conspiracy, 260; Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 26–27.

50. Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 298–300. The funds to Miceli in 1972 were allegedly ordered by Kissinger over the objections of the local CIA chief.

51. See Daniele Ganser, “Beyond Democratic Checks and Balances: The Propaganda Due Masonic Lodge and the CIA in Italy’s First Republic,” in Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty, ed. Eric Wilson and Tim Lindsey (London: Pluto, 2008).

52. Leonard Weinberg and Ami Pedahzur, Political Parties and Terrorist Groups (London: Routledge, 2003), 56.

53. J. Patrice McSherry, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 43.

54. Dilip Hiro, The Iranian Labyrinth: Journeys through Theocratic Iran and Its Furies (New York: Nation Books/Avalon, 2005), 76.

55. Hiro, The Iranian Labyrinth, 74.

56. U.S. Congress, Senate, 102nd Cong., 2nd sess., The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from Senator John Kerry, Chairman, and from Senator Hank Brown, Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, September 30, 1992, 1–2.

57. Scott, The Road to 9/11, 163–67.

58. Dorothy J. Samuels and James A. Goodman. “How Justice Shielded the CIA,” Inquiry, October 18, 1978), 10–11; U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Government Operations, Justice Department Handling of Cases Involving Classified Data and Claims of National Security, 96th Cong., 1st sess., House Report No. 96-280 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1979).

59. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press (London: Verso, 1998), 391–92.

60. E.g., “Colombia: The Perils of ‘Parapolitics,’” Economist, May 22, 2007. In my own writings I once attempted to distinguish between intentional parapolitics and uncontrollable deep politics (Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, xx; Scott, The Road to 9/11, 267–69). But as both terms have gained currency, they have also become more and more interchangeable.

61. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Intelligence, IC21: Intelligence Community in the 21st Century, Staff Study, 104th Congress, 205.

62. America’s income disparity, as measured by its Gini coefficient, is now among the highest in the world, along with Brazil, Mexico, and China. See Phillips, Wealth and Democracy, 38, 103; Greg Palast, Armed Madhouse (New York: Dutton, 2006), 159.

63. This is the subject of my book The Road to 9/11, 4–9.

64. Anthony Cave Brown, Oil, God, and Gold (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 213.

65. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: a People’s History of the Third World (New York: Free Press, 2007), 276: [In hosting the World Muslim League], “Faysal had a senior partner in Aramco, and behind them was the U.S. government. . . . In eastern Saudi Arabia, the CIA agent James Russell Barracks confirmed the existence of ‘an extensive programme’ to fund small religious cells (these are the direct ancestors of Osama bin Laden’s Advice and Reformation Committee or Hayat Annaseyha Wa’ahisla).”

66. One could cite also the experience of the French Third Republic and the Banque de l’Indochine or the Netherlands and the Dutch East India Company.

67. Through a long century of revolution and counterrevolution, culminating in the Cold War, it was difficult to discuss this evolution dispassionately. Marxists and other radicals tended to focus on the pathogenic state. Academic social scientists in Western universities tended in contrast to assume that the state was the desirable prerequisite of social order.

68. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower (New York: Basic Books, 2007).

69. For this process, see Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987); Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2002).

70. Scott, The Road to 9/11, 245–60.

71. Scott, The Road to 9/11, 2–3 (income disparity); 253, 386 (religion), citing Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Viking, 2006), 9, 221–22, 226–28, 375.

72. The Royal Charter of the Bank of England was enacted as part of the Tonnage Act of 1694 (Statutes of the Realm, VI, 483–495), An Act For Granting to Their Majesties [William and Anne] Several Rates and Duties upon Tonnage of Ships and Vessels.

73. T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society and Other Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1982).

74. This qualified optimism is in some respects like Mead’s but without Mead’s unqualified commitment to Anglo-American capitalism.

75. Readers skeptical of the thesis that the Dark Ages were a period of liberation and creativity should read Lynn Townsend White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).

76. “In 1899 Thorstein Veblen described predation as a phase in the evolution of culture, ‘attained only when the predatory attitude has become the habitual and accredited spiritual attitude . . . when the fight has become the dominant note in the current theory of life.’ After an entire century’s struggle to escape from this phase, we’ve suffered a relapse. The predators are everywhere unleashed; and the institutions built to contain them, from the United Nations to the AFL-CIO to the SEC, are everywhere under siege. Predation has again become the defining feature of economic life” (James K. Galbraith, “Taming Predatory Capitalism,” Nation, March 30, 2006, http://www

.thenation.com/doc/20060417/forum/4).

77. In The Road to 9/11, I discuss the role of the New York financial-corporate overworld in first designing the CIA and then mobilizing it in support of these coups.

78. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 40.

79. Even the most notorious bank of all, the drug-laundering BCCI, was closed with convictions for only five employees in America and three in England. Cf. Scott, The Road to 9/11, 177–78.

80. Los Angeles Times, October 26, 2009, B1.

81. Scott, The Road to 9/11, 275, Frederick Lundberg, The Rich and the Superrich (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1968).

82. Robert Armstrong, El Salvador: The Face of Revolution (Boston: South End Press, 1982), 37.

83. Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, 147.

84. E.g., Mark Zepezauer, The CIA’s Greatest Hits (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994), http://www.doublestandards.org/ciahits.html. Asked by an Italian commission whether he was ever a member of WACL, delle Chiaie replied that he was not because he believed that WACL “operated as a CIA front” (hearing of Stefano Delle Chiaie on July 22, 1997, before the Italian Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism headed by Senator Giovanni Pellegrino, http://www.parlamento.it/bicam/terror/stenografici/steno26.htm). I shall try to argue that the truth is more complex.

85. FBI Report, Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), January 21, 1982, National Security Archive, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/

ch02-06.htm.

86. FBI Report, Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), January 21, 1982, National Security Archive, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/

ch02-06.htm.

87. FBI Report, Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), January 21, 1982, National Security Archive, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/

ch02-06.htm.

88. John Dinges and Saul Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row (New York: Pantheon, 1980).

89. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 316.

90. John Prados, The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 423.

91. McSherry, Predatory States, 6. Cf., e.g., “Michael Townley: Ex agente de la CIA relata la conspiración,” El Correo de la Diaspora Argentine, May 10, 2000, http://www

.elcorreo.eu.org/esp/article.php3?id_article=4329.

92. John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New York: New Press, 2004), 165; Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York: New Press, 2003).

93. In addition, the Cuban Nationalist Movement, the CORU component that supplied DINA with Letelier’s assassins, was said to be financing itself through drug smuggling organized by DINA (Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: The CIA, Drugs, and Armies in Central America [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998], 30–31, 33).

94. Costa Rican authorities later said that Bosch’s target in Costa Rica was not Kissinger but Pascal Allende, nephew of the slain president of Chile (McSherry, Predatory States, 159).

95. Henrik Krüger, The Great Heroin Coup—Drugs, Intelligence, and International Fascism, trans. Jerry Meldon (Boston: South End Press, 1980), 186n18, citing NACLA Report, January–February 1978 (Falconbridge).

96. Saul Landau, They Educated the Crows: An Institute Report on the Letelier-Moffit Murders (n.p.: Transnational Institute, 1978), 28n.

97. “Some sources in Miami said the Bonao gathering and the creation of CORU had the active support of the CIA and at least the acquiescence of the FBI, and that CORU was allowed to operate to punish Castro for his Angola policy without directly implicating the United States government” (Dinges and Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row, 251).

98. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 2007), 66–71, 76–78, 81–86, 98–100.

99. Orlando Letelier, “The Chicago Boys in Chile: Economic Freedom’s Awful Toll,” The Nation, August 28, 1976.

100. Scott, The Road to 9/11, 21–22, 51–52.

101. Scott, The Road to 9/11, 39–42, 89–102; Scott, The War Conspiracy, 12–13. David Rockefeller described in his memoirs, almost with pride, his role in persuading Kissinger and the Nixon White House to act against Allende (David Rockefeller, Memoirs [New York: Random House, 2002], 432–33).

102. Scott, The Road to 9/11, 80–81, 309; Bernard Gwertzman, New York Times, November 18, 1979. The military coup in Argentina in 1976 was welcomed by Kissinger, by then secretary of state under President Ford. Kissinger arranged for the junta’s minister of economy, José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, to meet with David and Nelson Rockefeller to discuss Argentina’s plans for privatization and foreign investment. Within a year, according to Naomi Klein, “wages lost 40 percent of their value, factories closed, poverty spiraled” (Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 89).

103. Ariel C. Armony, Argentina, the United States, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Central America (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1997), xiii, 35–46. Carter’s human rights policy was undercut by the CIA. Argentine intelligence operative Leandro Sánchez Reisse testified to a U.S. congressional subcommittee in 1987 how Argentine intelligence set up, with the sanction of the CIA, a Condor base in Miami in 1978. The base then handled both drug money–laundering and counterinsurgency operations in Latin America on behalf of both Argentina and the CIA (Armony, Argentina, the United States, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Central America, 46–47; McSherry, Predatory States, 212–13).

104. Bertil Lintner, Blood Brothers: The Criminal Underworld of Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 8–9.

105. Frank Viviano, “Hong Kong Triads’ New Frontier,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 25, 1997, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/

archive/1997/05/28/MN25477.DTL. Cf. Fredric Dannen, “Partners in Crime, Part II,” New Republic, July 14/21, 1997: “In a recent issue of Apple Daily, Hong Kong’s leading Chinese-language newspaper, a reputed member of the 14K triad society boasted that he and his triad brothers had established ‘terrific guanxi’ with Communist officials, and cited a thriving partnership in cross-border prostitution.”

Chapter 2: Mexico, Drugs, the DFS, and the United States

1. From U.S. government investigative file, in Jamie Dettmer, “Family Affairs—Mexican Businessman and Politician Carlos Hank Gonzalez Allegedly Involved in Drug Trade,” Insight, March 29, 1999, http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_12_15/ai_54246287.

2. A border used for major smuggling typically induces corruption on both sides. For example, in April 2006 a former head of the FBI in El Paso was indicted on five counts of lying in connection with the investigation into gifts he had received from a Mexican racetrack owner whom Mexican officials alleged was a member of a drug cartel (Reuters, April 12, 2006, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12292463).

3. In chapter 6, I shall make a similar argument, that a “metagroup” in the global narcosystem was able to control specific actions by the Russian government.

4. The term “narcodemocracy” received currency in 1995 with the publication of Eduardo Valle’s El Segundo disparo: La narcodemocracia mexicana (The Second Shot: The Mexican Narcodemocracy) (Mexico City: Oceano, 1995). Cf. Leonardo Curzio, “Organized Crime and Political Campaign Finance in Mexico,” in Organized Crime and Democratic Governability: Mexico and the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, John Bailey and Roy Godson (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 85.

5. Manuel Buendía, La CIA en Mexico (Mexico City: Oceano, 1983), 24.

6. John Bailey and Roy Godson, “Introduction,” in Bailey and Godson, Organized Crime and Democratic Governability, 24.

7. Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 62.

8. Luís Astorga, “Organized Crime and the Organization of Crime,” in Bailey and Godson, Organized Crime and Democratic Governability, 61, cf. 67–68.

9. Astorga, “Organized Crime,” in Bailey and Godson, Organized Crime and Democratic Governability, 63.

10. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 193.

11. Elias Castillo and Peter Unsinger, “Mexican Drug Syndicates in California,” in Bailey and Godson, Organized Crime and Democratic Governability, 200.

12. Also rarely mentioned in the United States until recently was a major Mexican drug trafficker who emerged from the CIA-protected Cuban émigré community: Alberto Sicilia Falcón. Cf. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 33–34.

13. Andrew Reding, “Mexico under Salinas: A Façade of Reform,” World Policy Journal, Fall 1989, http://www.worldpolicy.org/globalrights/mexico/1989-fall-WPJ

-Salinas.html.

14. Reding, “Mexico under Salinas.” Ten years after Reding’s essay, Gutiérrez Barrios was still an éminence grise. In November 1999 he organized the come-from-behind Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) primary victory of Francisco Labastida, a candidate “dogged by allegations—yet unproved—that he cut deals with drug traffickers while governor of Sinaloa, a Pacific-coast state, a decade ago” (J. Michael Waller, “The Narcostate Next Door,” Insight, December 27, 1999, http://www

.geocities.com/dmontero_trejo/Politica/The_NarcoState_Next_Door.htm). Gutiérrez Barrios’s former deputy, Manlio Fabio Beltrones Rivera, became, as governor of Sonora, the political patron of the drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes (New York Times, February 23, 1997).

15. Jefferson Morley, “LITEMPO: Los ojos de la CIA en Tlatelolco,” Proceso, October 1, 2006, in English as “LITEMPO: The CIA’s Eyes on Tlatelolco,” National Security Archive, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB204/index.htm.

16. Sergio Aguayo Quezada, La Charola: Una Historia de los Servicios de Inteligencia en México (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2001), 74–75, 84; Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 104–5.

17. Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 105, quoting from Elaine Shannon, Desperados (New York: Viking, 1988), 179.

18. Terrence E. Poppa, Drug Lord: The Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin (Seattle: Demand Publications, 1990), 165.

19. Institute of Policy Studies, “A Tangled Web: A History of CIA Complicity in Drug International Trafficking,” Congressional Record, May 7, 1998, H2956, http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1998_cr/980507-l.htm. Compare Aguayo Quezada, La Charola, 241.

20. Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 36; Aguayo Quezada, La Charola, 247; Peter Dale Scott, Minding the Darkness (New York: New Directions, 2000), 136.

21. Poppa, Drug Lord, 74, 166. A photo of one of these badges is reproduced at p. 74.

22. Cables from Mexico City FBI Legal Attaché Gordon McGinley to Justice Department, in Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 36.

23. Scott, Deep Politics, 105, quoting from San Diego Union, March 26, 1982.

24. Cf. Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 41: “The CIA ran the facility, he told DEA agents at one point, using DFS ‘as a cover.’” Cf. Charles Bowden, Down by the River (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 148: “When he dies, Buendía is rumored to be looking at the links between the drug business, the CIA, and the contra war in Nicaragua.”

25. Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 41.

26. Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 10, 42, 56–58, 98–100.

27. “CISEN has far to go before it sheds its dark past: It was formed in the mid-1980s from the ashes of the despised Federal Security Department. . . . In CISEN’s ranks of former agents is the late master spy Fernando Gutierrez Barrios, known as the former ruling party’s keeper of dark secrets. Another original CISEN agent was Jorge Carrillo Olea, who later became governor of Morelos state but left office amid accusations linking him to organized crime. He has not been convicted” (Ricardo Sandoval, Dallas Morning News, May 27, 2003; http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/world/5951462.htm).

28. Barnard R. Thompson, “Mexico Is Collaborating with the CIA and FBI,” Mexidata.Info, January 12, 2004, http://www.mexidata.info/id117.html, citing Mexico City, Milenio, January 7, 2004.

29. Ted Galen Carpenter, “Mexico Is Becoming the Next Colombia,” Cato Institute, Foreign Policy Briefing no. 87, November 15, 2005, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5149. Cf. Ted Galen Carpenter, Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington’s Futile War on Drugs in Latin America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

30. Los Angeles Times, August 17, 2006.

31. Carlos Montemayor, La Jornada, May 13, 2006; cf. The Eyeopener, Ryerson University’s independent newspaper, January 18, 2005.

32. Reuters, January 20, 2010, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN19153111.

33. A key event of course was the publication of Alfred W. McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). McCoy’s copious footnotes make it clear that he interviewed such important U.S. CIA officers as Lucien Conein and William Young. My own book The War Conspiracy, published shortly before McCoy’s, was able to reveal further details of the drug traffic (including the key role of Paul Helliwell, not mentioned by McCoy until 1991). I too was helped in part by conversations with an author and former CIA officer whom I met accidentally (as I then believed) in the library at the University of California, Berkeley.

34. The best essay is by Jonathan Marshall, “CIA Assets and the Rise of the Guadalajara Connection,” in War on Drugs: Studies in the Failure of U.S. Narcotics Policy, ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Alan A. Block (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 197–208.

35. Testimony of George Gaffney, U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Government Operations, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Hearings, 88th Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1964; henceforward cited as Narcotics Hearings), 899. Cf. Jean-Pierre Charbonneau, The Canadian Connection (Ottawa: Optimum, 1976).

36. Lansky had been a major player in the so-called Operation Underworld of the OSS and the Office of Naval Intelligence during World War II to use information from Lucky Luciano in operations on the New York waterfront and later in Sicily (Scott, Deep Politics, 100, 145, 165). His opposite number in Mexico, the Corsican Paul Mondoloni, was likewise protected by the French government (Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs [London: Verso, 2004], 323).

37. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, 44.

38. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, 443.

39. Narcotics Hearings, 81, 989. Lansky was an unindicted coconspirator (and conceivably even an informant) in the case that convicted Meltzer (Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 95).

40. Alan A. Block, Perspectives on Organizing Crime (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991), 230–31.

41. Scott, Deep Politics, 140–41. One syndicate representative in Mexico City was Paul Roland Jones, who opened a casino there. Jones was later convicted in a major drug bust that involved both Jack Ruby (the future killer of Lee Harvey Oswald) and his brother Hymie (Scott, Deep Politics, 138–41). A Dallas detective, Lieutenant George Butler, taped Jones discussing how the U.S. government had stopped his activities in Mexico City, “at least until Aleman gets in” (Butler notes, in records of Senate Commerce Committee; cf. House Select Committee on Assassinations, Appendix to Hearings, vol. 9, 516).

42. Thirty minutes after Luciano’s death from a massive heart attack, FBN Deputy Commissioner Henry Giordano announced that the FBN “had been on the point of arresting the powerful Mafioso for having introduced $150 million worth of heroin to American territory over the previous ten years” (Charbonneau, Canadian Connection, 168, quoted in Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 247). No, arrest does not necessarily prove dismal failure.

43. Richard D. Mahoney, Sons and Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999), 269, citing Mason Cargill Memorandum to the File, Subject: Project ZR/RIFLE and QJ/WIN, April 30, 1975, HSCA.

44. Peter Lupsha, “Drug Lords and Narco-Corruption: The Players Change but the Game Continues,” in McCoy and Block, War on Drugs, 177–79, 181.

45. Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 104.

46. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 43, cf. 10, 46.

47. “Balkans Products, Ltd.,” Time, April 3, 1933, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,753621,00.html.

48. Luís Astorga, “Drug Trafficking in Mexico: A First General Assessment,” Management of Social Transformations—MOST, Discussion Paper No. 36, UNESCO, http://www.unesco.org/most/astorga.htm.

49. Astorga, “Organized Crime,” in Bailey and Godson, Organized Crime and Democratic Governability, 63.

50. Luís Astorga, “The Limits of Anti-Drug Policy in Mexico,” 428, http://www

.justiceblind.com/drugwar/mexicolimits.pdf.

51. Barry Carr, Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 145. (When E. Howard Hunt opened the first CIA office in Mexico City in 1949, he took over [in his own words] “from the slash-and-burn remnants of the FBI office”; interview, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-18/hunt1.html).

52. Luís Astorga, “Organized Crime and the Organization of Crime,” in Bailey and Godson, Organized Crime and Democratic Governability, 72, citing U.S. State Department, Confidential Report No. 4543 of the Assistant Military Attaché on the National Security Police of Mexico, September 7, 1947, NARA Record Group 59, 812.105/9-447.

53. El Angelino, edición especial, December 16, 1949; Aguayo Quezada, La Charola, 84. The driver was the nephew of Juan Ramón Gurrola, the number two official and eventual head of the DFS (Luis Astorga, Drogas sin Fronteras [Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2003], 285). Cf. Drew Pearson, Washington Post, February 29, 1948.

54. Aguayo Quezada, La Charola, 84–86.

55. Aguayo Quezada, La Charola, 74–75, quoting (in translation) from CIA, “Mexico,” SR-18, January 24, 1951, 57–58, 69.

56. Marshall, “CIA Assets,” 198, 200; cf. Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 34, 86; James Mills, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace (New York: Dell, 1986), 360–63.

57. Hunt is widely reported to have been CIA station chief in 1950–1951. See, e.g., “E. Howard Hunt,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Howard_Hunt; Daily Telegraph (London), January 26, 2007; cf. Washington Post, January 24, 2007, Associated Press obituary for Hunt, St. Petersburg Times, January 24, 2007 (“station chief”). However, the Rockefeller Commission Report, while confirming that Hunt served in the Mexico City CIA Station in 1950–1951, denied that he had ever been CIA station chief or acting station chief. Hunt later clarified that he was in fact in OPC (Howard Hunt, with Greg Aunapu, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond [Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007], 40). I conclude from the available evidence that he was the OPC station chief.

58. At least six of the OSS agents in Kunming—Paul Helliwell, Howard Hunt, Ray Cline, Lou Conein, John Singlaub, and Mitchell WerBell—went on to develop postwar drug-linked activities for the CIA. See Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 20, 207.

59. See Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 61–62, 198. The chief proprietaries were Sea Supply, Inc., and CAT, Inc. (Civil Air Transport, later Air America).

60. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 73.

61. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 70–71. Both Hill and Chung were under FBN surveillance, but no case was ever made against either woman.

62. Ed Reid, The Mistress and the Mafia: The Virginia Hill Story (New York: Bantam, 1972), 42.

63. Novedades, May 14, 1962; Astorga, “Organized Crime,” in Bailey and Godson, Organized Crime and Democratic Governability, 65.

64. Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986), 46–47. For Kodama and drugs, see David Kaplan and Alec Dubro, Yakuza (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1986), 66; Jonathan Marshall, “Opium, Tungsten, and the Search for National Security, 1940–52,” in Drug Control Policy: Essays in Historical and Comparative Perspective, ed. William O. Walker III (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 100–103.

65. Bertil Lintner, Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency since 1948 (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1999), 134, cf. 234.

66. Jorge Prieto Laurens was one of the politicians whose telephone was tapped by the DFS (Aguayo Quezado, La Charola, 308).

67. Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, 79; Rogelio Hernández, Zorrilla: El Imperio del Crimen (Mexico City: Editorial Planeta Mexicana, 1989), 26.

68. Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, 54–55; Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 65; Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould, Rollback: Right-Wing Power in U.S. Foreign Policy (Boston: South End Press, 1989), http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Foreign_Policy/GlobalRollbackNetwork.html.

69. Cf. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, 203, 210.

70. Marshall et al., The Iran-Contra Connection, 62–64.

71. Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, 204; Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 45–46, 109. In April 1971 the chief Laotian delegate to the WACL, Prince Sopsaisana, was caught in Paris with sixty kilos of high-grade heroin, worth $13.5 million on the streets of New York (Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 163; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, 379).

72. Testimony of Special Counsel Jack A. Blum, Senate Intelligence Hearing on Drug Trafficking and the Contra War, October 23, 1996; Washington Weekly, October 28, 1996.

73. Mike Levine, The Big White Lie (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1993), 35–36.

74. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 46; Marshall et al., The Iran-Contra Connection, 20–25; Loretta Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 19, 247.

75. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, 59–60. Through the Guérinis of the Corsican Mafia, Brown also made “contact with the mafia in Italy” (Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 112). Valentine confirms allegations that Brown himself came under FBN investigation in the 1960s because of his unexplained travels in the company of Corsican drug trafficker Maurice Castellani (362–63, cf. 270–74); see also Douglas Valentine, “The French Connection Revisited: The CIA, Irving Brown, and Drug Smuggling as Political Warfare,” Covert Action, http://www.covertaction.org/content/view/99/75.

76. Charbonneau, The Canadian Connection, 69, 75; Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 328, 331.

77. Charbonneau, The Canadian Connection, 209.

78. Proceso, August 5, 1985, 30; Peter Lupsha, “Drug Lords and Narco-Corruption,” in McCoy and Block, War on Drugs, 180. Chavarri was described by Lupsha as a founder of the DFS. But La Charola (65–66) gives a list of the founding officers; there is a Fernando Rocha Chavarri but no Rafael Chavarri.

79. Gaia Servadio, Mafioso (New York: Dell, 1976), 125–28; Scott, Deep Politics, 174.

80. Scott, Deep Politics, 174.

81. Scott, Deep Politics, 174–77.

82. Wikipedia, “Sylvestro Carolla,” citing Jay Robert Nash, The Encyclopedia of World Crime (Wilmette, IL: CrimeBooks Inc., 1990), vol. 1 (A–C).

83. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 39 (Lebanon), 162ss (Thailand), 197 (Vietnam), and 476–77 (Pakistan); Jeffrey M. Bale, “The ‘Black’ Terrorist International: Neo-Fascist Paramilitary Networks and the ‘Strategy of Tension’ in Italy, 1968–1974” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley), 170 (Italy); Warren Hinckle and William Turner, The Fish Is Red (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 314 (Cuba); Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 2005), 240–43 (Turkey). Ganser also presents evidence of a CIA–drugs triarchy involving Spanish intelligence (106–7) and the French Secret Army Organization or OAS (100). By the 1980s such triarchic arrangements were widespread in Latin America (Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, vii–xii, 79–85).

84. Alan A. Block and Constance A. Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire: Global Banking, Money Laundering, and International Organized Crime (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 28.

85. Joseph. J. Trento, Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005), 1. I have not found documentation for this claim. The closest might be Dulles’ overseas work in 1949 as legal adviser to Overseas Consultants, Inc., whose “most promising venture was the design of a long-range development program [for] Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, shah of Iran” (Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles [Boston: Richard Todd/Houghton Mifflin, 1994], 295).

86. Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan (New York: Times Books, 1982), 821–22.

87. Quoted in Mark Riebling, Wedge: The Secret War between the FBI and CIA (New York: Knopf, 1994), 97–98.

88. Riebling, Wedge, 98.

89. William Stevenson, The Revolutionary King: The True-Life Sequel to The King and I (London: Constable and Robinson, 2001), 4.

90. Brown, The Last Hero, 796.

91. Brown, The Last Hero, 795–800.

92. Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 509–12; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 109–10, 197.

93. Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 511; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 109–10, 197. Satiris “Sonny” Fassoulis, accused of passing bribes as the vice president of Commerce International, was under indictment ten years later when he surfaced in the syndicate-linked Guterma scandals.

94. Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 511. As we shall see in the next chapter, suspicions that CIA uses CI(C) persist to this day (Paul Collin, “Global Economic Brinkmanship,” http://www.totse.com/en/politics/corporatarchy/Valentine,globaleconomic170320.html).

95. Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 513; cf. William M. Leary, Perilous Missions: Civil Air Transport and CIA Covert Operations in Asia (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984), 102.

96. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 109–10, 197; New York Times, May 23, 1950, 34.

97. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, xx; Scott, The Road to 9/11, 267–69. As noted earlier, the increasingly common usage of both terms has blurred this distinction.

98. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 8, 1989.

99. Washington Post, February 6, 1989.

100. Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 37, cf. 41–42.

101. Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 41–42 and passim, quoting Newsweek, May 13, 1985.

102. Lupsha, “Drug Lords and Narco-Corruption,” 185–87.

103. Peter Lupsha, “Transnational Narco-Corruption and Narco Investment: A Focus on Mexico,” excerpted from Peter Lupsha, “Under the Volcano: Narco Investment in Mexico,” Transnational Organized Crime Journal, Spring 1995, posted originally on the Web by PBS, Frontline, April 8, 1997, http://www.eco.utexas.edu/~archive/chiapas95/1997.04/msg00066.html.

104. Elaine Shannon, Desperados (New York: Viking, 1988), 67, quoted in Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 38–39.

105. Jorge Castañeda, The Mexican Shock: Its Meaning for the United States (New York: New Press, 1995), 222.

106. Castañeda, The Mexican Shock, 215; New York Times, July 20, 1996.

107. Clyde Prestowitz, Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 78.

108. Castañeda, The Mexican Shock, 37.

109. Anthony DePalma, “Gap between Mexico’s Rich and Poor Is Widening,” New York Times, July 20, 1996: “Today the richest 10 percent of Mexicans control 41 percent of the country’s wealth, while the bottom half of the population receives only 16 percent of all national income. The government admits that the number of Mexicans living in extreme poverty has grown to 22 million, an increase over just the last 15 months of 5 million people, roughly equal to the population of Scotland.” In 2008 a report from the Organization for Economic Development reported that of its 30 member states, Mexico had the largest gap between its wealthiest and poorest households, followed in order by Turkey and the United States. Mexico’s poverty rate was also the highest, at more than 20 percent (Jim Lobe, “Rich-Poor Divide Worst among Rich Countries,” Institute for Policy Studies, October 21, 2008, http://ipsnews

.net/news.asp?idnews=44381).

110. Chris Humphrey, “Narcotic, Economics, and Drug Production in the Southern States,” http://wbln0018.worldbank.org/lac/lacinfoclient.nsf/d29684951174975c85256735007fef12/63a3f4e71ce14d2385256dc500661aaf/$FILE/Mexico%20South

States%20Narcotics%20and%20Poverty.pdf.

111. Wall Street Journal, September 30, 1998.

112. George Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 1998), 117.

113. See, e.g., Pedro-Pablo Kuczynski and John Williamson, After the Washington Consensus: Restoring Growth and Reform in Latin America (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 2003). John Williamson originally coined the phrase “Washington consensus” in 1990.

114. Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 14.

115. Chua, World on Fire, 195.

116. Castañeda, The Mexican Shock, 239.

117. Andres Oppenheimer, Bordering on Chaos: Mexico’s Roller-Coaster Journey Toward Prosperity (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 90–93: “Mexico in the early nineties was similar to American capitalism in the late 1870s. . . . Like the American ‘Robber Barons’ of their time, the Mexico Twelve were making a fortune from their close partnership with the government.” What Oppenheimer writes of the Mexico Twelve in Mexico could be said also of Halliburton and Enron in Washington.

118. Tom Barry, Harry Browne, and Beth Sims, The Great Divide: The Challenge of U.S.-Mexico Relations in the 1990s (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 69.

119. New York Times, July 20, 1996.

120. Oppenheimer, Bordering on Chaos, 5, 164.

121. Christian Science Monitor, July 15, 1996.

122. Cf. Oppenheimer, Bordering on Chaos, 306–7.

123. Arguments for this can be found in 1996 issues of Money Laundering Alert, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/mexico/family/citibankaffair.html. Cf. Stephen Bender, “American Banks and the War on Drugs,” Z Magazine, March 2001, http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/mar01bender.htm.

124. Cf. “Mexican Governor Pleads Not Guilty to Drug Charges in US,” AFP, May 10, 2010. The problem of bank-assisted theft was of course not confined to Mexico. “Sani Abacha, Nigeria’s former dictator, looted his nation of $110 million, also laundered for him by Citibank” (Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic [New York: Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 2004], 274).

125. Stephen Bender, “American Banks and the War on Drugs,” Z Magazine, March 2001; http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/mar01bender.htm. The Minority Staff Report is at http://govt-aff.senate.gov/110999_report.htm.

126. Guilhem Fabre, “Prospering on Crime: Money Laundering and Financial Crises,” http://www.mamacoca.org/FSMT_sept_2003/en/doc/fabre_prospering_on

_crime_en.htm. Details in Guilhem Fabre, Criminal Prosperity: Drug Trafficking, Money Laundering and Financial Crises after the Cold War (London: Routledge/Curzon, 2002), chap. 5.

127. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 198, 207.

128. Before the first loan was issued in 1982, the U.S. government had already ascertained from DEA and CIA that the profits from drug exports for Colombia and Mexico “probably represent 75 percent of source-country export earnings” (James Mills, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Government Embrace [New York: Dell, 1986], 1135, 1181).

129. Reforma (Mexico City), May 22, 1996, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/

frontline/shows/mexico/news/reforma.html. An article in Proceso, February 16, 1997, based on heavily censored U.S. court documents, reproduced the allegations of a woman who claimed to have delivered payments of from $300,000 to $1 million to Raúl’s brother-in-law, José Ruiz Massieu. Cf. Charles Bowden, Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 167.

130. CNN, May 18, 1998.

131. Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947–2000 (New York: Knopf, 2001), prologue. Sally Denton later enlarged on the details: “When it became clear 70 United States, American, banks were involved, had the complicity, knew about every single one of the wire-transfers and transactions—banks including Chemical Bank, Bank of New York, CitiBank, American Express— . . . President Clinton and Madeline Albright stepped in and intervened and stopped the entire investigation and closed all of the cases” (discussion at Taos Community Auditorium, October 12, 2002, http://www

.taosplaza.com/taosplaza/2003/pages/tmff_drugs.php).

132. Interview with Al Giordano, Multinational Monitor, April 2002, http://multi

nationalmonitor.org/mm2002/02april/april02interviewgiordano.html.

133. According to U.S. sources in 1998, “The Mexican federation of [drug] cartels alone is believed to earn between $17 and $30 billion each year” (Richard Parker, “U.S. Fickle on Anti-Narcotics Aid,” ABQJournal (Albuquerque Journal), http://www

.abqjournal.com/news/drugs/2drug3-5.htm). These estimates seem consistent with official estimates of drug consumption in the United States, in the order of $64 billion a year (Prestowitz, Rogue Nation, 259). To put the Mexican estimates in perspective, consider that the total of U.S.–Mexican trade in both directions, for the first nine months of 1996, was $94 billion.

134. CNN, July 9, 2009; Fox News, January 12, 2009.

Chapter 3: Operation Paper

1. William O. Walker III, “Drug Trafficking in Asia,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 34, no. 3 (1992): 204.

2. William Peers [OSS/CIA] and Dean Brellis, Behind the Burma Road (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), 64.

3. Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 300.

4. Peter Dale Scott, “Mae Salong,” in Mosaic Orpheus (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), 45.

5. Peter Dale Scott, “Wat Pa Nanachat,” in Mosaic Orpheus, 56.

6. Vietnam Archive, Oral History Project, Interview with Bill Lair, Texas Tech University, December 12, 2001, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/star/images/OH/OH0200/OH0200-part1.pdf. Lair also recruited for the CIA William Young, the son of American missionaries who was raised among Thai–Lao hill tribes and spoke their languages. Young also helped to improve relations between the hill tribes and the Thai government. In this effort he was succeeded by Assawin Willis Bird, the Thai-American son of Willis Bird (Lair’s brother-in-law), who figures prominently in the following pages.

7. I write about this practice in Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

8. There are analogies also with the history of U.S. involvement in Iraq, though here the analogies are not so easily drawn. The most relevant point is that U.S. success in the defense of Kuwait during the 1990–1991 Gulf War once again produced internal pressures, dominated by the neoconservative clique and the Cheney–Rumsfeld–Project for the New American Century cabal, which ultimately pushed the United States into another rollback campaign, the current invasion of Iraq itself.

9. G. William Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957), 166–67; Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press, 2003), 101; Bertil Lintner, Blood Brothers: The Criminal Underworld of Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 234.

10. Carl A. Trocki, “Drugs, Taxes, and Chinese Capitalism in Southeast Asia,” in Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952, ed. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 99.

11. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 102; James C. Ingram, Economic Change in Thailand, 1850–1970 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971), 177.

12. Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand, 166–67, 236–44, 264–65.

13. Cf. Robert Maule, “British Policy Discussions on the Opium Question in the Federated Shan States, 1937–1948,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 33 (June 2002): 203–24.

14. One often reads that the Northern Army invasion of the Shan states was in support of the Japanese invasion of Burma. In fact, the Japanese army (which may have had its own designs on Shan opium) refused for some months to allow the Thai army to move until the refusal was overruled for political reasons by officials in Tokyo. See E. Bruce Reynolds, Thailand and Japan’s Southern Advance: 1940–1945 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 115–17.

15. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 105. Cf. E. Bruce Reynolds, “‘International Orphans’—The Chinese in Thailand during World War II,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 28 (September 1997): 365–88: “In an effort to distance himself from the Japanese, Premier Phibun initiated secret contacts with Nationalist China through the Thai army in the Shan States and developed a scheme to transfer the capital to the northern town of Petchabun with the idea of ultimately turning against the Japanese and linking up militarily with Nationalist China.” Under orders from Thai Premier Phibun, rapprochement of the Northern Army in Kengtung with the KMT began in January 1943 with a symbolic release of prisoners followed by a cease fire (“Thailand and the Second World War,” http://www.geocities.com/thailandwwii/shan3.html).

16. E. Bruce Reynolds, Thailand’s Secret War: The Free Thai, OSS, and SOE during World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 170–71.

17. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 162–63, citing Archimedes L. A. Patti, Why Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 216–17, 265, 354–55, 487. Lung Yun’s son, Lung Shing, denied to James Mills that his father was a smuggler: “My family’s been painted as the biggest drug runner. This is nonsense. The government in the old days put a tax on opium, which is true. It’s been doing that for the past hundred years. You can’t pin it on my family for that” (James Mills, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace [New York: Dell, 1986], 737).

18. The directions given by Washington to the OSS mission were to establish contact with Phibun’s political enemy, Pridi Phanomyong. However, the mission’s leader, Khap Kunchon, was secretly a Phibun loyalist with a history of sensitive missions, and this complication helps to explain Khap’s motive and success in promoting the Thai–KMT talks (Nigel J. Brailey, Thailand and the Fall of Singapore: A Frustrated Asian Revolution [Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986], 100).

19. Judith A. Stowe, Siam Becomes Thailand: A Story of Intrigue (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1991), 282. The border itself, a product of Sino–British negotiations in the nineteenth century, was an artifact, dividing the historically connected principalities of the Thai Lü in Sipsongpanna (southern Yunnan) from those of the Thai Yai (Shans) in Burma (Stephen Sparkes and Signe Howell, The House in Southeast Asia: A Changing Social, Economic and Political Domain [London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003], 134; Janet C. Sturgeon, Border Landscapes: The Politics of Akha Land Use in China and Thailand [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005], 82).

20. Stowe, Siam Becomes Thailand, 282–83. I have discovered no indication as to whether Nicol Smith, the American leader of the OSS mission, was aware of the implications of the talks for the future of the Shan opium trade.

21. Reynolds, Thailand’s Secret War, 171, 175–76.

22. Reynolds, Thailand’s Secret War, 171; Brailey, Thailand and the Fall of Singapore, 100; Maochun Yu, OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 117; John B. Haseman, The Thai Resistance Movement (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2002), 62–63; Stowe, Siam Becomes Thailand, 282; Nicol Smith and Blake Clark, Into Siam: Underground Kingdom (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1946), 146. According to Smith, General Lu himself took responsibility for delivering a message from OSS promising amnesty to the Northern Army; according to Haseman, the letter “was delivered to front-line Thai positions, who passed it in turn to Sawaeng [Thappasut, a former student of Khap’s], MG Han [Songkhram], LTG Chira [Wichitsongkhram], and to Marshal Phibul.”

23. Miles, Donovan’s first OSS chief for China, became more and more closely allied with the controversial Tai Li in a semiautonomous network, SACO. In December 1943 Donovan, alerted to the situation, replaced Miles as OSS China chief with Colonel John Coughlin (Richard Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972], 246–58).

24. Reynolds, Thailand’s Secret War, 191–92, citing documents of September 1944, cf. 175; Stowe, Siam Becomes Thailand, 270.

25. Cf. Jonathan Marshall, “Opium, Tungsten, and the Search for National Security, 1940–52,” in Drug Control Policy: Essays in Historical and Comparative Perspective, ed. William O. Walker III (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 96: “Americans . . . knew that [Tai Li’s] agents protected Tu’s huge opium convoys”; Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs (London: Verso, 2004), 47: “It was an open secret that Tai Li’s agents escorted opium caravans from Yunnan to Saigon and used Red Cross operations as a front for selling opium to the Japanese.”

26. After the final KMT defeat of 1949, the 93rd Division received other remnants from the KMT 8th and 26th Armies and a new commander, General Li Mi of the KMT Eighth Army (Bertil Lintner, Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency since 1948 [Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1999], 111–15).

27. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 106, 188–91, 415–20.

28. Thomas Lobe, United States National Security Policy and Aid to the Thailand Police (Denver: Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver, 1977), 27.

29. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 192.

30. Lintner, Blood Brothers, 241–44. After Sarit died in 1963, Chin was able to return to Thailand.

31. William Stevenson, The Revolutionary King: The True-Life Sequel to The King and I (London: Constable and Robinson, 2001), 4, 162, 195. The king personally translated Stevenson’s biography of Sir William Stephenson into Thai.

32. Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan (New York: Times Books, 1982), 797; Stevenson, The Revolutionary King, 162. In 1970, Thompson’s biographer, William Warren, described the funding of Thompson’s company in some detail but made no reference to the WCC (William Warren, Jim Thompson: The Unsolved Mystery [Singapore: Archipelago Press, 1998], 66–67). Former CIA officer Richard Harris Smith wrote that Thompson was later “frequently reported to have CIA connections” (Smith, OSS, 313n). Joe Trento, without citing any sources, places Jim Thompson at the center of this chapter’s narrative: “Jim Thompson . . . (who in fact was a CIA officer) had recruited General Phao, head of the Thai police, to accept the KMT army’s drugs for distribution” (Joseph J. Trento, The Secret History of the CIA [New York: Random House/Forum, 2001], 346). Thompson disappeared mysteriously in Malaysia in 1967; his sister, who investigated the disappearance, was brutally murdered in America a few months later.

33. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 155. Helliwell in Kunming used opium, which was in effect the local hard currency, to purchase intelligence (Wall Street Journal, April 18, 1980).

34. Sterling Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 361.

35. John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War against the Jews (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 110–11.

36. The best evidence of this, the M-fund reported on by Chalmers Johnson, is discussed in the next chapter. Cf. Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold (London: Verso, 2003), 3. The Seagraves link Helliwell to the movement of Japanese gold out of the Philippines, and they suggest, by hearsay but without evidence, that both Sea Supply Inc. and Civil Air Transport were thus funded (147–48, 152). Although many of their startling allegations are beyond my competence to assess or even believe, there are at least two that I have verified from my own research. I am persuaded that in the first postwar months when the United States was already supporting and using the SS war criminal Klaus Barbie, the operation was paid by SS funds. And I have seen secret documentary proof that a large sum of gold was indeed later deposited in a Swiss bank account in the name of a famous Southeast Asian leader, as claimed by the Seagraves.

37. Leonard Slater, The Pledge (New York: Pocket Books, 1971), 175. An attorney once made the statement that Burton Kanter (Helliwell’s partner in the money-laundering Castle Bank) “was introduced to Helliwell by General William J. Donovan. . . . Kanter denied that. ‘I personally never met Donovan. I believe I may have spoken to him once at Paul Helliwell’s request’” (Pete Brewton, The Mafia, CIA and George Bush [New York: S.P.I. Books, 1992], 296).

38. In the course of Operation Safehaven, the U.S. Third Army took an SS major “on several trips to Italy and Austria, and, as a result of these preliminary trips, over $500,000 in gold, as well as jewels, were recovered” (Anthony Cave Brown, The Secret War Report of the OSS [New York: Berkeley, 1976], 565–66).

39. Amy B. Zegart, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 189, citing Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 172; see also U.S. Congress, Senate, 94th Cong., 2nd sess., Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report, April 26, 1976, Senate Report No. 94-755, 28–29.

40. Stevenson, The Revolutionary King, 50. Douglas Valentine claims that in mid-1947, Donovan intervened in Bangkok politics to resolve a conflict between the police and the army over the opium traffic. In 1947, Donovan was a registered foreign agent for the civilian Thai government, representing them in negotiations over the postwar border with French Indochina. Valentine reports that in mid-1947, “Donovan traveled to Bangkok to unite the squabbling factions in a strategic alliance against the Communists” and that the KMT businessmen in Bangkok who managed the flow of narcotics from Thailand to Hong Kong and Macao “benefited greatly from Donovan’s intervention” (Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 70). He notes also that “by mid-1947 Kuomintang narcotics were reaching America through Mexico.” What actually happened in November 1947 in Thailand was the ousting of Pridi’s civilian government in a military coup. Soon afterward the first of Thailand’s postwar military dictators, Phibun, took office. Not long after Phibun’s accession, Thailand quietly abandoned the antiopium campaign announced in 1948, whereby all opium smoking would have ended by 1953 (Francis W. Belanger, Drugs, the U.S., and Khun Sa [Bangkok: Editions Duang Kamol, 1989], 75–90).

41. Stevenson, The Revolutionary King, 50–51.

42. William O. Walker III, Opium and Foreign Policy: The Anglo-American Search for Order in Asia, 1912–1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 184–85, citing letters from Bird, April 5, 1948, and Donovan, April 14, 1948 (Donovan Papers, box 73a, Military History Institute, U.S. Army, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania).

43. Paul M. Handley, The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand’s Bhumipol Adulyadej (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 105.

44. Walker, Opium and Foreign Policy, 185.

45. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949–1951 (hereinafter FRUS) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), vol. 6, 40–41; memo of March 9, 1950, from Dean Acheson, secretary of state.

46. FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, 651, memo of October 7, 1952, from Edwin M. Martin, special assistant to the secretary for mutual security affairs, to John H. Ohly, assistant director for program, Office of the Director of Mutual Security (emphasis added).

47. Shortly before his dismissal on April 11, 1951, MacArthur in Tokyo issued a statement calling for a “decision by the United Nations to depart from its tolerant effort to contain the war to the area of Korea, through an expansion of our military operations to its coastal areas and interior bases [to] doom Red China to risk the imminent military collapse” (Lintner, Blood Brothers, 237).

48. Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). Donovan in this period became vice chairman of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding Anti-Communist China.

49. Martha Byrd, Chennault: Giving Wings to the Tiger (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987), 325–28; William M. Leary, Perilous Missions: Civil Air Transport and CIA Covert Operations in Asia, 1946–1955 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984), 67–68; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 2.

50. Jack Samson, Chennault, 62.

51. John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 125. Cf. Los Angeles Times, September 22, 2000: “Newly declassified U.S. intelligence files tell the remarkable story of the ultra-secret Insurance Intelligence Unit, a component of the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA, and its elite counterintelligence branch X-2. Though rarely numbering more than a half dozen agents, the unit gathered intelligence on the enemy’s insurance industry, Nazi insurance titans and suspected collaborators in the insurance business. . . . The men behind the insurance unit were OSS head William “Wild Bill” Donovan and California-born insurance magnate Cornelius V. Starr. Starr had started out selling insurance to Chinese in Shanghai in 1919. . . . Starr sent insurance agents into Asia and Europe even before the bombs stopped falling and built what eventually became AIG, which today has its world headquarters in the same downtown New York building where the tiny OSS unit toiled in the deepest secrecy.”

52. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 46–47, 263–64. William Youngman, Corcoran’s law partner and a key member of Chennault’s support team in Washington during and after the war, was by 1960 president of a C. V. Starr company in Saigon.

53. Smith, OSS, 267.

54. Smith, OSS, 267n.

55. It is possible that other backers of the Chennault Plan allied themselves, like Helliwell, with organized crime. In those early postwar years, one of the C. V. Starr companies, U.S. Life, was the recipient of dubious Teamster insurance contracts through the intervention of the mob-linked business agents Paul and Allan Dorfman (Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 197; Scott, The War Conspiracy, 279). One of the principal supporters of Chennault’s airline on the U.S. West Coast, Dr. Margaret Chung, was suspected of drug trafficking after her frequent trips to Mexico City with Virginia Hill, a courier for Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel. See Ed Reid, The Mistress and the Mafia: The Virginia Hill Story (New York: Bantam, 1972), 42, 90; Peter Dale Scott, “Opium and Empire: McCoy on Heroin in Southeast Asia,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, September 1973, 49–56.

56. Ronald Shelp with Al Ehrbar, Fallen Giant: The Amazing Story of Hank Greenberg and the History of AIG (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006), 60.

57. Encyclopaedia Britannica. The money splashed around in Washington by the “China Lobby” was attributed at the time chiefly to the wealthy linen and lace merchant Joseph Kohlberg, the so-called China Lobby man. But it has often been suspected that he was fronting for others.

58. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 111–14. As early as 1950, Ting was also actively promoting the concept of an Anti-Communist League to support KMT resistance (134, 234). The KMT’s ensuing Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League (later known as the World Anti-Communist League) became intimately involved with support for the KMT troops in Burma. In 1971 the chief Laotian delegate to the World Anti-Communist League, Prince Sopsaisana, was detained with sixty kilos of top-grade heroin in his luggage (Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 163, 194–95).

59. MacArthur advised the State Department in 1949 that the United States should place “500 fighter planes in the hands of some ‘war horse’ similar to Chennault” and further support the KMT with U.S. volunteers (memo of conversation, September 5, 1949, FRUS, 1949, vol. 9, 544–46; Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 103; Byrd, Chennault, 344). Chennault in turn told Senator Knowland that Congress should appoint MacArthur a supreme commander for the entire Far East.

60. Donovan suggested that Chennault become minister of defense in a reconstituted KMT government. At some point Chennault and Donovan met privately with Willoughby in Japan (Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 513).

61. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 260; Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 133.

62. Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 119–21, 796; James Burnham, The Coming Defeat of Communism (New York: John Day, 1951), 256–66.

63. David McKean, Peddling Influence: Thomas “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran and the Birth of Modern Lobbying (Hanover, NH: Steerforth, 2004), 216.

64. Hersh, The Old Boys, 299.

65. McKean, Peddling Influence, 216; Christopher Robbins, Air America (New York: Putnam’s, 1979), 48–49, 56–57, 70; Byrd, Chennault, 333; Alan A. Block, Masters of Paradise: Organized Crime and the Internal Revenue Service in the Bahamas (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1991), 169.

66. Curtis Peebles, Twilight Warriors: Covert Air Operations against the USSR (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2005), 88–89.

67. William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire (New York: Dial Press/James Wade, 1977), 320–21.

68. Hersh, The Old Boys, 284. Cf. Samuel Halpern (a former CIA officer) in Ralph S. Weber, Spymasters: Ten CIA Officers in Their Own Words (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 117: “Bedell suddenly said, ‘They’re under my command.’

. . . He did it, and he did it in the first seven days of his tenure as DCI [director of the CIA].”

69. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance, 319; Daniel Fineman, A Special Relationship: The United States and Military Government in Thailand, 1947–1958 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), 137; Henry G. Gole, General William E. DePuy: Preparing the Army for Modern War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 80: “CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith opposed the plan, but President Truman approved it, overruled the Director, and ordered the strictest secrecy about it.”

70. Victor S. Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle: The United States, Taiwan and the 93rd Nationalist Division,” China Quarterly, no. 166 (June 2001): 441, citing Memorandum, Bradley to Secretary of Defense, April 10, 1950, and Annex to NSC 48/3, “United States Objectives, Policies, and Courses of Action in Asia,” May 2, 1951. President’s Secretary’s File, National Security File—Meetings, box 212, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri. Cf. Sam Halpern, in Weber, Spymasters, 119: “The Pentagon came up with this bright plan, as I understand it; at least, I was told this by my [CIA/OSO] boss, Lloyd George, who was Chief of the Far East Division at the time.”

71. Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 442–43; Fineman, A Special Relationship, 141–42.

72. Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 443: “Whether . . . Secretary of State Dean Acheson . . . knew of Operation Paper is uncertain. Acheson was present at discussions regarding the use of covert operations against China. . . . Yet since mid-1950, the secretary of state had been working to remove the irregulars. Therefore, either Acheson knew of the operation and did not inform his subordinates, or he too did not have the entire picture.” In apparent contradiction, William Walker writes that “Acheson had participated from the start in the decision-making process relating to NSC 48/5, so he was familiar with the discussions about using covert operations against China’s southern flank” (Opium and Foreign Policy, 203). But NSC 48/5, primarily a policy paper on Korea, dates from May 17, 1951, half a year later.

73. Leary, Perilous Missions, 116–17.

74. Lintner, Blood Brothers, 237, citing MacArthur on March 21, 1951, in Robert H. Taylor, Foreign and Domestic Consequences of the Kuomintang Intervention in Burma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, Data Paper no. 93, 1973), 42; Chennault on April 23, 1958, in U.S. Congress, House Committee on Un-American Activities, International Communism (Communist Encroachment in the Far East), “Consultations with Maj.-Gen. Claire Lee Chennault, United States Army,” 85th Cong., 2nd sess., 9–10.

75. Leary, Perilous Missions, 129–30. Leary states that U.S. personnel delivered the arms only as far as northern Thailand, with the last leg of delivery handled by the Thai Border Police. But there are numerous contemporary reports of U.S. personnel at Mong Hsat in Burma who helped unload the planes and reload them with opium (Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 60; Corson, The Armies of Ignorance, 320–22). Lintner reproduces a photograph of three American civilians who were killed in action with the KMT in Burma in 1953 (Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 168). On April 1, 1953, the Rangoon Nation reported a captured letter from Major General Li’s headquarters, discussing “European instructors for the training of students.”

76. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 169–71; Lintner, Blood Brothers, 238. Despite this military fiasco, the KMT troops contributed to the survival of noncommunist Chinese communities in Southeast Asia both by serving as a protective shield and by sustaining the traditional social fabric of drug-financed KMT Triads in Southeast Asia. See McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 185–86; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 60, 192–93.

77. Donald F. Cooper, Thailand: Dictatorship of Democracy? (Montreux: Minerva Press, 1995), 120.

78. E.g., McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 165–69. Cf. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 60: “The final theater for the CIA in the Korean War lay in Burma. In early 1951, as the Chinese Communists chased General MacArthur’s troops south, the Pentagon thought the Chinese Nationalists could take some pressure off MacArthur by opening a second front. . . . The CIA began [sic] flying Chinese Nationalist soldiers into Thailand . . . and dropping them along with pallets of guns and ammunition into northern Burma.” Cf. Walker, Opium and Foreign Policy, 200: “Some aid was already reaching KMT forces in Burma . . . months before the January 1951 NSC meeting.”

79. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 289n25.

80. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 137.

81. U.S. Treasury Department, Bureau of Narcotics, Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1949), 13; (1950), 3; (1954), 12. Through the same decade, the FBN, by direction of the U.S. State Department, acknowledged to UN Narcotics Conferences that Thailand was a source for opium and heroin reaching the United States (Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 191, 203, citing UN Documents E/CN.7/213, E/CN.7/283, 22, and E/CN.7//303/Rev.1, 34; cf. Walker, Opium and Foreign Policy, 201 [State Department]). When the FBN Traffic in Opium reports began to acknowledge Thai drug seizures again in 1962, the Kennedy administration had already initiated serious efforts to remove the bulk of the KMT troops from the region (Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 452).

82. Walker, Opium and Foreign Policy, 206, cf. 213–15. Cf. also Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 133, 150–52. Anslinger was not alone in blaming heroin flows on mainland China. He was joined in the attack by two others with CIA connections: Edward Hunter (a veteran of OSS China and OPC who in turn was fed information regularly by Chennault) and Richard L. G. Deverall of the American Federation of Labor’s Free Trade Union Committee (under the CIA’s labor asset Jay Lovestone).

83. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7, 60–61, 198, 207, citing Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984), 42–44, 84.

84. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 215.

85. I explore this question in Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 60–64.

86. Gole, General William E. DePuy, 80.

87. Chennault himself was investigated for such smuggling activities, “but no official action was taken because he was politically untouchable” (Marshall, “Opium, Tungsten, and the Search for National Security, 1940–52,” 92); cf. Barbara Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–1945 7–78; Paul Frillmann and Graham Peck, China: The Remembered Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), 152.

88. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance, 322.

89. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 71, quoting Reid, The Mistress and the Mafia, 42.

90. Marshall, “Opium, Tungsten, and the Search for National Security, 1940–52,” 98, citing OSS CID 126155, April 19, 1945.

91. Marshall, “Opium, Tungsten, and the Search for National Security, 1940–52.”

92. Andrew Forbes and David Henley, The Haw: Traders of the Golden Triangle (Bangkok: Teak House, 1997).

93. Cooper, Thailand, 116.

94. Wen-chin Chang, “Identification of Leadership among the KMT Yunnanese Chinese in Northern Thailand, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 33 (2002): 125. Chang calls this name “a popular misnomer” on the grounds that the KMT villages have been expanding and “slowly casting off their former military legacy.”

95. Taylor, Foreign and Domestic Consequences of the Kuomintang Intervention in Burma, 10.

96. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 162–63.

97. Sucheng Chan, Hmong Means Free: Life in Laos and America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 1942; cf. John T. McAlister, Viet Nam: The Origins of Revolution (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 228; Scott, The War Conspiracy, 267.

98. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, eds., Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 261–79; Jonathan Marshall, “Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism in Nationalist China, 1927–1945,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, July–September 1976, 19–48; Laura Tyson Li, Madame Chiang Kai-shek: China’s Eternal First Lady (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), 107, citing Nelson T. Johnson to Stanley K. Hornbeck, May 31, 1934, box 23, Johnson Papers, Library of Congress.

99. In global surveys of the opium traffic, one regularly reads of the importance of Teochew (Chiu chau) triads in the postwar Thai drug milieu (e.g., Martin Booth, Dragon Syndicates: The Global Phenomenon of the Triads [New York: Carroll and Graf, 1999], 176–77; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 389, 396). Although triads are central to trafficking in Hong Kong, and today possibly inside China, I question whether the Teochew in Thailand, although they certainly are prominent in the drug trade there, are still as dominated by triads as they were before World War II. Cf. Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand, 264–67.

100. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 14, citing Melvin L. Hanks, NARC: The Adventures of a Federal Agent (New York: Hastings House, 1973), 37, 162–66; Brook and Wakabayashi, Opium Regimes, 263. For an overview of U.S. knowledge of KMT drug trafficking, see Marshall, “Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism in Nationalist China, 1927–1945.”

101. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 72–73, citing Terry A. Talent report of November 15, 1946; Douglas Clark Kinder and William O. Walker III, “Stable Force in a Storm: Harry J. Anslinger and United States Narcotics Policy, 1930–1962,” Journal of American History, March 1986, 919.

102. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 77.

103. Victor S. Kaufman, Confronting Communism: U.S. and British Policies toward China (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 20–21.

104. Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 508–25; Robert Accinelli, Crisis and Commitment: United States Policy toward Taiwan, 1950–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 271–72; Ross Y. Koen, The China Lobby in American Politics (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 46, 48–51. Elsewhere I have described Commerce International China as a subsidiary of the WCC. Since then, I have learned that it was a firm founded in Shanghai in 1930. I now doubt the alleged WCC connection. Later, Fassoulis was indicted in a huge organized crime conspiracy to defraud banks in a stock swindle (New York Times, September 12, 1969; Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998], 168–69, 178). By 2005, Fassoulis was worth $150 million as chairman and CEO of CIC International, the successor to Commerce International China; his company, now supplying the U.S. armed services, was predicted to do $870 million of business (“The 50 Wealthiest Greeks in America,” National Herald, March 29, 2008). There have been speculations that the “U.S. Central Intelligence Agency . . . may actually support CIC International, Ltd. so it remains in business as one of its many brokers for arms, technology components, logistics on transactions significant to intelligence operations” (Paul Collin, “Global Economic Brinkmanship,” http://www.totse.com/en/politics/corporatarchy/Valentine, globaleconomic170320.html).

105. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 188.

106. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 185.

107. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 192–93. Anslinger’s protection of the KMT traffic had the additional consequence of strengthening and protecting pro-KMT tongs in America. In 1959, when a pro-KMT Hip Sing tong network distributing drugs was broken up in San Francisco, a leading FBN official with OSS–CIA connections, George White, blamed the drug shipment on communist China while allowing the ringleader to escape to Taiwan (Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 63; Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 195).

108. Walker, Opium and Foreign Policy, 214.

109. Joe Studwell, Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007), 95–96.

110. J. W. Cushman, “The Khaw Group: Chinese Business in Early Twentieth-Century Penang,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 17 (1986): 58; cf. Trocki, “Drugs, Taxes, and Chinese Capitalism in Southeast Asia,” 99–100.

111. Marshall, “Opium, Tungsten, and the Search for National Security, 1940–52,” 106. The KMT obtained the tungsten from Karen rebels controlling a major mine at Mawchj in exchange for modern arms provided by the CIA.

112. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 133, 153. Bird at the time was a “private aviation contractor” (McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 168), and aviation was the key to the BPP strategy of defending the Thai frontier because the Thai road system was still primitive in the border areas. Because Bird included in this committee his brother-in-law, Air Force Colonel Sitthi Savetsila, Sitthi became one of Phao’s closest aides-de-camp and his translator. In the 1980s he served for a decade as foreign minister in the last Thai military government.

113. I have not been able to establish the identity of this OPC officer. One possibility is Desmond Fitzgerald, who became the overseer and champion of Sea Supply, Operation Paper, the BPP, and (still to be discussed) PARU. Another possibility is Paul Helliwell.

114. Lobe, United States National Security Policy and Aid to the Thailand Police, 19–20.

115. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 137; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 165.

116. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 134, emphasis added.

117. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 168–69: Sherman Joost, the OPC officer who headed Sea Supply in Bangkok, “had led Kachin guerrillas in Burma during the war as a commander of OSS Detachment 101.”

118. Walker, Opium and Foreign Policy, 200, 205.

119. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 168.

120. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 187–89, 201–2; Robbins, Air America, 48–49, 56–57, 70; Leary, Perilous Missions, 110–12.

121. Chen Han-Seng, “Monopoly and Civil War in China,” Institute of Pacific Relations, Far Eastern Survey 15, no. 20 (October 9, 1946): 308.

122. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 187–89. CAT was not the only airline supplying Li Mi. There was also Trans-Asiatic Airlines, described as “a CIA outfit operating along the Burma-China border against the People’s Republic of China” and based in Manila (Roland G. Simbulan, “The CIA in Manila,” Nathan Hale Institute for Intelligence and Military Affairs, August 18, 2000, http://alexanderhamiltoninstitute

.org/lp/Hale/Special%20Reports%5CProactive%20Preemptive%20Operations%20Group%5CThe%20CIA%20in%20Manila.htm). On April 10, 1948, an operating agreement was signed in Thailand between the new Thai government of Phibun and Trans-Asiatic Airlines (Siam) Limited (Far Eastern Economic Review 35 [1962]: 329). Note that this was two months before NSC 10/2 formally directed the CIA to conduct “covert” rather than merely “psychological” operations and five months before the creation of the OPC in September 1948.

123. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 146.

124. FRUS, 1951, vol. 6, pt. 2, 1634; Fineman, A Special Relationship, 150–51. The memo described Bird as “the character who handed over a lot of military equipment to the Police, without any authorization as far as I can determine, and whose status with CAS [local CIA] is ambiguous, to say the least.”

125. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 133, 153. Handley’s otherwise well-informed account wholly ignores Bird’s role in preparing for the coup (The King Never Smiles, 113–15).

126. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 40, citing McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 162, 286–87. McCoy’s estimate of the KMT’s impact on expanding production is extremely conservative. According to Bertil Lintner, the foremost authority on the Shan states of Burma, “The annual production increased from a mere 30 tons at the time of independence [1945] to 600 tons in the mid-1950s” (Bertil Lintner, “Heroin and Highland Insurgency,” in War on Drugs: Studies in the Failure of U.S. Narcotics Policy, ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Alan A. Block [Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992], 288). Furthermore, the KMT exploitation of the Shan states led thousands of hill tribesmen to flee to northern Thailand, where opium production also increased.

127. Mills, Underground Empire, 789. Mills also quotes General Tuan as saying that the Thai Border Police “were totally corrupt and responsible for transportation of narcotics.” Mills comments, “This was of some interest, since the BPP, a CIA creation, was known to be controlled by SRF, the Bangkok CIA station” (Mills, Underground Empire, 780). For details on the CIA–BPP relationship in the 1980s, see Valentine’s account (from Drug Enforcement Administration sources), The Strength of the Pack, 254–55.

128. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 62–63, 193.

129. Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 443.

130. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 141.

131. Rangoon Nation, March 30, 1953; Cooper, Thailand, 123; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 174; Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 139.

132. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 174–76; Leary, Perilous Missions, 195–96; Lintner, Blood Brothers, 238; Life, December 7, 1953, 61.

133. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 177–78.

134. Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Boston: Richard Todd/Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 324.

135. According to McCoy (The Politics of Heroin, 178), a CAT pilot named Jack Killam “was murdered in 1951 after an opium deal went wrong and was buried in an unmarked grave by CIA [i.e., OPC] agent Sherman Joost”—the head of Sea Supply. Joseph Trento, citing CIA officer Robert Crowley, gives the almost certainly bowdlerized version that two “drunk and violent” CAT pilots “shot it out in Bangkok” (Trento, The Secret History of the CIA, 347). According to William Corson, “Several theories have been advanced by those familiar with the Killam case to suggest that the trafficking in drugs in Southeast Asia was used by the CIA as a self-financing device to pay for services and persons whose hire would not have been approved in Washington . . . or that it amounted to the actions of ‘rogue’ intelligence agents” (Corson, The Armies of Ignorance, 323). One consequence of these intrigues was that, as we have seen, OPC was abolished. At this time OPC Far East Director Richard Stilwell was rebuked severely by CIA Director Bedell Smith and transferred to the military. In the Pentagon, “by the end of 1981, Stilwell was running one of the most secret operations of the government” in conjunction with ex-CIA officer Theodore Shackley, a protégé of Stilwell’s former OPC deputy, Desmond Fitzgerald (Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network [New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005], 213). Stilwell was advising on the creation of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command.

136. Marchetti and Marks, CIA and the Cult, 383.

137. Hersh, The Old Boys, 301, quoting Polly (Mrs. Clayton) Fritchey. Other men prominent in the cabal responsible for Operation Paper were also Republican activists. One was Paul Helliwell, who became very prominent in Florida Republican Party politics, thanks in part to funds he received from Thailand as the Thai consul general in Miami. Harry Anslinger was a staunch Republican and owed his appointment as the first director of the FBN to his marriage to a niece of the Republican Party magnate (and Treasury Secretary) Andrew Mellon (Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 16). Donovan, married to a New York heiress and an OPC consultant in the late Truman years, had a lifelong history of activism in New York Republican Party politics.

138. A perhaps unanswerable deep historical question is whether some of these men, and especially Helliwell, were aware that KMT profits from the revived drug traffic out of Burma were funding the China Lobby’s heavy attack on the Truman administration in general and on Dean Acheson and George C. Marshall in particular. (We shall see that in the later 1950s, Donovan and Helliwell received funds from Phao Sriyanon for the lobbying of Congress, supplanting those of the moribund China Lobby. Cf. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 214–15.) Citing John Loftus and others, Anthony Summers has written that Allen Dulles, before joining the CIA, had contributed to the young Richard Nixon’s first election campaign and possibly had also supplied him with the explosive information that made Nixon famous: that former State Department officer Alger Hiss had known the communist Whittaker Chambers (Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swann, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon [New York: Viking, 2000], 62–63).

139. Sydney Souers (the first director of central intelligence or DCI, Central Intelligence Group, 1946) was born in Dayton, Ohio. Hoyt Vandenberg (director, Central Intelligence Group, 1946–1947) was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Roscoe Hillenkoetter (the third DCI and first director of the CIA, 1947–1949) was born in St. Louis. Walter Bedell Smith (the fourth DCI, 1949–1953) was born in Indianapolis.

140. For the details, see Scott, The War Conspiracy, 261. The one from Boston, Robert Amory, was no less Social Register, and his brother, Cleveland Amory, wrote a best-seller, Who Killed Society, 1960).

141. Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 52–53. It may be relevant that Bedell Smith himself was a right-wing Republican who reportedly once told Eisenhower that Nelson Rockefeller “was a Communist” (Smith, OSS, 367).

142. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 165–78; cf. Trento, The Secret History of the CIA, 71.

143. McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 184.

144. Darrell Berrigan, “They Smuggle Drugs by the Ton,” Saturday Evening Post, May 5, 1956, 42.

145. “Thailand: Not Rogue Cops but a Rogue System,” a statement by the Asian Human Rights Commission, AHRC-STM-031-2008, January 31, 2008, http://www

.ahrchk.net/statements/mainfile.php/2008statements/1359.

Chapter 4: Rollback, PARU, and Laos

1. Richard Helms to American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1971, quoted in Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press, 2001), 477.

2. Interview with Alfred McCoy by David Barsamian, February 17, 1990, http://www.lycaeum.org/drugwar/DARKALLIANCE/ciah3.html.

3. Eisenhower, in his first State of the Union Address in January 1953, threatened to “unleash Chiang.” But two years of problems over the KMT drug forces in Burma meant that both Chiang Kai-shek and his friend Chennault had lost favor with Washington bureaucrats. By 1953 an emerging consensus in Washington feared that the KMT scandal was contributing to the influence of communism in Burma and damaging U.S. interests. See FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, pt. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), 13–19, 46–49, 53–62.

4. Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), vol. 1, 85; cf. David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/Belknap Press, 2000), 11.

5. Summary of PSB D-23, Top Secret, “U.S. Psychological Strategy Based on Thailand,” September 14, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, pt. 2, 688–91. The complete document has never been published. It is contained in NARA, PSB Files, lot 62 D 333, file PSB D-23, also in the C. D. Jackson Records, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Series I, PSB-OCB Series, 1953–1954, box 1. Fineman summarizes and quotes from an earlier version of PSB D-23 in the Eisenhower Library, dated July 2; this copy is still sanitized with respect to Indochina (Daniel Fineman, A Special Relationship: The United States and Military Government in Thailand, 1947–1958 [Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997], 170–73, 299–300).

6. William O. Walker III, Opium and Foreign Policy: The Anglo-American Search for Order in Asia, 1912–1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 209.

7. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 170 (drafted); Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, 63, quoted in Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 55 (Luce).

8. This reflects the Gladio strategy of stay-behind forces that was already being instituted in Europe and Turkey.

9. FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, pt. 2, 689; Fineman, A Special Relationship, 172. In Fineman’s words, PSB D23 is “based on a variety of truths, half-truths, misconceptions, and outright falsehoods.” As he points out, the PSB D-23 strategy ended up supporting the non-Thai Hmong against the Tai-speaking lowland Lao. In retrospect this talk of the “ethnic bonds of the Thai peoples” makes about as much sense as developing a World War II strategy based on the “ethnic bonds” of the Dutch and the Germans or the French and the Italians. But at the time it did reflect Phibun’s nationalist vision of reuniting with Thai-related areas in Burma, Laos, and Cambodia, which the Japanese had allowed him to occupy in World War II.

10. Other explanations of the acronym PARU are Police Aerial Resupply Unit, Police Airborne Rescue Unit, and so on. All the titles tend to obscure the fact that PARU forces were paratroopers trained with an increasingly offensive military capacity.

11. Thomas Lobe, United States National Security Policy and Aid to the Thailand Police (Denver: Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver, 1977), 24, emphasis added. Lobe indicates that PARU had already been organized before Donovan’s arrival in 1953; this claim was later corroborated by Bill Lair in his Texas Tech interview (65: “The PARU? When I first went there [in March 1951], I opened this training school for guerilla warfare including parachute training”). In contrast, Fineman writes that “Donovan helped Phao found [PARU] in 1953” (A Special Relationship, 182). Another historian writes that PARU was created in 1958 (Timothy N. Castle, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam: United States Military Aid to the Royal Lao Government, 1955–1975 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1993], 37–38).

12. Texas Tech University, Vietnam Archive Oral History Project, interview with Bill Lair, December 11, 2001, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/star/images/OH/OH0200/OH0200-part1.pdf, 83–85.

13. Chairman of the Operations Coordinating Board Walter Bedell Smith (the former CIA director) to Cutler, September 11, 1953, in Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (SPANSA) Papers, NSC Series, Briefing Notes Subseries, SEA folder, box 16, Eisenhower Library, quoted in Fineman, A Special Relationship, 179. The quoted words do not occur in the truncated version of this memo reproduced in FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, pt. 2, 687–88. However, they are consistent with the thrust of that memo and still more with the document, PSB D-23, which it transmitted. We shall see below that there are questions whether in fact the National Security Council (NSC) had authorized the document’s proposed cross-border operations, which led to the Vietnam War.

14. Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 130.

15. Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 131.

16. Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 410.

17. Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 514, quoting British Foreign Service report of interview with Donovan.

18. Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan (New York: Times Books, 1982), 822–23.

19. Brown, The Last Hero, 824–25, emphasis added. In the same pages Brown notes that Donovan was “heading rapidly towards penury” (825) and that he was assisted by a cash gift from the CIA and Allen Dulles by January 1954 (828). Donovan also persuaded Allen Dulles to build up the local CIA station into “a miniature OSS” with “a number of ex-OSS men, among them [the controversial anthropologist and racial theorist] Carleton Coon and Gordon Browne” (825). Coon and Browne had worked with Muslim tribes in Morocco for the OSS. Coon’s wartime service for Donovan had also included a report “in which he advocated the formation of an elite corps of assassins” (252–53, 269).

20. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 181.

21. Interview with Bill Lair, 62.

22. Lobe, United States National Security Policy and Aid to the Thailand Police, 24.

23. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 134, 181. Fineman says that Donovan’s visits were “not so much to oversee Sea Supply’s work as to relive old times with his buddies.” But Fineman’s source for this questionable downplaying of Donovan’s interest (cf. Brown, The Last Hero, 825) is a personal interview with Bill Lair. The next paragraph contains one of the very few errors in Fineman’s excellent book: the claim that the BPP was “formed during Donovan’s tenure.” In fact, by nearly all accounts it had been formed back in 1951.

24. The camp was also visited by Desmond FitzGerald, by then head of the CIA’s Far Eastern Division, and by CIA Director Allen Dulles. Lair dates the Dulles visit as “probably ’53” (Interview with Bill Lair, 84).

25. Paul M. Handley, The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand’s Bhumipol Adulyadej (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 124.

26. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 141.

27. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 179–80, emphasis added; cf. FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, pt. 1, 689–90. Although it is clear that the opposition in the NSC was voiced by Admiral Radford on behalf of the Joint Chiefs, Donovan appears to have voiced all his frustration at the timid policies of Eisenhower (“not a great man”), the Dulles brothers, and Bedell Smith, who had “ruined” the CIA (Brown, The Last Hero, 826).

28. FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, pt. 1, 685–86.

29. FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, pt. 1, 732.

30. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 135.

31. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 182, emphasis added. Fineman cites a personal interview with Lair from which I deduce that “Washington” here means the CIA. Cf. Roger Warner, Back Fire: The CIA’s Secret War in Laos and Its Link to the War in Vietnam (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 31–32. The date that the BPP school relocated from Lopburi to Hua Hin was 1953.

32. Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 72, citing FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 13, 981–82.

33. Porter, Perils of Dominance, 84, citing FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, 528.

34. Porter, Perils of Dominance, 84; cf. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 197.

35. Porter, Perils of Dominance, 84, citing FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, 613.

36. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 247.

37. George Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (New York: Knopf, 1986), 44; Fineman, A Special Relationship, 183; FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, pt. 1, 364. According to Sucheng Chang, “The CIA had first heard of the Hmong [in Laos] when Edward Lansdale, one of its agents in Laos, became acquainted with the Hmong and their fighting ability” (Sucheng Chang, ed., Hmong Means Free: Life in Laos and America [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994], 29). A 1961 memo from Lansdale to Kennedy’s military adviser, General Maxwell Taylor, gives precise information about PARU, the BPP, the “splendid fighting men” of the Meos [Hmong] in Laos, and the “13 PARU teams, totaling 99 men, operating with the Meo guerrillas in Laos” (undated memo, apparently from July 1961, Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition, 2: 643–49).

38. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 182.

39. Interview with Bill Lair, 137–39.

40. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 184.

41. Fineman notes that the United States provided funds for two BPP-administered supplementary programs, a civilian-based Volunteer Defense Corps and a permanent program for schools, clinics, and infrastructure in northern hill tribe villages (Fineman, A Special Relationship, 182–83). But these programs fell under Phase I of PSB D-23, Some BPP trainees, however, were taught from the outset to “parachute behind enemy lines” (Lobe, United States National Security Policy and Aid to the Thailand Police, 24).

42. Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave, Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold (London: Verso, 2003), 3.

43. Amy B. Zegart, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 189, citing Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 172. See also U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report, April 26, 1976, 94th Cong., 2nd sess., Senate Report No. 94-755, bk. 4, 28–29.

44. Chalmers Johnson, “The 1955 System and the American Connection: A Bibliographic Introduction,” Japan Policy Research Institute, JPRI Working Paper no. 11, July 1995, http://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp11.html:

These issues reentered the news when the New York Times published [on October 9, 1994] its “C.I.A. Spent Millions to Support Japanese Right in 50’s and 60’s,” by Tim Weiner, Stephen Engelberg, and James Sterngold. This report did not say anything that had not been strongly suspected earlier, but it quoted some important participants, including Alfred C. Ulmer, Jr., the CIA’s operations chief for East Asia from 1955 to 1958; Roger Hilsman, the head of Intelligence and Research at the State Department in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations; and U. Alexis Johnson, American ambassador to Japan from 1966 to 1969. Each acknowledged making or authorizing payoffs to the LDP [Liberal Democratic Party] from 1955 to approximately 1972.

Cf. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 116–21: this is a watered-down account, alleging wrongly that the CIA connection to Yoshio Kodama (part of the global drug connection and a major source of illicit funds) “was severed” in 1953.

45. Norbert A. Schlei, “Japan’s ‘M-Fund’ Memorandum,” January 7, 1991, Japan Policy Research Institute, JPRI Working Paper no.11, July 1995, http://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp11.html:

In the early postwar period, General MacArthur saw that financial aid would be required in order to develop democratic institutions in Japan and to rebuild its devastated economy. Primarily because some of these funds would be used to finance political activity deemed necessary to get democratic forces off to a good start, General MacArthur became convinced that it was essential to establish a secret fund. Such a fund was duly created, utilizing primarily money and property that had been in the possession of the Japanese armed forces at war’s end after having been seized during the war in occupied areas such as China, Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines. This wealth, which was turned over to the U.S. at war’s end, was not on Japan’s books as a nation and was available for use by MacArthur without the need of any public legislative action in the United States.

46. Johnson, “The 1955 System and the American Connection.” I have not seen—and Worldcat is not aware of—Hajime Takano, M-Fund: The Unknown World of Underground Finance. Cf. Eiji Takemae: “As an academic, it’s not a subject about which I can publish” (“On the M-Fund,” Japan.Inc, http://www.japaninc.com/article

.php?articleID=1327).

47. Declan Hayes, The Japanese Disease: Sex and Sleaze in Modern Japan (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2005), 262. Cf. David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro, Yakuza: The Explosive Account of Japan’s Criminal Underworld (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1986), 68. Both Kodama and the Li Mi KMT troops in Burma were engaged in supplying the CIA with tungsten, a strategic metal then in short supply (Jonathan Marshall, “Opium, Tungsten, and the Search for National Security, 1940–52,” in Drug Control Policy: Essays in Historical and Comparative Perspective, ed. William O. Walker III [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992], 100–104).

48. For the extraordinary story of Schlei’s conviction, see Los Angeles Times, April 21, 2003; Johnson, “The 1955 System and the American Connection”; Seagrave and Seagrave, Gold Warriors, 130–37.

49. As mentioned previously, Corson mentions this as a possible explanation for the Killam murder and CIA “Thai flap” of 1952 (William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire [New York: Dial, 1977], 323).

50. Interview with Bill Lair, 137–39.

51. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 186.

52. Interview with Bill Lair, 139.

53. Darrell Berrigan, “They Smuggle Drugs by the Ton,” Saturday Evening Post, May 5, 1956, 42, 156–57. Before the tenth session (1955) of the UN Narcotics Commission, the U.S. representative noted that from 200 to 400 tons of opium were imported annually south into Thailand across the Burma–Laos border, of which only 100 tons were consumed in Thailand itself (UN Document E/CN.7/303/Rev. 1, 34). The mule train out of the barely accessible KMT camp must have been impressive. An earlier caravan carrying only six and a half tons required 180 mules (Andrew D. W. Forbes, “The ‘Cin-Ho’ [Yunnanese Chinese] Caravan Trade with North Thailand during the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of Asian History 27 [1987]: 25).

54. At the same time, his candid admission in his oral interview that he obtained the reward for seizing forty tons of opium was followed by a less candid explanation: “Sinay [his Thai counterpart] wanted to get married. He said he didn’t have enough money, but if we could do that we could make some money on this, see, from the reward. It’s always a split according to rank on how much. So, I got money out of it, too, because [sic] I never kept any of the things that they ever paid me. What I did was the money that I got out of that I used to buy some mules.” Using the reward cited by Berrigan ($1.2 million for a twenty-ton seizure), we can perhaps calculate that Lair’s seizure would have earned well over $2 million, enough to pay for a lot more than a wedding and “some mules.”

55. “An Interview with Willis Bird Jr,” http://www.irrawaddy.org/database/2004/vol12.5/interview.html.

56. Bertil Lintner, Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency since 1948 (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1999), 192; Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 51, 187, 192–93. But Phao’s role in the Thai drug economy was short lived compared to that of his banker, Chin Sophonpanich, a leader in the local Chinese Teochew community. According to an informed study, “Chin became Thailand’s richest man, the king of banks, and was listed as one of the world’s top ten tycoons” (“The Tycoons of Thailand,” http://www.geocities.com/wallstreet/district/1193/tycoon.htm).

57. Ross Y. Koen, The China Lobby in American Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1960), ix; discussion in Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 193–94.

58. Other examples include John Newman’s JFK and Vietnam (New York: Warner Books, 1992), and my own book The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1972), a copy of which once reportedly sold for $1,400.

59. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 214–15, cf. 206.

60. I do not know how much was paid to Helliwell by the Thai government, which was receiving some 15 percent or more of its income from its still licit opium monopoly in addition to the sums, perhaps larger, from the illegal drug traffic. Fineman tells us that Donovan, after retiring as ambassador was hired by Thailand “as an ‘economic advisor’ (i.e. lobbyist) . . . they gave him $25,000 for his ‘expenses’ and, over the remainder of [1955], reportedly added another $75,000” (Fineman, A Special Relationship, 206–7). Ever since, there have been scattered reports, usually not investigated, of dubious money from Asia reaching American politicians (as noted in chapter 2). For the noninvestigation of sources like the “Committee of United States Citizens in Asia for Nixon,” headed by Chennault’s widow Anna Chan Chennault, see Renata Adler, Canaries in the Mineshaft: Essays on Politics and Media (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 65–68. For the political contributions in the 1980s from the drug-tainted Pakistani Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), see chapter 7. For the contributions to Clinton in the 1990s from the BCCI-linked Riadys in Indonesia (the so-called Lippo-gate), see Peter James Rimmer and H. W. Dick, The City in Southeast Asia: Patterns, Processes and Policy (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), 215–16. The Riadys were protégés of the Indonesian godfather Lim Sioe Liong, who in turn had been launched with the assistance of Chin Sophonpanich (Joe Studwell, Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia [New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007], 95–96).

61. My personal impression is that the CIA may have been paying salaries by 1957, but this does not address the mystery of the 1953–1954 period. In any case, as a nominee of Phao’s enemy Sarit Thanarat, Sawai was by no means a neutral observer. In 1957 he attacked Sea Supply and PARU because of his and Sarit’s mistaken fears that Phao would use PARU to oppose Sarit’s successful ousting of Phao and assumption of power. The CIA used his attack to achieve its goal of severing its overt link to PARU, which had become notorious and unpopular. Sawai was also the cousin of the Laotian prince Phetsarath Ratananavongsa, who became Sarit’s and Thailand’s principal client in Laos (Fineman, A Special Relationship, 186). Many of the actions taken by PARU between 1953 and 1961, which from an American perspective would constitute steps taken to fight “communism,” must also have been seen by those controlling the traffic as steps consolidating a new protected channel for opium out of Laos while the Burmese slowly moved to drive the KMT out of Burma.

62. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 244–47; cf. interview with Bill Lair, 79–81. We now know that CIA had been withdrawing millions of dollars from U.S. economic aid funds since the beginning of the Marshall Plan in the late 1940s (Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 28–29).

63. As late as 1972, after more than a year of major revelations about the CIA’s drug assets in Laos, there was only a single marginal and nonpolitical reference to this in Charles Stevenson’s The End of Nowhere: American Policy toward Laos since 1954 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972). Stevenson’s book was originally a Harvard dissertation for Professor Richard Neustadt.

64. FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, pt. 2, deals with Burma, the Philippines, and Thailand. The CIA was at the center of U.S. foreign policy in all three countries during this period. Yet in this 742-page volume, there are only two passing references to the Central Intelligence Agency (39, 681) and none at all to its operations. This is characteristic of the FRUS volumes for 1952–1954, in which the CIA’s overthrow of Mossadeq in Iran is not mentioned.

65. For decades academic books by Americans about Thailand were striking in their determination to mention neither opium nor the CIA. See, e.g., David Wyatt’s otherwise useful Thailand: A Short History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). It may be relevant that “over a thousand books were produced, subsidized or sponsored by the CIA before the end of 1967” and that some of these books were apparently area studies by academics (U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report, April 26, 1976, 94th Cong., 2nd sess., Senate Report No. 94-755, bk.1, Foreign and Military Intelligence, 453).

66. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 183.

67. The biggest Hmong immigration into Thailand was after World War II, when with other hill tribes they started “planting poppies all over Thailand’s mountainous northern provinces” (Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 118).

68. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 183.

69. Castle, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam, 36: “Small groups of Lao soldiers had, unofficially, been trained [at U.S. expense] at Thai military bases since 1957.”

70. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 183. According to Warner, it was among the Hmong (“Meo”) of northern Thailand that PARU and Lair first heard of Vang Pao (Warner, Back Fire, 32).

71. For a more detailed account of U.S. interventions in 1958–1960, in which CAT played a significant role, see Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 128–33.

72. William M. Leary, “Foreword,” in Covert Ops: The CIA’s Secret War in Laos, by James E. Parker (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), x. Leary’s account of “CIA Air Operations in Laos, 1955–1974,” is posted on the CIA’s website at https://www.cia

.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/winter99-00/art7.html.

73. Martin E. Goldstein, American Policy toward Laos (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973), 135: “In 1956, for example, the United States spent $47.7 million on defense support [for Laos] and only $1 million on technical cooperation.”

74. Editorial note, FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. 16, 478.

75. Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base, “Escalation in Laos,” http://udornrtafb

.tripod.com/id15.html.

76. John Morrocco, Thunder from Above: Air War, 1941–1968 (Boston: Boston Press, 1984), 10.

77. Lucian R. W. Pye, “Armies in the Process of Political Modernization,” in The Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries, ed. John J. Johnson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 87–89. At the same conference Guy Pauker of RAND urged Indonesian officers present to “strike, sweep their house clean” (224), quoted in Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965–1967,” Pacific Affairs 58, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 239–64. Some of those present played important roles in the subsequent Indonesian coup of 1965.

78. Grant Evans, A Short History of Laos: The Land in Between (Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2002), 113.

79. Martin Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 108. William Leary has written on the CIA’s website that “the appearance of the Americans coincided with the outbreak of fighting between the FAR and Pathet Lao.” But, as we have seen, the first U.S. troops arrived in March, while the fighting began only some time after May.

80. Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos, 104.

81. Paper prepared by Assistant White House Staff Secretary John S. D. Eisenhower, FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. 16, 548.

82. Telegram of August 9, 1959, to the State Department, FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. 16, 555–56.

83. Dulles briefing to National Security Council, August 6, 1959, FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. 16, 553.

84. Bernard Fall, Street without Joy (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1964), 334.

85. Bernard Fall, Anatomy of a Crisis: The Laotian Crisis of 1960–1961 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 115.

86. Hugh Toye, Laos: Buffer State or Battleground (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 126.

87. Leann Grabavoy Almquist, Joseph Alsop and American Foreign Policy: The Journalist as Advocate (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993), 9–10, cf. 76.

88. Almquist, Joseph Alsop and American Foreign Policy, 57.

89. Almquist, Joseph Alsop and American Foreign Policy, 80.

90. Hersh, The Old Boys, 307–8, 438.

91. After I published a reference to “Alsop’s ‘invasion’” in 1970, one of my contacts, probably at the New York Review of Books, had a mutual friend ask Alsop about his 1959 scare article. Alsop allegedly replied in effect that he was just a team player trying to help out. Helping whom to achieve what, one wonders.

92. Fall, Street without Joy, 334–35; cf. Fall, Anatomy of a Crisis, 136; Denis Warner, The Last Confucian (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 210.

93. Leary, “Foreword,” x.

94. Scott, The War Conspiracy, 72. Cf. Leary’s further details about the CIA’s preparations on the CIA’s website: “The summer of 1959 saw the introduction into Laos of a US Special Forces Group, codenamed Hotfoot, under the command of Lt. Col. Arthur ‘Bull’ Simons. Twelve Mobile Training Teams took up duties at Vientiane, Luang Prabang, Savannekhet, and Pakse. The appearance of the Americans coincided with the outbreak of fighting between the FAR and Pathet Lao. In light of these developments, CIA officials in Laos requested additional air transport resources” (William M. Leary, “CIA Air Operations in Laos, 1955–1974,” https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/winter99-00/art7.html, emphasis added).

95. Dulles NSC briefing of December 23, 1959, FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. 16, 491.

96. Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos, 109–10.

97. Arthur J. Dommen, Conflict in Laos: The Politics of Neutralization (New York: Praeger, 1971), 133; Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos, 110–11. Stuart-Fox cites the example of Sam Neua province, where the Pathet Lao was in power, yet their candidate received thirteen votes, while the CDNI’s received 6,508.

98. Castle, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam, 23. I have shown elsewhere that Eisenhower’s approval of the Air America flights, like his earlier approval of the PSB D-23 rollback program, was belated, ratifying flights that had begun months earlier (Scott, The War Conspiracy, 78–85, expanding slightly on Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 133–38).

99. Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos, 114.

100. Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos, 115.

101. Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos, 116. According to Grant Evans, “some 600 people were killed” (A Short History of Laos, 119).

102. Warner, Back Fire, 32–33 (PARU-trained troops); Castle, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam, 38 (PARU technicians). PARU may also have supplied training to the Cambodian Khmer Serai irregulars, recruited in South Vietnam, who according to Wilfred Burchett raided Cambodia from bases in Thailand in 1956 and 1957 (Wilfrid Burchett, The Second Indochina War: Cambodia and Laos [New York: International Publishers, 1970], 41). By 1959, PARU was training South Vietnamese CIDG irregular troops.

103. Leary, “Foreword,” xii.

104. Warner, Back Fire, 32–33.

105. According to Hmong sources, General Harry C. Aderholt was also present at the Lair-Vang Pao meeting, which produced a signed agreement with the Hmong on behalf of the U.S. government. See Hmong International Human Rights Watch’s Thamkrabok Support Group Proposal Presented before the State Department’s Bureau for Population, Refugees, and Migration in Washington, D.C., October 15, 2003, http://www.hmongihrw.org/october_15_2003.htm. So, according to John Prados, was CIA officer Stuart Methven, who had previously contacted the Hmong for political purposes (John Prados, Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby [New York: Oxford University Press, 2003], 97). Prados writes that it was CIA officer Stewart Methven who convinced Vang Pao “over a series of visits . . . to ally with the CIA” (John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA [Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006], 346). But Tim Weiner agrees with Warner that it was Bill Lair who “discovered” Vang Pao (Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 212). So do Arthur J. Dommen (The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001], 432) and Keith Quincy (Harvesting Pa Chay’s Wheat: The Hmong and America’s Secret War in Laos [Spokane: Eastern Washington University Press, 2000], 176–77). Cf. finally United States, Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence (U.S.), Studies in Intelligence, 1999, 77.

106. Interview with Bill Lair, 85; Warner, Back Fire, 36–47; cf. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 308. Citing a personal interview with former Ambassador Leonard Unger, Fineman writes (A Special Relationship, 183) that “the CIA, with Thai help” began forming and training Vang Pao’s army “around 1958” (i.e., not in 1960 as alleged by Lair, Warner, Weiner, Castle, and McCoy).

107. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 184.

108. Warner, Back Fire, 377. Starting in 1963, Hmong and PARU troops were also used by Lair in support of Lao neutralist troops under Kong Le. In August 1963, Lair sent in PARU demolition specialists with Hmong to destroy the strategic route N7 linking North Vietnam to the Plaine des Jarres. See Quincy, Harvesting Pa Chay’s Wheat, chap. 8.

109. Time, March 17, 1961; discussion in Scott, The War Conspiracy, 78.

110. Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos, 116.

111. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 290, cf. 317–27. McCoy portrays Vang Pao as the personal financier of at least one shipment of heroin refined in a laboratory at Long Tieng, the CIA-Hmong base (284–85, cf. 290–91).

112. Interview with Bill Lair, 58.

113. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 133. As noted earlier, their common Thai brother-in-law, Sitthi Savetsila, had been recruited by Bird in 1950 into his “secret committee of leading military and political figures to develop an anticommunist strategy,” bypass the U.S. embassy, and lobby the United States for increased military assistance. The committee also included Phao, Phao’s father-in-law Phin Choonhavan, and Sarit. As a result, Sitthi “began his long service as one of Phao’s closest aides-de-camp and translator.” Later, from 1980 to 1990, Sitthi served as Thailand’s foreign minister under General Prem, Thailand’s last military ruler (Fineman, A Special Relationship, 133).

114. Warner, Back Fire, 31; interview with Bill Lair, 67.

115. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 184. My statement is not intended as a personal innuendo against Lair, who unlike Phao, ended his days without great wealth. I am persuaded of Lair’s personal idealism both by the sympathetic portrait of him in Warner and by his own words in his oral history interview, cited previously.

116. I was told years ago by an American from Asia that William and Willis Bird were cousins but have never found further corroboration of it. According to a monograph on C-46 aircraft, “Bird and Sons was a proprietary company of the US Central Intelligence Agency, operating a variety of aircraft, mainly light types, in South-East Asia. . . . In fact Bird & Sons, Inc, a private airline run by William H. Bird, was the aviation division of A Bird and Sons, the San Francisco heavy construction company operating in Vietnam and Laos” (http://www.laoveterans.com/about.html). I can find nothing more about A Bird and Sons. But after retiring from Thailand in the 1970s, William Bird purchased and operated the Hotel Leamington in Oakland, California.

117. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 569, citing, in part, Scott, The War Conspiracy, 207–8; Leary, Perilous Missions, 129–31.

118. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Government Operations, U.S. Aid Operations in Laos, House Resolution 546, 86th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), 2; Goldstein, American Policy toward Laos, 186–90.

119. New York Times, February 2, 1962. As a poet, I see in this as a metonymy for what was happening to America. Willis Bird’s life in Thailand continued undisturbed until his death in 1991—inconvenienced only by his inability to return to the United States. Both the attorney general who had the temerity to indict him and his brother who tried vainly to neutralize Laos were murdered. Meanwhile, in Laos, Bird’s brother-in-law, CIA operative James W. (“Bill”) Lair, negotiated an agreement with Hmong leader Vang Pao that opened up the Hmong opium areas to Air American flights and drug shipments (William Leary, “CIA Air Operations in Laos, 1955–1974”; http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/winter99-00/art7.html).

120. Fall, Anatomy of a Crisis, 99.

121. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 194–95.

122. Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 450.

123. Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 451.

124. Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 452, citing State Department dispatches and telegrams; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 349.

125. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 352, citing New York Times, August 11, 1971.

126. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 349; Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 235.

127. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 235.

128. Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 451–53.

129. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 177.

130. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 234.

131. Tzang Yawnghwe, The Shan of Burma: Memoirs of a Shan Exile (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1987), 124–49.

132. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 202, citing CIA, Office of Current Intelligence, Chinese Irregulars in Southeast Asia (NLK-77-320, July 29, 1961). Victor Kaufman estimates that 2,000 to 3,000 of the irregulars remained in Laos, of which some joined the military (Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 453).

133. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 128–38.

134. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 151; Toye, Laos, 182. Both the London Times (May 16, 1962) and the New York Times (May 7, 1962) commented at the time that Phoumi concentrated his troops in Nam Tha, against U.S. advice, “in order to provoke an attack” (Goldstein, American Policy toward Laos, 256).

135. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 151–52.

136. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 151–52, citing London Times, May 24, 1962, and May 31, 1962. I agree with McCoy that in this crisis Phoumi used the drug traffic to finance his army (McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 300). I am not convinced that he could at this time have anticipated profits adequate to make up for the CIA subsidy.

137. Kaiser, American Tragedy, 127–30, 135–38; FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 23, 936–39, 968–69. Cf. William Shawcross, “How Tyranny Returned to Thailand,” New York Review of Books, December 9, 1976, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/8648: “In 1964 the US began to build in Thailand the bases that were essential to the prosecution of the Vietnam war; the country was transformed into ‘a land-based aircraft carrier.’ The bombing of Vietnam began from Thai bases in 1965; Thai troops (paid by the US) ‘volunteered’ to fight in Vietnam and Laos.”

138. Scott, The War Conspiracy, xiii–xiv, 3–41; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 109–11, 119–58. For independent corroboration of the role of Laos in leading to the Vietnam War, see Kaiser, American Tragedy, 20–35: “Eisenhower’s . . . policies left his successor facing an immediate decision between war and peace” (34). But like almost all archival historians, Kaiser underestimates the role of the drug traffic and of the CIA’s airline Air America in steering events in Laos; cf. my comments in Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 13–14.

139. Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 451.

140. Prados, Lost Crusader, 169. Unlike the Hmong, the lowland Lao were devout Buddhists for whom killing under any circumstances was abhorrent. Their American advisers found this quality to be a mark of the Laotians’ inferior civilization.

141. Roger Warner, Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America’s Clandestine War in Laos (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1996), 254.

142. Quincy, Harvesting Pa Chay’s Wheat, 321.

143. Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Pack: The People, Politics and Espionage Intrigues That Shaped the DEA (Springfield, OR: TrineDay, 2009), 77; Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs (London: Verso, 2004), 421–22.

144. Leary, Perilous Missions, 81–82.

145. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 133–56, 196.

146. FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. 16, 720.

147. FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. 16, 708, 720; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 146.

148. FRUS, vol. 16, 893.

149. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 311; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 134–35.

150. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 131, 135. In addition, the U-2 incident occurred when Eisenhower was artificially isolated outside Washington as part of a rehearsal of “Doomsday” plans for response to a nuclear attack (James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency [New York: Doubleday, 2001], 49–53).

151. FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. 16, 1009; Kaiser, American Tragedy, 29–30; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 129–37.

152. The same motive was later attributed by CIA pilot Gary Powers to his ill-fated and unprecedented U-2 flight across the entire Soviet Union in 1960 (Scott, The War Conspiracy, 87, 112–13, 136).

153. Henrik Krüger, trans. Jerry Meldon, The Great Heroin Coup—Drugs, Intelligence, and International Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1980), 16; cf. Alan A. Block, Masters of Paradise: Organized Crime and the Internal Revenue Service in the Bahamas (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1991), 169–70.

154. Charles J. V. Murphy, “Cuba: The Record Set Straight,” Fortune, September 1961, 94. Discussion in Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 136–37; Paul W. Blackstock, The Strategy of Subversion (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 250.

155. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 300.

156. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 40.

157. Alan A. Block and Constance A. Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire: Global Banking, Money Laundering, and International Organized Crime (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 39–44; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 61, 67. Castle’s parent bank, Mercantile Bank and Trust, was founded by Helliwell in 1962.

158. See chapter 10; see also John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism (London: Pluto, 1999), 81–161.

159. In addition, there are more than 4 million addicts in Iran, a country with a longer history of addiction.

160. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 147–60. Phao “used the CIA to his advantage, while the CIA exploited his willingness to perform operations that served US interests” (Surachart Bamrungsuk, United States Foreign Policy and Thai Military Rule, 1947–1977 [Bangkok: Editions Duang Kamol, 1988], 62).

161. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 105–6; Sterling Seagrave, Lords of the Rim: The Invisible Empire of the Oversea Chinese (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995), chap. 10.

162. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 162.

163. Bamrungsuk, United States Foreign Policy and Thai Military Rule, 1947–1977, 63.

164. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 156.

165. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 157.

166. Catherine Lamour and Michel R. Lamberti, Les grandes manoeuvres de l’opium (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 108–11.

167. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 305.

Chapter 5: Laos

1. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 212, 253–55, 344. Weiner writes that the CIA under Hecksher in the 1950s “installed a new Prime minister, Prince Souvanna Phouma” (212). He actually means Phoumi Nosavan, who briefly overthrew Souvanna Phouma. However Weiner does note that in Thailand Donovan’s boost to CIA covert operations was helped by the “Thai national police force, whose commander [Phao Sriyanon, not named] was an opium king” (257).

2. Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 258–61 (Phoumi and Ouane), 277–81 (Hmong); Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press, 2001), 299–302, 317–21. Cf. Roger Warner, Back Fire: The CIA’s Secret War in Laos and Its Link to the War in Vietnam (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 121, 366–67.

3. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, 14, 353; The Politics of Heroin, 23, 383.

4. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 15.

5. Burton Hersh, The Old Boys (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 300, citing Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984), 67.

6. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, 130. In his 2001 edition, McCoy is much more explicit: “In Washington [actually in Miami] OPC official Paul Helliwell, a lawyer, formed the Sea Supply Corporation to mask the arms shipments” [to Li Mi’s drug-trafficking troops in Burma] (168). I assume that McCoy’s sources in the 1970s never mentioned Helliwell to him, but I had already identified Helliwell and Sea Supply in my own book, The War Conspiracy, which appeared a few months before McCoy’s (“Sea Supply Inc. was organized in Miami, Florida, where its counsel, Paul L. E. Helliwell, doubled after 1951 as the counsel for the C.V. Starr insurance interests, and also as Thai consul in Miami”; The War Conspiracy [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972], 210).

7. “An Interview with Alfred W. McCoy,” Education Forum, http://educationfo

rum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6941&pid=63550&mode=threaded&start=#entry63550, emphasis added.

8. James Mills, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Government Embrace (New York: Dell, 1986), 1142–43; cf. 727, 731.

9. Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Pack: The People, Politics and Espionage Intrigues That Shaped the DEA (Springfield, OR: TrineDay, 2009), 94; cf. Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs (London: Verso, 2004), 332–34.

10. Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 73.

11. Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 164; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 199, 212. One cannot be surprised that some Americans on the scene, witnessing the protected flow of drugs, subsequently enriched themselves from Southeast Asian heroin. Two notable examples are Bernard Houghton and Michael Hand, who moved to Australia and helped found the major drug-trafficking Nugan Hand Bank. Other veterans of covert operations in the area, such as former Bangkok CIA Chief Robert Jantzen, joined them there. Still other veterans engaged in business with the bank, including Theodore Shackley, once the CIA station chief in Laos, and his associate Thomas Clines, once chief of the CIA base with Vang Pao at Long Cheng. See Alfred W. McCoy, Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organized Crime in Australia (Sydney: Harper and Row, 1980); Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots (New York: Norton, 1987).

12. Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 77. He describes Nam Yu as the site of the CIA’s “Strategic Intelligence Network 118A,” where CIA officer William Young had inserted two Lahu tribesmen into KMT caravans penetrating China. Cf. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 420–22; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 335–37.

13. “Lima Sites,” LaoVeterans.com, http://www.laoveterans.com/about.html; Lao Trip Report, May 5–13, 2008, Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood Organization, http://www.tlc-brotherhood.org/Assistance/Laos%20Assistance%20Reports/May%205%20may%202008.htm.

14. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 337.

15. William Leary, “The Death of a Legend,” http://www.air-america.org/In

_Remembrance/poe.shtml. Poe’s superior at Sea Supply, Joost’s successor Walter Kuzmak, was a longtime close friend of Howard Hunt; he testified on Hunt’s behalf when Hunt sued a newspaper for saying that he had been in Dallas on the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated (Lisa Pease, “James Angleton Part II,” in The Assassinations, ed. James DiEugenio, Lisa Pease, Judge Joe Brown, and Zachary Sklar [Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003], 196). Kuzmak had been airdropped on an OSS mission into Thailand in July 1945 at a time when Hunt was at the OSS station in Kunming (E. Bruce Reynolds, Thailand’s Secret War: The Free Thai, OSS, and SOE during World War II [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 360).

16. Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 170.

17. Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 388, citing interview with Tony Poe and Albert Habib Memorandum Report, FBN, January 27, 1966, cf. 77, 170; Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 422.

18. Roger Warner, Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America’s Clandestine War in Laos (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1996), 264.

19. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 296–97.

20. Bertil Lintner, Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency since 1948 (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1999), 235–36.

21. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 440, 455. In 1993, Wei Xuekang, relocated to Burma, was indicted in New Jersey and later convicted in absentia for a shipment of 680 kilograms (a ton and a third) of heroin (Bangkok Post, June 27, 1999; Nation [Bangkok], September 9, 2003). Seven years later it was reported that he had become a banker by purchasing 80 percent of the Yangon-based May Flower Bank (Asian Economic News, July 24, 2000).

22. Martin Booth, Dragon Syndicates: The Global Phenomenon of the Triads (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1999), 175, 177, 179; cf. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 279, 399–401, 405–8.

23. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 310–11. Ma Sik-yu died in Taiwan in 1992. Cf. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 405–6: “Shortly after the Ma brothers’ flight from Hong Kong in 1977, the Hong Kong Star cited DEA sources to report that ‘suspected syndicate boss Ma Sik-yu was deeply involved with a network that spied on China for Taiwan.’ . . . Citing sources in the colony’s Investigation Bureau, the Star further claimed that agents of the People’s Republic of China ‘played a big part in giving Hong Kong police evidence to smash the alleged syndicate, which led to the arrest of ten in Hong Kong and Ma Sik-yu in Taiwan.’”

24. Independent, January 20, 1998, http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v98.n058

.a10.html: “According to the reports, which were accompanied by a picture of Mr Ma’s son with John Major, the payment was made in an effort to smooth Ma senior’s return to Hong Kong from Taiwan, where he has lived as a fugitive since 1978. Three months after the donation was made, Ma Ching-kwan, Mr Ma’s son, was invited to dine with Mr Major at Downing Street. The Oriental Daily News published a copy of the invitation and the menu—cucumber and tarragon soup, roast lamb with rosemary and orange and caramelised lemon tart. . . . Last night the Conservative Party refused to discuss individual donors but a spokesman said donations were never accepted with conditions attached. ‘We will categorically say that the Conservative Party did not or would not accept donations conditional on favours,’ the spokesman said. . . . Mr Major’s office said he was in the United States yesterday and, therefore, not available to explain why CK Ma’s presence at Downing Street on 27 September 1994 was not listed at the time as one of the former Prime Minister’s official engagements.”

25. Alain Labrousse, La drogue, l’argent et les armes (Paris: Fayard, 1991), 240–44.

26. Mark Jacobson, “The Return of Superfly,” New York Magazine, August 2000, http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/3649. Cf. http://www.wanttoknow

.info/militarysmuggledheroin.

27. Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 171; cf. 103.

28. Michael Levine, “Mainstream Media: The Drug War’s Shills,” in Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, ed. Borjesson (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), 261–64.

29. William J. Chambliss, On the Take: From Petty Crooks to Presidents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 153.

30. Joseph J. Trento, The Secret History of the CIA (New York: Random House/Forum, 2001), 345.

31. FBI document 92-2781-1276, April 24, 1968; NSA #124-10197-10282, http://www

.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=89707&relPageId=2; FBI document 92-2781-1262, February 16, 1968; NSA #124-10205-10242, http://www

.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=128895&relPageId=2 (Roselli).

32. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 253.

33. Inspector-General’s Report on CIA Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, NARA #104-10213-10101, 58; cf. David Corn, Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA’s Crusades (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 67. Corn writes that Harvey passed the keys to Roselli personally, but the CIA records indicate that Roselli, like Harvey and Shackley, was only there as an observer along with O’Connell and was unaware that Harvey and Shackley were also present.

34. House Select Committee on Assassinations, Report, 173; Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II: The New Revelations in U.S. Government Files, 1994–1995 (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2007), 59–63.

35. Full disclosure: In 1987, I wrote the following: “The Christic suit charges that Shackley facilitated arrangements to sell opium from the Laotian guerrillas to Santo Trafficante, and that ‘in return, Shackley’s organization received a fixed percentage of the income’” (Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era [Boston: South End Press, 1987], 36). I now believe that on this point the Christic suit affidavit was unfounded and its author misinformed or disinformed by his CIA source.

36. David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (New York: Free Press, 2007), 109.

37. Corn, Blond Ghost, 85. Ed Wilson told Joseph Trento that Morales “would do anything for Shackley—from blowing up a radio tower in the Dominican Republic to paying off the drug lords. He was totally devoted to Shackley” (Trento, The Secret History of the CIA, 344).

38. Long after 1963, Morales remarked to a Harvard-trained lawyer, Robert Walton, in the presence of a third witness: “Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” (Lamar Waldron with Thom Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK [New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006], 766–67, 808, 818–19; Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation [New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1993], 383–90). Walton later told BBC reporter Shane Sullivan on camera that “Morales told him ‘I was in Dallas when I, when we got that mother fucker [JFK], and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard [RFK]” (Talbot, Brothers, 399). I should make it clear that I attach little or no evidentiary value to the content of Ragano’s and Morales’s alleged remarks. Like comparable statements from Howard Hunt, David Phillips, and John Martino, they may well be disinformation, like the aluminum chaff released by bombers to produce false echoes on enemy radar. What remains of interest is that all five of these men were associated with Shackley’s CIA station in Miami, and all five, in one way or another, were personally connected to the CIA’s global drug connection.