>       by geocities.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id UAA00966
>       for <[log in to unmask]>; Tue, 14 Oct 1997 20:03:19 -0700 (PDT)
>Resent-Date: Tue, 14 Oct 1997 20:03:19 -0700 (PDT)
>Resent-From: [log in to unmask]
>Resent-Message-Id: <[log in to unmask]>
>Received: from discuss by dispatch.mail-list.com with local (Exim 1.71 #2)
>       id 0xLJGN-0004N0-00; Wed, 15 Oct 1997 02:32:43 +0000
>Message-Id: <[log in to unmask]>
>X-Sender: [log in to unmask] (Unverified)
>X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Light Version 3.0.3 (16)
>Date: Tue, 14 Oct 1997 21:32:25
>To: [log in to unmask]
>From: Larry-Jennie <[log in to unmask]>
>Mime-Version: 1.0
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>Subject: [cia-drugs] Alfred McCoy Interview (1 of 2)
>Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
>X-Unsubscribe: send a blank message to [log in to unmask]
>Precedence: bulk
>
>(1 of 2)
>reprinted permission of Prevailing Winds Research
>pob 23511 santa barbara ca  93121  805 899 3433
>
>The CIA & The Politics of Narcotics:
>An Interview with Alfred McCoy by David Barsamian
>(conducted at University of Wisconsin-Madison, February 17,1990)
>
>Barsamian: This is David Barsamian and my guest is Alfred McCoy,
>author of "The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia" and "Drug Traffic:
>Narcotics and Organized Crime in Australia". Alfred McCoy is
>Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
>
>In your book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, you
>demarcate very carefully that the United States was poised at
>the end of World War II, in 1945, to... I don't have your exact
>words ... to terminate the problem of drug addiction in the
>United States and it could have done so but for forces that
>I'd like you to discuss - was unable to do so.
>
>McCoy: The problem with America's failed chance at essentially
>reducing if not eliminating drugs as a problem was a contradiction
>between the needs of domestic policy and the national security
>state. After World War II the United States became a global power
>and set up a number of agencies to exercise this global power,
>most importantly the executive agency known as the U.S. Central
>Intelligence Agency when it was ultimately formed in 1948. The
>CIA, in order to conduct its campaign against communism, which
>was seen as an overweening evil that had to be stopped, was
>willing to ally with anybody and everybody that could provide
>during what was seen as a critical period, some strength, some
>support in the global struggle against communism.
>
>In Europe and Asia the CIA allied themselves with major drug
>brokers and organized crime syndicates. In sum, what they did
>was to create a mainline flow of narcotics from the Middle East
>through Europe to the United States which dominated America's drug
>markets until the 1960s. At the same time, the CIA was forging
>alliances and protecting the traffickers in Europe, for reasons
>of intelligence.  They also formed similar alliances in Asia -
>alliances which were actually deeper and had much more profound
>and lasting impact on the Asian drug trade.
>
>As the European trade began to diminish in the late 1960s and
>early 1970s, the second stream, the flow of Asian drug traffic
>came into the United States and supplanted the old Turkey-
>Marseilles heroin connection. But, ultimately, when you look
>at the source of supply and the politics that provided drugs to
>America in the post-war era, you came down to this contradiction
>between the weak drug policy and same kind of vague commitment
>to doing something about drugs versus a very high profile, very
>important effort to contain communism globally. In this balance
>between an inarticulated, poorly formed narcotics policy and a
>very clear national goal of containing communism, narcotics
>policy was barely considered.
>
>The CIA in this era was dealing with governments, intelligence
>chiefs, warlords, gangsters, traffickers of all sorts - good
>character was not considered of moment. The only thing that
>counted during the period from the late 1940s through the late
>1960s was containing communism.
>
>Barsamian: You trace the involvement of the Mafia - the U.S.
>Mafia - in the promotion of narcotics trafficking in the
>United States. How did the politics get involved with the
>Mafia?
>
>McCoy: We have to step back a bit to the origin of the drug
>problem. Since the 1800s western societies - Europe, Australia,
>America - have had very extensive drug problems. Now, you can
>really divide the western world's century of mass drug abuse into
>two convenient periods. From the late 1800s to the present we
>can split it down the middle. From about the 1870s when you get
>big-time mass consumption of narcotics to the 1920s drugs were
>legal. The name "heroin" for example, was a trade name coined
>by the Bayer company. In 1898 they came up with a new product
>which seemed to be very good for respiratory ailments. They
>put it on the market and called it "heroin." That's where the
>term comes from. It's a trade name coined by one of the world's
>major pharmaceutical manufacturers.
>
>The next year, 1899, they came up with another nifty new product
>that seemed to do the same thing for headaches that heroin did
>for respiratory ailments. They called the new product "aspirin."
>That one's worked out pretty well. So we got one winner and one
>loser during this same period of the global boom of pharmaceuticals.
>
>It wasn't until the 1920s that there was a general consensus that
>law would be used to regulate personal behavior. So alcohol,
>gambling and narcotics were, during the 1920s, globally subject
>to regulation. So you have laws on the books in the United
>Kingdom, Australia, the United States - not only the nations
>themselves but their several states and provinces - banning the
>use of narcotics.
>
>Narcotics moved from being a personal choice - something you
>picked up at your local pharmacy, your local drug store - to
>being a criminal act.  The process by which it becomes illegal
>varied in every country and, in some cases every state. By the
>time you get to about 1930, drugs were illegal around the globe.
>
>So, suddenly, who's moving the drugs? Well, it's syndicates. The
>abolition or the prohibition of alcohol, partial prohibition of
>alcohol in some countries and full prohibition in this country,
>combined with the prohibition of narcotics, transferred an
>enormous sector of the legitimate economy to syndicates. So
>that's where you got the rise of organized crime.
>
>In 1932 the United States pulled back from the prohibition on
>alcohol It was gradual, it was slow, but the syndicates got out
>of the alcohol trade. But we've never pulled back from the
>prohibition of narcotics. It's remained illegal.  That prohibition
>has become permanent. So, during the 1930s. the syndicates began
>moving into narcotics. They were of secondary importance
>initially to alcohol, but once alcohol became legal after 1932,
>narcotics became correspondingly more important.
>
>During World War II things changed. All global commerce was
>disrupted. Military controls and war zones intervened with the
>normal trafficking routes. The drug trade was totally disrupted
>in the United States. In Asia it continued. The Japanese military
>intelligence dominated the manufacture and distribution of heroin
>from China. They used it very explicitly as a weapon against
>the Chinese resistance. They flooded China with heroin, financed
>all of their intelligence operations and special operations
>from the drug trade.
>
>But in the United States and Europe, the drug traffic was
>disrupted. It largely disappeared. Survival had to do with,
>in part, some short-term tactical alliances with the Mafia.
>In 1943 the United States invaded Sicily as one of its two major
>invasions of Europe, a major event in the history of World War II,
>secondary to D-Day. That leap from North Africa and fighting up
>the boot of Italy, bloody horrible campaign that it was, was
>something that really concerned American military planners at
>the time. They apparently - the U.S. Navy in particular - forged
>a short-term political alliance with Lucky Luciano who'd been
>convicted for operating a brothel that employed something like
>a thousand prostitutes in New York City; he was in Dannemara
>State Prison in New York. The Navy cut a deal with him and he
>used his contacts with the Sicilian Mafia to get Mafia support
>because the Mafia politically dominated western Sicily which
>was the area where U.S. forces landed.
>
>Mussolini, for reasons just purely of state, couldn't abide
>the Mafia. They didn't do what he wanted. He tried to break them.
>Under the U.S. military occupation of Sicily, the Mafia revived.
>There were some American mafiosi deported to Sicily after the war.
>They provided links back to the United States with their confreres
>in organized crime. Moreover, as the United States' campaign
>against communism got underway, particularly in the Mediterranean
>basin - in Italy and southern France - the United States formed
>tactical alliances with Corsican syndicates and with the Mafia
>too. It served as a counterweight to communist dockworker
>influence in places like Marseilles particularly.
>
>The net result is that as a result of wartime policy and postwar
>anti-communist policy, you got a revival of organized crime
>operating initially under some kind of U.S. military-government
>protection and ultimately under CIA protection.
>
>As the trafficking routes got re-established through the Middle
>East and Europe, ultimately to the United States, a revived,
>restored Mafia in Sicily, Corsican syndicates in Southern France,
>were major participants in this traffic.
>
>Half a world away, in Asia, you get a similar phenomenon. We can
>talk about that if you want.
>
>Barsamian: In fact, the recolonization of Indochina by the French
>at the end of World War II in 1946 led to what you call the first
>Indochina war, and the establishment of a major international
>narcotics trade which the French intelligence was very much
>involved with. Is that true?
>
>McCoy: Yes, but again I think we have to stand back and look at
>this in somewhat broader perspective. It's one of the liabilities
>of being a history professor - I can't understand 1990 unless I
>know about 1890. It's just the way I see things. Things have
>historical roots and if you deal with present superficialities
>you won't have a clue as to what's going on.
>
>You have to understand, first of all, that the extensive opium
>trade in Indochina - mass consumption, particularly in the cities -
>was as a result of European colonial policy. Nowhere else in the
>world - and most of the tropical latitudes of the globe were
>colonized - Asia, Africa and Latin America were, at one time,
>entirely colonized.
>
>It's only in Southeast Asia that the colonial governments paid
>for their very dynamic development, massive infrastructural
>projects, irrigation that transformed the landscape, massive
>road networks, rail networks, very dynamic colonial development -
>all of this was paid for by direct taxes upon Indochinese
>consumers. Taxes on alcohol, salt and particularly opium. In
>British Malaya, 40% of colonial taxes came from opium. In Thailand
>it was running about 15%. (Thailand was an independent state but
>they followed the colonial model.) In French Indochina it ranged
>about 15% from the period of the 1870s up through the 1950s when,
>as a result of UN pressure, all of these governments abolished
>the opium trade. Thailand was the second last to do it. Thailand
>didn't abolish its state opium monopoly - rather like an alcoholic
>beverage control that a lot of states have. They didn't abolish
>this until 1957 and Laos didn't abolish theirs until 1961.
>
>So you had, then, mass opium consumption in Southeast Asia as a
>result of this colonial policy of making the colony pay with opium.
>That was the policy.
>
>Now, most of the opium was not produced in Southeast Asia. It came
>from abroad - either Southern China or, particularly, India. The
>thing that changes significantly after World War II is not the
>emergence of Southeast Asia as a major area of opiate consumption -
>it had been so for a century or even more. What is significant is
>the emergence of the mountain areas of Southeast Asia as major areas
>of global opium production. Indeed, by the early 1960s, the largest
>single source of opium anywhere in the world was the so-called
>"Golden Triangle" region of Southeast Asia.
>
>How did this come about? It comes about two ways. Most importantly,
>we have to look at North Burma. That's the bulk of the Golden
>Triangle. In fact, most of that imaginary geographical construct
>penned by some unknown journalist wag or geographer - nobody knows
>where this idea came from calling this sort of triangular-shaped
>highland zone where opium is grown in Southeast Asia "the Golden
>Triangle" - most of that triangle is in Burma, northeastern Burma
>in particular.
>
>So, where did opium come from? Well, if you look at the British
>colonial records, because the British colonized Bunna, you find
>opium production up until 1945 in northeastern Burma was almost
>insignificant. There was very little grown. Most of the opium
>consumption in northeastern Burma came from India. Burma, after all,
>was a province of India under the British, so they just brought it
>in and sold it legally. Now, where the opium came from was a major
>CIA operation. One of the biggest - the only one I know of of its
>scale that is yet to be exposed by journalists or muckrakers of any
>sort. This was the attempt to overthrow the People's Republic of China.
>
>In 1949 the Red Army, Mao's Red Army, drove south and they drove the
>Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-Shek in two directions: one down
>to Taiwan to the East and secondly, into this redoubt, this highland
>plateau which is the Hunan province in southwestern China. The
>warlord of Hunan surprisingly surrendered, betrayed Chiang Kai-Shek,
>and surrendered to the communists. Chiang Kai-Shek's plan of having
>his old World War II redoubt which was the bastion of his resistance
>against the Japanese. This was Chiang Kai-Shek's old mountain bastion.
>He thought he could hold it and maybe use it for counter-attack.
>Well, the warlord of Hunan betrayed him for reasons nobody quite
>understands, turned it over to the communists, and Chiang's forces
>were suddenly without a redoubt. They fled across the border into
>the mountains of northeastern Burma, where the CIA set up a massive
>support operation, including an air link that was of the nature of
>the hump - the flight from India across the hump of the Himalayas
>into the Hunan province of southern China during World War II. They
>also rearranged the politics of Thailand. the CIA became involved in
>the factional politics among the military leadership in Thailand.
>They allied themselves with the commandant of the Thai national
>police, a particularly corrupt man named General Pao. General Pao
>went into the opium business with the nationalist Chinese forces
>in Laos.
>
>What you had was the CIA sustaining nationalist Chinese forces
>in Northeastern Burma on the China border, supporting - we have
>records I think of two invasions of southern China by this force
>which left, in a couple of battles, dead white men on the field of
>battle. One can only suspect that they were CIA operatives or contract
>mercenaries working for the Agency, We don't know. No identification.
>
>But anyway, these invasions failed. So why didn't they withdraw?
>Well, the CIA had the idea - and you can find these in formal
>National Security Council documents - the CIA and the Pentagon
>had the idea that there was going to be a massive Chinese invasion
>of Southeast Asia at some point. This was what the Vietnam war was
>all about: building up the South Vietnamese Army, to integrate, to
>become an Allied force within the U.S. conventional combat forces,
>to resist this projected Chinese invasion of Southeast Asia. The
>falling dominoes were not just going to fall from within, they were
>going to be pushed from without by an invading China.
>
>So they kept the Nationalist Chinese forces up along this long
>difficult Burma border as a kind of trip-wire to detect a Chinese
>invasion of Southeast Asia and to run intelligence operations. They
>went into China, kidnapped Chinese officials, tapped phone lines, and
>bought newspapers - and they were maintained in northeastern Burma
>from 1949 until 1961 when a joint Communist Chinese-Burmese Army
>operation drove them into northern Thailand which is where they are
>today. But they still maintained their posts, even though they couldn't
>keep their base camps in Burma. That group, the Nationalist Chinese
>forces in northeastern Burma, transferred northeastern Burma from a
>region of very little opium production into the largest single
>producer of opium anywhere in the world today.
>
>How did they do it? They did it through the classic colonial policy
>that we saw under Leopold of the Belgians in the Congo Free State.
>Under Leopold every peasant had to grow rubber and if you didn't
>deliver rubber, your children's limbs were amputated. I can show
>you a very famous photograph in book published by Macmillan University
>Press, The Colonial Empires by Professor B.K. Hildhouse(?) and
>there's a picture of an African man sitting on his porch looking
>at the feet of his daughter which had been amputated because he
>didn't deliver the rubber. It was such a brutal, horrific administration
>that the European colonial powers held a conference, took the Congo
>away from Leopold, and gave it to the Belgian parliament to administer.
>It was one of the great scandals of the 19th century, one of the
>horrors of colonialism. That great novel, Heart of Darkness, that
>became Apocalypse Now - that's written about the brutality of the
>Belgians in the Congo Free State.
>
>There are many legacies in the European imagination of how horrible
>this was. Well, that's exactly what the Nationalist Chinese forces
>did to the Hill tribes of northeastern Burma. I've interviewed American
>Baptists missionaries who told me that ordinary peasants - hill
>tribesmen - who did not deliver their opium quota, suffered the loss
>of limbs. Fingers would be cut and hands were taken from you and your
>family.
>
>So people produced.
>
>Under this forced r6gime of occupation where you had the Nationalist
>Chinese forces backed by the CIA occupying the mountain areas, the
>prime opium growing areas in northeastern Burma, Burma went from maybe
>7 or 8 tons of opium production per annum to anywhere up to 1,000
>tons of production by the time the CIA's mercenaries were driven out
>in 1961. A thousand tons would have been, in any given year, up to
>60 and 70% of the world's total illicit opium production coming
>from this one area as a result of a decade of CIA-Nationalist Chinese
>occupation.
>
>The other Southeast Asian area was as you describe. Until 1950 France
>had an opium monopoly in Indochina. They were under pressure from the
>United States and UN to clean up. They signed the Segal(?) Convention
>on Narcotic Drugs with the United Nations and they abolished the opium
>monopoly. But it didn't disappear. The opium dens and opium shops were
>simply transferred from the French Ministry of Finance to French
>military intelligence and they, in turn, turned them over to a criminal
>syndicate that was running Saigon for the French, using their funds to
>buy daily intelligence and ferret out communist terrorists in the
>streets of Saigon.
>
>The communists were running a terrorist campaign against the French.
>A Frenchman would sit down in a cafe and a 12-year-old boy would come
>up to him and put a gun to the back of his head and shoot him and
>disappear into a crowd. That's the kind of operation. The French were
>powerless to control that and they set up a very elaborate intelligence
>apparatus to try and stop that terror. Money was the fuel that drove
>that engine and the money came from drugs.
>
>Moreover, there were Corsican syndicates that dominated the inner-city
>economy of Indochina, based in Saigon. They began exporting to Europe
>where part of the so-called Marseilles connection which has been
>celebrated in films - the connection where it's supposed to be opium
>from Turkey coming through the laboratories of Marseilles and then on
>to the United States - part of that production - we don't know how
>much - in fact, came from Saigon.
>
>So, it's as a result of French counter-insurgency efforts in Indochina
>where they integrate narcotics into their intelligence operations, but
>primarily it's as a result of CIA operations in Burma that we get the
>so-called Golden Triangle where it's northeastern Burma and the adjacent
>area of northern Laos going into high-scale production.
>
>When the Americans moved into Indochina after the French departed in
>1955, we picked up the same tribes, the Hmong, the same politics of
>narcotics, the politics of heroin, that the French had established.
>By the 1960s we were operating, particularly the CIA, in collusion with
>the major traffickers exporting from the mountains not only to meet the
>consumption needs of Southeast Asia itself, but in the first instance
>America's combat forces fighting in Vietnam and ultimately the world
>market. Southeast Asia today, by the way, is the number one source of
>American heroin. That's our major source. So it's those very mountains
>of Burma, those very fields that were cleared and put to the poppy as
>a result of this Nationalist Chinese-CIA counterinsurgency intervention
>policy - that army that the CIA maintained there - that's supplying
>America's addicts today with illicit heroin.
>
>Barsamian: Was the anti-communist ideology so powerful and so strong
>that the CIA would risk the worldwide opprobrium of being linked with
>drug trafficking? Why would they take that risk?
>
>McCoy: It's easy. Look, it's effective. I interviewed a guy named Lt.
>Col Lucien Conein who, since I published my book now despises me, and
>I asked Col Conein why they worked with the Corsicans in Saigon, for
>example. He said that there aren't very many groups that know the
>clandestine arts. When you think about the essential skills it takes to
>have an extra-legal operation - to have somebody killed, to mobilize a
>crowd, to do what it does when societies are in flux, when power is unclear
>and to be grabbed and shaped and molded into a new state - you want to
>overthrow a government and put a new one in - how do you do it? Who
>does this? Accountants? - They go to the office every day. Students? -
>They go to classes - they're good for maybe one riot or something, but
>they've got to get on to medical school or law or whatever they're doing.
>Where do you get people who have this kind of skill? You have your own
>operatives and they're limited. Particularly if you're a foreigner, your
>capacity to move something in the streets is very limited. You know,
>sometimes you can turn to a state intelligence agency in a country you're
>working with, but most effectively you can turn to the underworld. That's
>why the CIA always worked very effectively with the warlords of the Golden
>Triangle. It's worked very effectively with Corsican syndicates in Europe,
>worked very effectively and continuously with American Mafia - because
>they have the same clandestine arts. They operate with the same techniques.
>
>And they have the same kind of amorality. They are natural allies. There
>was a conversion of cultures between the milieu of the underworld and
>the world of the clandestine operative.
>
>Barsamian: The French intelligence services used the services of the
>Corsican Mafia during the first Indochina war and many of those
>Corsicans remained behind and the Americans picked them up. But then
>you have the introduction of the American Mafia itself with the full-scale
>American intervention in Indochina: people like Santo Trafficante
>getting involved.
>
>McCoy: I was interested in discovering during the course of my research
>in Saigon in 1971 that the last of the founding generation of the Mafia
> - I read these Mafia histories and I wonder if they're accurate, but
>you know, if you read enough of them and they're talking about the
>formation of a Commission, the big five families getting together and
>setting this thing up - but sometimes you wonder if it isn't a fairy
>tale but everybody keeps repeating it. So let's just assume as kind of
>a footnote that this may not be accurate. But let's assume this is some
>kind of story that's accurate. The last of the founding generation of
>Mafia titans was Santo Trafficante, Jr. He was the boss of Tampa. He
>also ran Cuba for the Mafia. Cuba was one of the major conduits of
>Marseilles heroin. The raw opium would come from Indochina through the
>Suez Canal, across the Mediterranean to Marseilles - or it would come
>through Turkey, down through Lebanon, then across the Mediterranean
>to the port of Marseilles. There it was refined and it would enter
>the United States.
>
>Back in 1950, because of the very substantial Mafia presence in Cuba -
>they owned most of the casinos, they operated a lot of the prostitution
>industry and they were on good terms with the Batista dictatorship.
>It was their major offshore operating zone. It was a kind of vice free
>port. Santo Trafficante is believed to have been heavily involved in
>narcotics importation operations in a general kind of way as somebody
>who was very heavily involved in Cuba. Cuba was supposed to be - again,
>in these Mafia fairy tales - something of a neutral zone. It was
>nobody's territory. But Trafficante kind of ran it, providing a certain
>amount of protection and order for organized crime because he was
>southern Florida and it was a natural territory for him to expand into.
>
>Well, in the late 1960s, Trafficante and his consigliere, his
>counselor - again, in these Mafia charts, the number three man was
>a guy named Dominic Furchi(?). Dominic Furchi and Santo Trafficante
>took a trip and went to Hong Kong and they went to Saigon. When they
>were in Saigon they met with old man Furchi's kid, Frank Furchi. Now,
>Frank Furchi had set himself up in Saigon and was involved in this shady
>world of contracting all of these kind of murky private business
>operations that were what you might call black marketeering on the
>fringes of this massive U.S. war effort. Wherever you get armies
>operating in the midst of war zones you get an enormous amount of
>black market activity. Prostitution, clubs, entertainment, purloining
>of military equipment - you know, there's just so much men and movement
>and violence and such a risk that freelancers would come in there and
>wheel and deal and make money.
>
>This young Furchi was in there. There was a group of Corsicans that
>was still operating left over from the first Indochina war and they
>were dealing. Some of them were ex-nazi Gestapo officers that had
>come out there as well. It was a remarkable polyglot group of adventurers.
>Trafficante is believed, according to Hong Kong police intelligence, to
>have explored getting an Asian heroin connection. Some police I talked
>to during this period were convinced that, in fact, he did provide
>the basic contacts and connections during his trip which began to see
>the start of substantial flows of heroin from Southeast Asia to the
>United States. Now, whether or not, again, this is a Mafia fairy tale,
>nonetheless statistically it is after about 1970 that we see the flow
>of Number 4 pure white powder heroin moving from Southeast Asia to
>the United States, being detected in chemical analysis of street samples.
>
>Barsamian: One thing that has kind of perplexed me on this particular
>issue - you know, the CIA being involved in drug trafficking in
>Southeast Asia - very soon we see that heroin flowing into the veins
>of the American GIs stationed in Southeast Asia who are reputedly there
>to defeat the communists. That's kind of bizarre to say the least.
>
>McCoy: When I published my book I got a lot of flak from people on the
>left saying that I was probably a CIA agent because I was so moderate in
>my analysis. The thesis in the heated political times of the early 1970s
>about drugs was this. The CIA had two problems - or the American ruling
>class - whoever these invisibles are that control this complex
>uncontrollable country - supposedly had two problems. One was insurgency
>of minorities - I'm speaking of black uprisings in the cities of America.
>Another was winning the war in Vietnam. So they put one and one together
>and they came up with two: the Southeast Asian drug trade. Their vision
>was - you know, like the CIA Deputy Director in charge of global narcotics
>trafficking sort of telling the Hmong caravans to get moving out of the
>highlands of Southeast Asia. "Let's get that caravan now into the lab.
>Okay, let's get that heroin loaded onto the aircraft right. Okay, now
>we've got it into Harlem. Okay, get that kid, Kid, step forward and buy
>the bag." Okay, you know, that's it. Potentially insurgent youth has
>been narcotized. Write him off for black power.
>
>I didn't see things operating quite so comprehensively. What I saw going
>on was like this. And this is why I was accused by people on the left of
>being moderate and cowardly in my analysis. When you do this kind of
>research, when you move into this murky world of rumors, conspiracy, the
>shadow universe that is organized crime, narcotics and intelligence,
>you've got to adopt, I think, a minimalist approach. You can't say
>anything you don't have a source for. You can suspect all you want. But
>when you speak or write, you just don't say it. That's speculation. You
>have a drink and you talk it over when you're working with your colleagues
>trying to figure it out, then you can go into anything you want. But when
>you actually speak or write, you've got to stick to the facts. Otherwise,
>you're not doing your job ... it's nonsense. So I adopted a policy that I
> had to have sources. In fact, my book when it was published was gone over
>by a corporate lawyer at Harper & Row which is a big publishing firm. The
>CIA actually got a copy of the manuscript and tried to get certain passages
>deleted and removed. They pressured the corporation for the right to do
>that. Ultimately I had to stand behind every sentence. I had to have
>sources for it. The lawyers went through every sentence and said, "Where's
>this?" I had to have an interview notebook, I had to show my logic.
>
>What I found was this. This is my image. In effect the CIA's involvement
>in narcotics was originally specific. It was going on in Laos and it didn't
>get much beyond Laos. The Agency in Laos was, just like the agency globally
>in the 1940s and 50s, myopic, short-sighted. It was fighting a war. It was
>trying to stop the Ho Chi Minh trail from operating. In order to do so it
>had a 30,000 man mercenary army made up largely of Hmong hill tribesmen
>who lived in the area and were opium growers. The consequences of their
>complicity in the narcotics traffic was something they just weren't
>interested in. From 1964-65 to 1975 they ran this secret war with a massive
>army of 30,000 men - an operation of an unequaled duration and size.
>The CIA has never, ever run as big an operation. I think that's even bigger
>than the Burma operation they ran. The Nationalist Chinese forces never
>got to that size.
>
>Barsamian: What about Afghanistan?
>
>McCoy: That didn't last eleven years. When did it start? About '81 and
>it's already over. It didn't make it. It lasted eight years. I don't
>think also ... you see, the Mujahadin are not as integrated with the CIA.
>Those were just rebels that the CIA was backing. This is a 30,000 man army
>that the CIA ran. It was their army. They bought every bullet, they trained
>every soldier, they had a mercenary officer corps under General Vang Pao
>that they ran. It wasn't a "hands-off' operation. It was their army. That's
>why we've got all these Hmong in Los Angeles and Minnesota and Wisconsin -
>because we're looking after our loyal tribe that fought and died for us
>in some kind of twisted logic. But that's why they're all here. That's
>why we have all these mountain peasants trying to adapt to life in this
>country.
>
>Anyway, the CIA was complicitous in the Laotian drug trade at a number
>of levels. First of all, let's look at the situation. Why would the CIA
>be complicitous in the drug trade? Okay. They are allying themselves
>with a people which grows two products up in the mountains: they grow
>rice for subsistence and they grow opium for cash. They've grown opium
>really at a high level since World War II. They grew small amounts before,
>but with the boom in production in the Golden Triangle their production of
>opium expanded and they became dependent upon it as a source for cash.
>
>When the CIA allied itself with this tribe, after a few years, by 1970,
>the economy, the culture, the whole of Hmong tribal society and the CIA's
>secret army were one. It was a total merger. It was as much an alliance
>between the CIA and the Hmong as it was between the United States and
>Great Britain in World War II. We just didn't give the British bullets,
>we financed their whole economy. We integrated our economy, our polity
>with Britain. Two societies, two states merged.
>
>Well, in a funny kind of way, that's what's going on in Laos right now.
>The rice crop disappears because of the Meo policy of slash and burn -
>they chop down the trees, they burn it, that clears the land and leaves
>ash and phosphate on the ground and you get maybe two or three rice
>crops out of it before the land goes bad and the men, because there's
>a distribution of labor in the tribes, the men have to cut down the trees.
>The women till the crop, harvest the rice crop. Now, opium, well done,
>can go ten or twelve years whereas rice can only go two or three. So once
>it was started, very quickly the Hmong ran out of rice and the CIA began
>dropping rice to them. But they still had their opium. Now, the Hmong
>growing opium meant the CIA felt that they had to support the Meo's opium
>crop because there's only two cash crops. So they started actually using
>their remarkably extensive energistics network of light aircraft and
>helicopters to actually move the opium out of the mountains for the Meo
>because the war had disrupted the normal caravan routes of Chinese
>merchants that comb the hills for the opium. That was gone by 1966 as
>the war spread. So the CIA collected the opium and became the major
>source of transport, moving the opium from field to market, getting into
>the actual flow of regional international commerce.
>
>(continued)
>
>
>----------------------------------------------
>To unsubscribe, please send a blank message to
>     [log in to unmask]
>To subscribe, send email to
>     [log in to unmask]
>Archive of Mena documents and articles is at:
>     ftp://pencil.cs.missouri.edu/pub/mena/
>
>