>       by geocities.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id TAA17660
>       for <[log in to unmask]>; Tue, 14 Oct 1997 19:55:10 -0700 (PDT)
>Resent-Date: Tue, 14 Oct 1997 19:55:10 -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 0xLJGE-0004KD-00; Wed, 15 Oct 1997 02:32:34 +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 21:34:00
>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 (2 of 2)
>Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
>X-Unsubscribe: send a blank message to [log in to unmask]
>Precedence: bulk
>
>(2 of 2)
>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 the Air America fleet?
>
>McCoy: This is the Air America fleet, yeah. It's the CIA's contract
>airline. It's just a fig leaf. It was the CIA's airline.
>
>Barsamian: I notice you use Hmong and Meo interchangeably. Is that
>correct?
>
>McCoy: Yes. The word has been used traditionally, Hmong, but it means
>slave in Chinese. But if you look at all the ethnographic literature
>before the Hmong migrated to this country, it always refers to them as
>Meo. Since they've gotten here, the Hmong have regarded Meo as an impolite
>term and everybody... You know, one of the dynamics of a multi-cultural
>society is that the group gets to pick its own name. If African-Americans
>want to be African-Americans, that's what you call them and you don't
>worry about it. The oppressed get to pick the label of their oppression.
>So if the Hmongs want to be called Hmongs, we call them Hmong.
>
>Anyway, the CIA was absolutely aware of what it was doing. I went
>into a Meo district - I spent ten days there in 1971 - and I went
>house to house and asked every farmer how much opium they grew this
>year, last year, the year before. I went back ten years. I said,
>"Okay, now, how much do you grow." They said, "Well, we each grow
>about ten kilos," which will make you one kilo of heroin by the time
>you boil it down and combine it." Most of them grow about ten kilos
>from their fields. So, "What do you do with your ten kilos?" "Well,
>up to about five years the Chinese used to come through with their
>mules and we'd sell it to them and they'd give us some cloth, some
>money, this or that and flashlight batteries, whatever, and we'd
>deal with them. Or sometimes we'd take it down to the market down
>in the provincial capital." "So what have you done over the last
>few years?" "What happens is the Air America helicopter comes in
>and officers in the army, Hmong officers in the army, get out and
>we sell them our opium."
>
>Opium stinks. It's like wrapping up cow dung in leaves. You've got
>a whole helicopter full of cow dung and you'd say to the pilot, the
>American CIA pilot - do you know what you're carrying? He'd say,
>"Yeah, I'm carrying cow dung." "How do you know?" "Well, I can
>smell it." Opium, in that kind of confined space, load up a helicopter
>with opium and you know what you're carrying. Everybody knows what it
>smells like. So they all knew that they were carrying it. This entire
>district that I interviewed established a pattern beyond doubt. The
>helicopters came there and left.
>
>Where did it go? It went down to a place name Long Tien. Long Tien
>was one of the most secret U.S. installations anywhere in the world.
>It was the headquarters of the whole secret war in Laos, this attempt
>to fight the Ho Chi Minh trail, to cut it with this mercenary army.
>Long Tien was closed to any American other than somebody that had top
>intelligence classification.
>
>I learned from Hmong sources that Vang Pao operated a very large
>heroin lab there. At this point the CIA got hands off. They didn't mind
>moving the opium out of the hills, but when it came to actually carrying
>the Number 4 heroin that came out of that lab, they wouldn't touch
>that. What they did was they established a private air line for Vang
>Pao called Zeng Kwan(?) Air Transport, the province where he came from
>was Zeng Kwan. So they created, you know, home-town province airlines
>and gave it to Vang Pao. They were hands-off from that point.
>
>Then what happened was there was a flow, there were other labs, and
>the Chief of Staff of the Royal Laotian army - 99% of the Royal
>Laotian army's budget came from the United States - the Chief of Staff
>of the Laotian army operated the largest heroin refinery in the world
>in northwestern Laos. This flow of heroin went down to southern Laos where
>Nguyen Cao Ky's sister ran a hotel. There were three routes into Vietnam
>from southern Laos. One was Nguyen Cao Ky's pilots would fly over from
>Tonsonhut(?) Airport in Saigon and would pick up and fly back in. The
>Prime Minister of Vietnam, the President of Vietnam also had their
>own distribution apparatuses. Our allies in Vietnam, the three major
>political players, ran heroin distribution networks. There was a
>time in the 1970s when I think half a dozen members of the South
>Vietnamese parliament were picked up by customs by mistake carrying
>heroin in from Laos and Thailand. You know, the whole South Vietnamese
>government was dealing heroin to our troops. That was where it was
>coming from.
>
>The CIA didn't know about that. I mean, they didn't care about that;
>they didn't worry about it. Once it was out of the mountains and out
>of the labs they didn't think about it very much. Now, what's the legacy
>of Laos. Well, the legacy of Laos, I think, is something that nobody's
>really thought about. Let's look at it. For ten years the CIA's biggest
>operation was completely integrated with the structure of the Indochina
>opium trade. The capacity of that army to fight and move, the capacity
>of those people to survive and to keep replacing soldiers (because they
>were killed by the tens of thousands). We were fighting with boy soldiers
>by the time it was over. I mean, those soldiers had to keep delivering the
>troops. The whole apparatus was integrated with the opium trade, the whole
>secret war apparatus was part of the opium trade. We ran that war through
>Vang Pao. He was a general in the Laotian army, but more importantly, he
>was the CIA's general. Now, Vang Pao was not from a traditional elite
>family. He was never very popular with the Hmong, certainly not at that
>time. And his capacity to get recruits out of the villages once the war
>started taking heavy casualties and people were seeing one and two and
>three sons dying, his capacity to extract more and more recruits to
>keep that war going relied upon him being able to pressure those villages.
>
>I was in a village in Laos that stopped sending recruits and the CIA cut
>off the rice supply and those people were pushed to the brink of
>starvation. They had lost all the males down to the 14-year-olds. The
>village and district leader didn't want to send the 14-year-olds. "This
>is the next generation," he said. "If we lose these kids, then we will
>disappear. We won't produce another generation. We can't do this." And
>so he said no, we've been doing this for six or seven years now, we've
>lost everybody, we're not going to do it any more. So they cut off his
>rice.
>
>The other thing that Vang Pao had was the opium. Remember, they had the
>two basic commodities - rice to survive and opium for cash to buy
>everything that they needed. So Vang Pao became the big opium broker
>for the Hmong and, as such, he gained extraordinary power over their
>economy and thus over their lives. So that by controlling those two
>products, opium and rice - the supply of rice and the export of opium
>from the villages - Vang Pao controlled those villages and could force
>them to support him even after the casualties began to mount.
>
>My metaphor for Vang Pao is kind of like a Judas Goat. Do you know what
>a Judas goat is? In the stockyards, I don't know if it's still done, but
>let's say when you're leading sheep to the slaughter, there's a goat that
>will lead the sheep through the maze of the stockyards and then, as
>they're heading into the chute, the Judas goat jumps aside and the flock
>of sheep go pelting through to get hit with electrodes or hammers and be
>slaughtered. That's how you have to think of Vang Pao - as kind of like
>a tribal Judas goat leading the males to the slaughter. Except, the Hmong
>are not like sheep - they know what's going on - they know that they're
>being slaughtered. It's not like they're being slaughtered in one room
>at one time - they're being slaughtered slowly over a decade. So how does
>he get to keep leading them? Through the control over these two products.
>
>You've got, then, a CIA secret war which in an essential way, in a
>fundamental way is linked with the opium traffic. More than that, it
>appears that a number of CIA operatives as individuals got involved.
>They started smuggling, started wheeling, started dealing and started
>doing a couple of bags here and there. We know, for example, there's a
>famous case of a CIA global money-moving bank called the Nugan-Hand bank
>which was established in Australia. The founder of that was a Michael
>John Hand. He was a green beret who was a contract CIA operative in Laos.
>When he first came to Australia in 1969-1970 Australian federal police got
>intelligence on him - I've seen the files - saying that what he's basically
>doing is he's bringing down light aircraft that are flying from Thailand to
>northern Australia into those abandoned air strips that were left over from
>World War II and he's dealing heroin. That's what Michael John Hand,
>according to Australian federal police intelligence, was doing. So, as
>individuals CIA operatives were getting involved and more or less what
>you've got then as a result of Laos is that the policy of integrating
>intelligence and cover operations with narcotics gets established.
>
>You get, then, an entire generation of covert action warriors used to
>dealing with narcotics as a matter of policy. In short, you get a policy
>and personnel which integrates covert action with narcotics. This manifests
>itself in a number of ways. First of all the Nugan-Hand bank. Not only was
>it moving money globally for the CIA, but it was the major money laundering
>
>conduit that was trimming funds up to Southeast Asia from Australia and
>linking the Golden Triangle heroin trade of Southeast Asia with the urban
>markets of Australia. In Afghanistan as well, this same distributing
>pattern that we saw in Laos emerges.
>
>This is one case that hasn't been well studied. I've spoken to one
>correspondent for the Far East Economic Review which is a Dow-Jones
>Publication, Mr. Lawrence Lifschultz(?), a friend of mine, and what he
>found was something of a similar pattern that I found in Laos. He was a
>correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the Mujahadeen campaign
>and he wrote articles in the Nation and elsewhere describing this similar
>pattern. You've got Pakistani government officials very heavily involved in
>narcotics, you've got the Mujahadeen manufacturing heroin, they're
>exporting it to Europe and the United States. They're using it to support
>their guerrilla campaign. the Pakistanis and the CIA are complicitous on
>the level of (1) not doing anything or (2) actually getting involved in
>the case of some of the Pakistani elite. So, it's a case where the
>Mujahadeen operation becomes ultimately integrated with the narcotics
>trade and the CIA is fully informed of the integration and doesn't do
>anything about it.
>
>Moving on to our fourth instance, one close to home, is the whole
>Iran-contra operation.
>
>First of all, I think the Laos parallel is very strong in the Iran-contra
>operation. Just in the formal outlines of the policy - you know, you've got
>the contras on the border of Nicaragua, they're a mercenary army, they're
>supported through a humanitarian operation, they're given U.S. logistic
>support, they're given U.S. equipment and they're given U.S. air power
>backup to deliver the equipment and the logistic support. All the personnel
>
>that are involved in that operation are Laos veterans. Ted Shackley, Thomas
>Clines, Oliver North, Richard Secord - they all served in Laos during this
>ten-year war. They are all part of that policy of integrating narcotics and
>being complicitous in the narcotics trade in the furtherance of covert
>action.
>
>In this case, what I think we can see is it's not just the same. It's not
>just simply that the CIA was complicitous in allowing the contras to deal
>in cocaine, to serve as a link between the Andes and across the Caribbean
>into the United States. I think we can see the situation has gotten worse.
>In Laos, as I said, the CIA was hands-off. Once it got beyond their secret
>base, they wouldn't touch it. They gave Vang Pao the aircraft and once it
>got any further they didn't really know about it and didn't want to know
>about it. They remained ignorant about it. And ultimately what you're
>looking at was a traffic that was in a remote region which, in a way I
>don't
>think the CIA saw was going to happen, wound up serving Americans. An
>estimate of 50% of U.S. combat forces in Vietnam taking drugs, what was
>common at that time. But it's still remote and it's still not going
>directly into
>the United States.
>
>The level of cynicism in Central America is even worse. We're not talking
>about original traffic or moving the raw product - we're talking about
>taking finished cocaine, providing aircraft, moreover providing protection
>for these traffickers as they fly across the Caribbean with these massive
>loads of cocaine. Now, I don't know. Can one estimate what percentage of
>the cocaine was politically protected by these intelligence operations.
>Until there's a formal investigation, which there's not likely to be,
>it's difficult to say.
>
>I think that one can say that as you look at the drugs flowing into the
>United States during the 1960s when this Lao operation was going, there
>was probably a much smaller percentage of narcotics entering the United
>States from politically protected brokers than there is today. In other
>words, this CIA policy of integrating covert action operations with
>narcotics, both at a level of individuals being involved and also just
>turning a blind eye to the fact that our allies are drug brokers, this
>complicity in the narcotics trade has gotten worse. It's closer to home.
>It's not moving the raw material out in the jungles, it's actually bringing
>the finished narcotics, cocaine, into the United States. So it's gotten that
>much closer to home and that much more cynical.
>
>Barsamian: Could you talk about the 1971 Nixon "War on Drugs" and the 1989
>version of the same war launched by George Bush? Do you see any parallels?
>
>McCoy: The parallel is striking and I'm surprised that commentators haven't
>made more of it. My own feeling is that the Bush war on drugs is modeled
>exactly on the war fought by his mentor, president Bush's mentor, Richard
>Nixon. America has in its history of a century of drug abuse, attempted
>two times a solution to the drug problem. The first one was the Nixon war
>on drugs in 1972-73 and the second is now the Bush war on drugs.
>
>Let's look at the Nixon war on drugs in order to get some sense of the
>probable outcome of the Bush war. Nixon declared war on drugs in 1973
>in the Anatolian plateau. There's a pretty good book by a man named Robert
>J. Epstein called Agency of Fear looking at the drug agency involved in
>this war on drugs. What he concluded was that Nixon was faced with a
>delicate political problem when he took office. He'd promised law and
>order. Once he got into office, Epstein says that he found out that the
>federal
>government's actual intervention in law enforcement in the United States
>is minimal. It's local police that do law enforcement. It's everybody's
>property taxes that put cops in their cars. So the American president may
>be powerful in many respects, but he's not powerful in law enforcement
>areas. What Nixon very quickly worked out is the only substantive area
>law enforcement where the federal government had any authority and
>capacity for action was in narcotics. So what he did was he manufactured
> a crisis and then he came up with a solution.
>
>The crisis came from a series of press releases from the Drug Enforcement
>Administration, releasing statistics showing a massive expansion in the
>number of addicts. Now, they even took me in on this. I read those
>statistics like everybody else and I said, "My god, this is getting out
>of control." But all they had done was to change the statistical ratio.
>In the 1960s before Nixon, our numbers of drug addicts - about 60,000 -
>came from two things: (1) a central registry of addicts into which police
>put the name of every addict. Another way figures were derived was through
>a statistical ratio between the number of bodies in the morgue from
>overdoses and the overall addict population. All the DEA did under Nixon
>was to change the ratio between corpses and addicts. They just simply said
>...
>I forget now the statistics - let's say it was 1 to 2. For every corpse
>you're
>likely to have two addicts. Then they made it 1 to 10 - for every corpse
>you can have ten addicts. So suddenly we had this massive expansion but it
>was just a result of statistical manipulation, changing the ratio between
>the known (the corpse) and the unknown (the number of addicts). In this way
>they manufactured this enormous sense of crisis.
>
>Moreover, there was more crime that was probably somewhat drug-related in
>the 60s and 70s - maybe, maybe not, I don't know. But in any case, they made
>this equation. We've got more drugs, we've got more addicts, we've got more
>crime. Having manufactured this crisis, having "discovered" the problem of
>this massive expansion in heroin addiction, Nixon then declared war as his
>solution.
>
>Nixon's image of the drug trade went like this: that there was raw opium
>being diverted from licensed opium growers in Turkey. There is, in fact,
>a legitimate pharmaceutical need for morphine which comes, like heroin,
>from the opium poppy. Turkey was a legal producer of opium for the
>pharmaceutical market, for patient's in hospitals who are dying of cancer
>and in incredible pain - they needed morphine. Troops use it in battle -
>it's a big market for people in accidents, all sorts of things. It's an
>important drug and has been for millennia.
>
>Turkey was a legitimate producer but what was happening, according to
>Nixon, was that peasants were producing more than their quota and selling
>it to the black market; it was working its way down through Lebanon,
>across the Mediterranean into Marseilles labs and then the United States.
>So Nixon said that he was going to fight his war on drugs, battle one on
>the Anatolian plateau of Turkey. It was a very simple war. It was a war
>that didn't involve very much. All Nixon did was announce this war. He
>then used the very close defense relationship between Turkey and the
>United States to pressure the Turks through normal well-established
>diplomatic channels, to force their farmers to go out of production.
>
>The Turkish government was faced with a choice - they could risk their
>whole strategic relationship with the United States in defense of farmers
>from a remote small region who were producing a minor product. Although
>it offended nationalism, they did it. They went along with it. Nixon
>also offered them, I think, $35 million to develop substitute crops, so
>there was a carrot-and-a-stick. The stick was the threat of a troubled
>strategic relationship and the carrot was this foreign aid bonus that
>was going to help these farmers produce a new crop.
>
>So the Turks went along and it was a very simple battle. Nixon then
>declared war. He started then manipulating the statistics downward,
>changing them so the public would see the problem was getting under
>control. Then Watergate intervened and all of his political plans went
>awry. A number of the people that were hired for his super drug agency
>called DALE became, in fact, the people that were involved in the
>Watergate conspiracy itself. So, as Watergate erupted, his whole drug
>program blew up and he got into a whole set of different problems and
>his drug strategy went away. But the DEA, long after the klieg lights
>were turned off and the correspondents went home, was still fighting
>the war on drugs and we went to Nixon to Ford and Carter. They had
>greatly expanded operational funds and a greatly expanded establishment.
>
>What the first war of drugs seemed to have produced, on balance, was a
>worsening of America's drug problem. The attempted interdiction failed -
>not only did it fail, it worsened the drug problem. Why do I say this,
>because it's a fairly strong conclusion? It's one I reached by looking
>at it.
>
>The United States applied a very simple law enforcement model to a
>complex global commodity trade. Let me look at those words now.
>What's a law enforcement model? Okay. You've got a prostitute or a
>group of prostitutes operating on a street corner in a brothel. You
>raid them, you put them in jail, you stop prostitution. It can be done.
>You've got somebody, let's say, more localized - running peep shows.
>Close them down. There goes peep shows. You've got people doing, let's
>say, stealing cars and cutting up auto parts - well, you can handle that.
>It's localized. It's within police capacities. This is a simple thing.
>This is a small business, being run by a limited number of definable
>vice entrepreneurs. They are subject to an enforcement operation which
>can wipe out their business.
>
>This is not true of narcotics. The variables, the points of pressure
>are global. We can't control them all. For two centuries now we've
>had integration of the first world demand for drugs, initially legal
>and now illegal - people in this society, and they're different people
>at different times, take illicit drugs. They take coca and opiate based
>products. They take cocaine and heroin and they have now for centuries.
>So this well-established demand for drugs, which save for the disruption
>of war has never gone away, it's just constant, there's a market here,
>has been tied into the complex political economy of the highland regions
>of the Andes and the southern Asian mountain rim. You're not talking about
>small localized areas. You're talking about the whole Andes, from Bolivia
>all the way through to Ecuador for coca. In Asia, for opium, when you
>actually look at a map, you're looking at almost a unitary drug zone that
>ranges for nearly 5,000 miles across the southern rim of Asia. It starts
>in the rest in the Anatolia plateau of Turkey, it then goes into
>Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Burma, Thailand, Laos, and once upon a time
>North Vietnam but not any more. It runs right across the whole southern rim
>of the Asian land mass. So when Nixon came into Anatolia and wiped out
>the Anatolian market, Anatolia is just one player! In fact, if you look at
the
>percentages, they were less than 10% of the illicit market. What did that
do?
>
>Well, as any farmer will tell you, if Russia doesn't produce any wheat,
>we're going to do very well here. We will know about that - if we don't
>know about it this year, we'll know about it next year - American farmers
>will get more money. They will go out and plant more wheat - they'll have a
>big bumper crop because Russia's not producing wheat, the crop's failed,
>the price goes up.
>
>Well, in the case of the Nixon drug war in Anatolia, we wiped out illicit
>production in Anatolia. What happened? The price for reliable, available
>illicit narcotics shot up in the world. So Southeast Asia's Golden
>Triangle, which is the world's largest supplier, met that demand. So we
>got then the Southeast Asian market, which had hitherto been just
>regional, coming out of the mountains of Southeast Asia to the cities of
>Southeast Asia - now began to export to the United States, let's say the
>northwestern United States. By 1974 in Seattle, nearly 50% of all the
>drug seizures in the streets of Seattle were from Southeast Asia. So the
>Nixon White House got upset - "We just wiped it out in Turkey! Let's
>get a firebreak team out to Southeast Asia!" So they sent a firebreak
>team out to Southeast Asia, okay. They sent 40 agents into Bangkok
>and they're all bankrolled to the hilt. They rented an entire division of
>the Thai national police!
>
>They put out the word on the streets that anybody that sells drugs can turn
>the drug buyer in and, no questions asked, they'll give him a bonus. So in
>Bangkok if you were a dealer you could sell to a foreign buyer and you
>could then turn around and turn them in so you get a percentage bonus on
>busting this guy! They actually then put what I call a "customs shield"
>down. The cost of exporting drugs from Southeast Asia to the United States
>went up because you had all these seizures. For every kilo you're sending,
>maybe you're losing one in three - we don't know how many they were sending
>exactly, but they were losing a lot. The seizures went way up.
>
>So, what did the drug exporters of Southeast Asia do? Well, I wasn't privy
>to their councils, nobody was. My feeling is the drug warlords of Southeast
>Asia sat around and were faced with two choices: (1) they could go out of
>business, but they weren't about to do that; and (2) they find a new
>market.
>That's what they did. They found new markets and I'm sure they thought it
>over like we would. Mere are only four areas of the world that have the
>standards of living to support the very high cost of international
>narcotics trafficking. They're North America (Canada and the United States),
>Japan,  Europe and Australia. Well, the North American market was closed
>for reasons we just described, so what did the exporters do? They started
>exporting to Australia and Europe. Australia and Europe had no drug
>problem. In 1970, Holland had maybe 800 addicts. In 1976 Holland had
>10,000 addicts. And that's what happened all over Europe. Europe's got a
>big drug problem. The Southeast Asian syndicates just started shipping
>straight to Europe.
>
>Australia had no drug problem in 1975. They now have a drug problem with
>heroin, as large in proportion as the United States. It came from the same
>period. So you suddenly have two big new markets - not only America as your
>destination. Well, meanwhile, American dealers can't get their stuff from
>Southeast Asia so they turn to Mexico. Mexico booms, Mexico gets closed
>down and then they turn to Southwest Asia - Pakistan and Afghanistan. In
>short,
>what you get as a result of this attempt at suppression is an elaboration
>of global trafficking routes - not just one big market, America, but now
>three big markets - Europe, Australia and America. And not just one major
>source, Turkey, but in fact, the whole of this mountain band of Asia is
>ready to supply the world. There's now been a disruption with cocaine in
>Central America because of all this pressure and there's been some
>disruption in Afghanistan. Southeast Asia is now number one. In short, what
>we have then is an elaboration of trafficking routes - more areas of
>consumption,
>more areas of production, more tightly knit together so that the attempted
>interdiction complicated the global trafficking to the point that it's now
>beyond any interdiction effort. I would think that the probable consequences
>of the Bush attempted interdiction in Latin America will be similar. You
>can't predict quite how it's going to work out, but based on what we know
>from the Nixon drug wars, it'll make the problem worse.
>
>Barsamian: And in your view, the enforcement effort has been totally
>compromised?
>
>McCoy: Well, yeah, the enforcement effort such as it is. Although, you
>know, it's usually run by bureaucrats that are reasonably dedicated to
>what they're doing. If you meet drug agents and you talk to them about what
>
>they're doing, they believe they're trying to do something good. They think
>that keeping drugs out of America is a good thing to do and I think that
>everybody would agree that these guys are doing an important job. That's
>why we keep hiring more of them and they get killed like Camarena in Mexico
>and take a lot of risks. I'm not talking about them, okay? But what are
>they essentially trying to do? What are these drug agents trying to do?
>They're trying to find out who the drug brokers are, they're trying to
>get the drug brokers arrested, they're trying to get the host government
>where they're operating - whether it be Mexico or Thailand - to use their
>very substantial police forces to crack down on the drug lords. The next
>thing they're trying to do is to cut the connection between 'Thailand and
>Mexico or Central America and the United States. So, over the short term,
>they're trying to stop the drugs, make seizures, disrupt it. Over the long
>term, identify the traffickers, the brokers and their political supporters,
>and get these guys out of business. That's the job of the anti-drug
>bureaucracy.
>
>It's only been a strong bureaucracy now for about 15 years, since the
>Nixon war on drugs they beefed the DEA up and it keeps getting beefed up.
>One of the things that will happen as a result of the Bush drug war I
>expect will be another major expansion of the DEA. Working against that
>has been the Central Intelligence Agency. Because of their mandate to stop
>communism or to run a secret army in Laos or to harass the Nicaragua
>government with the contra operation - because they've had a political
covert
>action mandate  - they have found it convenient to ally themselves with the
>very drug brokers the DEA is trying to put in jail. While you're working
>with the CIA you are untouchable. The CIA backs you up. There are
>instances of minor traffickers being arrested in the United States for
>importing drugs and the CIA will actually go to the local police and courts
>and get them off and out because oftentimes they threaten to talk, make
>trouble, so the CIA just gets them out. What the CIA does in these known
>instances it does more broadly. I, for example, had reason to gather
evidence
>based on talking to American officials in my own inquiry that the Chief of
>Staff of the Royal Laotian Army and the commander of the CIA secret army
>was involved in drugs.
>
>What happened when I made this allegation? The CIA did everything to
>discredit my allegations. They attacked me. 'They didn't attack Vang Pao
>who was operating a heroin ring. They didn't go after General Owen
>Radicone(?) who had the world's biggest heroin operation - they went after
>me!
>They tried to suppress my book, they threatened to murder my sources, they
>spent $25 million in staging a massive opium burning by the Nationalist
>Chinese forces in northern Thailand announcing they were retiring from the
>drug trade. I mean, they went through all kinds of hoops to discredit me and
>my allegations. They protect these guys. While you're working with the
>agency, you are protected.
>
>So at critical points in the history of the international drug trade,
>the CIA has moved in and allied itself with local drug brokers. Oftentimes
>the brokers have been able to use that alliance to their advantage and
>at a critical time when they were making new connections, they were
>reaching out and opening new markets there their whole apparatus was
>exposed in a way that it won't be once they get it tied down and get
>the procedures established. At this critical point they're under protection
>from the CIA.
>
>Barsamian: Are there any facets of the documentation that you developed
>and the evidence that you uncovered in your research in writing The
>Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, any new information that you've
>uncovered in recent years that you might add or change regarding your
>original investigations?
>
>McCoy: The book was, for whatever reason, pretty solid. A number of CIA
>people I've met since have said that it's pretty accurate. Some of them -
>the only complaints I've had are some who say that "it wasn't really us
>in analysis, it was really the covert action boys." It was really what's
>called "plans," the director of the plans, which is one of four divisions
>of the CIA. A lot of agency people who I'm sure are in intelligence
>analysis feel kind of besmirched and offended, but they generally agree
>that it's a pretty accurate depiction of what's going on.
>
>Barsamian: Do you think that the current war on drugs might be used as
>a vehicle of U.S. intervention in foreign countries?
>
>McCoy: That is something I can't answer. We can only speculate. This
>is a conversation, so I'll speculate. The evidence brought out by
>Jonathan Marshall who's preparing a book on cocaine in Central America -
>he's the op ed page editor of the Oakland Tribune - and most recently by
>the New York Times, raises real questions about the Panama operation.
>I mean, Noriega was portrayed as this desperate drug lord, this satanic
>figure that had to be knocked out in order for the drug war to go ahead.
>And we knocked out this evil man, Noriega, and put him on trial in Miami.
>
>Then we put in a government which, according to the New York Times g don't
>know if you saw that report) ... a government which is, in fact, linked
>either personally or their relatives are linked with the Panamanian
>banking industry.
>
>Now ... why is there a big banking industry in Panama?
>
>Panama is a little tiny country that was formerly a province of Colombia
>before the United States separated them and built the canal. For
>Colombians, Panama is just like next door. It's the old province. And
>yet it's not a part of Colombia any more. So if you're a Panamanian cocaine
>
>merchant, if you're the Medellin cartel or the Cali cartel, where do you
>do your banking? You don't do it in Bogota, you do it in Panama City and
>you do it through these big Panamanian banks. If you've ever noticed
>the photographs of the financial district of Panama City, it looks like
>a mini-Wall Street or a mini4owntown Los Angeles. Why? Why in this poor
>economy do you have this elaborate banking structure? It's built from
>money laundering and the Endara government, as individuals - and of his
>vice presidents, several of his cabinet ministers - are an the boards
>of banks which have been big in the money laundering industry. Moreover,
>one of Endara's key cabinet people was actually a lawyer for one of the
>big drug lords of Colombia. So what you're looking at is we replaced
>Manuel Noriega who is supposedly this evil drug dealer who moved a
>million dollars of drugs and made $4 million from the Medellin cartel -
>we replace this guy with people who represent the Panamanian money-
>laundering industry which was moving the money from the United States
>to Colombia. We got rid of some petty thug, some tough guy on the street
>who's stealing hubcaps, and we put the Mafia in power.
>
>Why? Why? I don't know yet. I mean, what it means to me is that the whole
>Panamanian operation didn't have anything to do with the drug war. I think
>it has to do with essentially trying to maintain influence in Panama. And
>Noriega, whatever else he was, was a nationalist who was very good at
>manipulating the United States. I think that infuriated us. Just to
>continue my speculative theme, my scenario - uninformed and totally
>ignorant, just based at looking at Laos and then guessing what could
>be going on in Colombia and Panama - my scenario would be that the hidden
>history of Panama maybe reads like this:
>
>You have a nationalist general who takes this colonial creation of the
>United States, this country of Panama, and gives it some dignity, a
>charismatic figure - General Omar Torrijos. The United States hated
>Torrijos.  They hated him why? Because Torrijos was a convincing
nationalist.
>He mobilized the Panamanian people, he had some kind of intentional
prestige,
>and he forced the United States to give up our greatest jewel of empire -
>the canal, which for a certain type of American is embedded in our
>consciousness. I mean, what India was to the British, what the Netherlands
>Indies was to Holland, the Panama Canal is to us. That's our empire, you
>know, our great triumph.
>
>So Torrijos took away the canal and - guess what!? - Reagan comes into
>office and Torrijos has an aircraft accident.
>
>Why? How? It's never been explained. Maybe he was killed. The CIA runs
>a lot of maintenance and aircraft firms in the Caribbean - maybe they did
>it. Anyhow, somebody kills Torrijos so they're looking around for some
>new pliable man to put in power to make sure they don't have trouble. So
>they install Noriega and they know Noriega's reliable because they know
>Noriega's been doing the drug operations for them in a small kind of petty
>way. So they know they've got him. He's manageable - he moves the drugs,
>he does whatever he wants, he's the intelligence chief under Torrijos. Now
>he's the CIA's liaison and perfectly reliable. What does Noriega do? He
>turns around and does exactly what Torrijos did. He plays to the
>nationalist  crowd, he uses the drug money and the Panamanian economy
>to build up an  independent political base so that he's no longer
>controllable.
>So what do we do? We stigmatize him as a drug lord, we go in and invade,
>we get rid of him, we put in an ugly, pliable government. We got rid of a
>man who maybe made $4 million from drugs and we replace him with a
>cabinet who are representatives of a multi-billion dollar bank-cum-money
>laundering industry.
>
>To me the logic is not so much to get rid of drugs but to maintain U.S.
>influence in a key strategic area at a time when the Canal is about to be
>turned over and the Canal still remains strategically significant for the
>United States. So my hunch, my guess, my uninformed opinion is that the
>Panamanian intervention has very little to do with drugs and everything
>to do with U.S. power abroad We dressed up our national strategic interest,
>no longer in the ball gown of anti-communism but in the formal wear of
>anti-narcotics policy. We're still just maintaining U.S. power and it's
>likely that the drug war is going to have other episodes like this. Whether
>or not the whole drug war will ultimately become a prisoner, a creation of
>U.S. global strategic interests I don't know. It's too early to say. But in
>this particular instance the major battle in the drug war looks very
>dubious.
>
>Barsamian: In your view, there will be a marked increase and expansion of
>drug addiction and drug use in the United States, Europe and Australia -
>Incidentally, earlier you mentioned that the drug flow went into Europe
>and Australia, but not into Japan, is that correct?
>
>McCoy: Yes.
>
>Barsamian: Why not?
>
>McCoy: The relationship between the ruling Liberal Democratic Party
>(the conservatives) and the big organized crime syndicates, which are
>enormous in Japan, is a very tight one and has been historically since the
>end of World War II. There's been a very close integration with the
>organized crime operations and the ruling conservative party. The
>conservatives have been in power now in Japan since 1948. It's one of
>the longest reigns of any party anywhere in the world. There's a kind of
>entente, an understanding between the syndicates and the government -
>it's not rigid - but the basic understanding is no drugs. That's the basic
>thing. Don't move drugs. And the Japanese police are ruthlessly efficient.
>If any of the syndicates, any of the big families - some of them have
>10,000 members in them - broke this rule, the police have sufficient
>mechanisms of control to punish them for it. So in this complex politics
>of organized crime in Japan, they can do prostitution, they can do all
>kinds of fraud, they can do many things - but not drugs. So Japan's
>never opened up.
>
>DeGaulle had a very similar relationship with the Corsican syndicates
>during his reign in the 1960s and early 1970s. The understanding was
>that the Corsican syndicates in Marseilles would manufacture in
>Marseilles under protection. But they would not sell in France. They
>would only export to the United States. That began to break down.
>DeGaulle died, Pompidoux replaced him and the Gaullists lost power,
>there was pressure on the syndicates, some new groups came in and
>started breaking the rule, and France wound up with a drug problem.
>But for practically a decade that rule held.
>
>
>
>----------------------------------------------
>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/
>
>