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Who Is Behind the Mexican Drug Cartels?
The US Opium Wars: China, Burma and the CIA
Operation Paper: The US and Drugs in Thailand and Burma
"The CIA is a bureaucracy which feeds on itself, and those involved are constantly sitting around thinking up schemes for [foreign] intervention which will win them promotions and justify further additions to the staff.
It self-generates interventions that otherwise never would be thought of, let alone authorized." - Senator Frank Church
"CIA arms, money, and disinformation enabled Corsican criminal syndicates in Marseille to wrestle control of labor unions from the Communist Party.
The Corsicans gained political influence and control over the docks - ideal conditions for cementing a long-term partnership with mafia drug distributors, which turned Marseille into the postwar heroin capital of the Western world.
Marseille's first heroin laboratories were opened in 1951, only months after the Corsicans took over the waterfront." - Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
"The Nationalist Chinese army became the opium barons of The Golden Triangle (parts of Burma, Thailand and Laos), the world's largest source of opium and heroin.
Air America, the ClA's principal airline proprietary, flew the drugs all over Southeast Asia. Many Gl's in Vietnam became addicts.
A laboratory built at CIA headquarters in northern Laos was used to refine heroin.
After a decade of American military intervention, Southeast Asia had become the source of 70 percent of the world's illicit opium and the major supplier of raw materials for America's booming heroin market." - Christopher Robbins, Air America
A pattern becomes apparent in regimes installed or supported by the CIA.
Nearly every regime derives a portion of its cash flow from the distribution of narcotics.
In the absence of a popular base for externally installed puppets external funds are needed for political repression.
There is someone very close to the installed puppet, typically a relative, that is heavily involved in a narcotics supply network.
In Taiwan Chiang Kai-shek and his brother-in-law TV Soong.
In Mexico Luis Echeverría Álvarez and his brother-in-law Rubén Zuno Arce.
In Iran Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and his twin sister Ashraf Pahlavi.
In Vietnam Ngô dình Diem and his brother Ngô dình Nhu.
In Afghanistan Hamid Karzai and his brother Ahmed Wali Karzai.
Laos broke the close family tie rule-of-thumb when Phoumi Nosavan used Ouane Rattikone.
1947-1954 First Indochina War
French SDECE military intelligence is in need of money for covert operations.
Officers contact opium producers in the Golden Triangle, and set up an international system of smuggling, the "French Connection", aided by intelligence and other aid from SDECE.
An alliance is made between the Corsican Mafia, who has a historical presence in South Vietnam dating back to the French occupation, and leading members of the American and Sicilian Mafia, under the leadership of Lucky Luciano.
Lucky Luciano is asked to provide assistance to American military intelligence about Axis infiltration of the waterfront in American ports (which was effectively controlled by the Mafia), as well as assisting Allied forces in their invasion of Sicily and Italy.
Luciano uses his contacts in the Sicilian Mafia to assist US forces by gathering intelligence and identifying both fascist collaborators and Socialist/Communist elements in the Italian résistance movement, who are then systematically eliminated.
Luciano is covertly permitted to run his crime operations from prison, and at the end of the war he is deported back to Sicily, where he immediately begins a major expansion of his drug operations, forging alliances with Corsican Mafia members in South Vietnam and organized crime figures in other countries, including Australia.
1950 Drug lords in Burma are recruited in operations against China.
1954 "The US defensive strategy for the region was defined by John Foster Dulles in January 1954 in his "massive retaliation" speech.
According to Dulles, the US would provide aid for the expansion and modernization of native armies which would be able to hold the southward surge of China's armies long enough for the US to launch a massive air strike at China's industry and communications.
To facilitate these projected air-strikes into Southern and Western China the US began construction and expansion of a network of airbases centered on Northeast Thailand.
From1954-1962 the US spent a modest $97.5 million on seven Royal Thai airbases, and two major highways linking the base at Udorn in the Northeast with Bangkok and North central Thailand." - Al McCoy
Subcontracting counterinsurgency
1959 Opium traffic identified as an alternative source of income for Laotian government of Phoumi Nosavan.
1963 Laotian Quanne Rattikone produces heroin for the Army camps in South Vietnam.
CIA provides transpotation through Air America.
1965 Theodore Shackley supports Vang Pao in his quest for an opium monopoly helping finance the building of an air drug shipment service between Long Tien and Ventiane.
Laos becomes the largest Heroin™ producing center in the world.
Support is provided General Ouan Rattikone (Phoumi's successor) and his drug-funded army.
Airplanes are supplied for opium transportation and intervene militarily with air support in battles over contested opium caravans.
"Ted Shackley ran the CIA recruitment pool from which Helliwell drew his increasingly rapacious and lethal workforce." - Patricia Goldstone
1968 Ted Shackley helps arrange a partnership between Santos Trafficante and Vang Pao.
"American involvement had gone far beyond coincidental complicity; embassies had covered up involvement by client governments, contract airlines had carried opium, and individual agents had winked at the opium traffic.
As an indirect consequence of American involvement in the Golden Triangle, opium production steadily increased.
Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle grew 70% of the world's illicit opium, supplied an estimated 30% of America's Heroin™, and was capable of supplying the United States with unlimited quantities of Heroin™ for generations to come." - Alfred W. McCoy
Gary Webb on CIA Trafficking of Cocaine
The CIA's Plans for a Drugged & Debilitated USA
How the CIA Watched Over the Destruction of Gary Webb
"For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the CIA." - Gary Webb
"You will recall that over the years General Manuel Noriega in Panama
and I have developed a fairly good relationship." - Lt. Col. Oliver North
1977 Norwin Meneses Cantarero, known as El Rey del Drogas (the king of drugs), feels the heat of a Nicaraguan customs probe into his smuggling of high-end North American cars from the US into Nicaragua so his gang murders the chief of customs.
Norwin Meneses Cantarero comes from a family intimately linked to the Somoza dictatorship.
One brother had been chief of police in Managua.
Two other brothers are generals in the force most loyal to Somoza, the National Guard.
The DEA and other agencies began keeping files on Meneses in 1974.
1979 Sandinista revolution evicts Anastasio Somoza and his corrupt regime.
Norwin Meneses Cantarero is granted political refugee status when he and other members of Somoza's elite flee to the US.
Norwin Meneses Cantarero, "head of security and intelligence" for the leading organization in the Contra coalition the Fuerza Democratico Nicaraguense works with Enrique Bermudez, Oscar Danilo Blandon, a cousin, and Adolfo Calero.
They set up a cocaine distribution ring in San Francisco, establishing ties with Freeway Ricky Ross who manufactures crack out of shipments of powder cocaine and distributes it through the black street gangs of South Central Los Angeles throughout America.
Profits made by the Nicaraguan exiles are funneled back to the Contra army.
The son of a Managua slumlord, Blandon headed Somoza's agricultural export program as an important component of the country's mainly beef and coffee based economy.
The Somoza family owns at least a quarter of the nation's agricultural land.
In his position as head of the export program, Blandon has developed close ties to the Department of Commerce and the State Department.
He secures $27 million in USAID funding and is well known to the US military and the CIA, both of which have a commanding presence in Somoza's Nicaragua.
Somoza sent his officer corps for training in the US.
The CIA station chief was the most powerful foreigner in Managua.
Blandon's wife, Chepita, came from a powerful clan, the Murillo family.
One of her relatives is the mayor of Managua.
Both the Blandon and Murillo families lost their land locked fortunes in the 1979 revolution.
In Somoza's final days, Jimmy Carter made a last-ditch effort to maintain a US-backed regime in Nicaragua even if Somoza should be forced to quit.
The plan is to preserve the National Guard as the custodian of US interests.
This plan fails.
The Sandinistas sweep into power, Carter orders the initial funding of what later becomes known as the Contras, operating out of Honduras.
The CIA musters Argentinian officers fresh from their own death squad campaigns, and these men began to organize the exiled National Guardsmen into a military force.
Enrique Bermudez had been a colonel in the National Guard, had trained at the US National Defense College and had served from 1976 to July 1979 as Somoza's military attache in Washington.
Furnished with $300,000 in CIA money, Bermudez takes command of the fledgling Contra force in Honduras.
1980s Support provided to the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the Hezbi-i Islami guerilla group in Afghanistan.
"The boom in the Pakistan drug trade was financed by BCCI."- Alfred W. McCoy
1981 Bermudez announces the formation of the FDN and his own position as commander of its military wing.
The CIA script later installs Adolfo Calero, formerly the Coca-Cola® concessionaire in Managua, as the FDN's civilian head, operating mainly out of the US, where he is under CIA supervision.
Reagan approves National Security Directive 77, which provides a budget of $19.3 million for the Contras.
April 13, 1989 "Bermudez was the target of a government-sponsored drug sting operation." - John Kerry, chairman committee investigating Contra cocaine smuggling. "Law enforcement officials know that the sting was called back in the interest of protecting the Contras."
"There's a saying," Blandon testified, "that the ends justify the means. And that's what Mr. Bermudez told us in Honduras."
Kerry Committee report concludes that members of the State Department "provided support for the Contras involved in drug trafficking ... elements of the Contras received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers."
November 1993 Judge Robert C. Bonner, the former head of the DEA, appeares on 60 Minutes and alleges that the CIA had permitted literally a ton of cocaine to enter the US.
1996 Gary Webb writes a series of articles published in the San Jose Mercury News which investigates the Nicaraguans linked to the CIA-backed Contras who had smuggled cocaine into the US.
According to Gary Webb, the CIA was aware of the cocaine transactions and the large shipments of drugs into the US by the Contra personnel and directly aided drug dealers to raise money for the Contras.
CIA Director John M. Deutch went to Los Angeles to refute the allegations raised by the Gary Webb articles, and was famously confronted by former LAPD officer Michael Ruppert, who said he had witnessed it occurring.
A Miami jury indicted former Venezuelan anti-narcotics chief and CIA asset, General Ramon Guillen Davila, who "led a CIA counter-narcotics program that put tons of cocaine on US streets in 1990."
2001 The American presence in Afghanistan is weakened initially by its dependence on a drug-trafficking Tajik-Uzbek minority coalition - the Northern Alliance led by Ahmad Shah Massoud.
"Since 2002, the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan 'at all levels' has been based on an implied strategy of attrition via clearing operations virtually identical to those pursued in Vietnam.
In Vietnam, they were dubbed "search and destroy missions;" in Afghanistan they are called "clearing operations" and "compound searches," but the purpose is the same, to find easily replaced weapons or clear a tiny, arbitrarily chosen patch of worthless ground for a short period, and then turn it over to indigenous security forces who can't hold it, and then go do it again somewhere else." - Thomas Johnson
US-CIA Heroin Transit Base Proven
CIA's Afghanistan Bribes Under Scrutiny
The CIA/MSM Contra-Cocaine Cover-up
Afghan Leader Confirms Cash Deliveries by C.I.A.
Anti-Drug Unit of C.I.A. Sent Ton of Cocaine to US in 1990
The Politics of Heroin; CIA Complicity In The Global Drug Trade
Real Drug Lords: A brief history of CIA involvement in the Drug Trade
"CIA are drug smugglers." - Head of DEA said this too late for Gary Webb