by Alfred McCoy
Progressive magazine, August 1997
Throughout the forty years of the Cold War, the CIA joined
with urban gangsters and rural warlords, many of them major drug
dealers, to mount covert operations against communists around
the globe. In one of history's accidents, the Iron Curtain fell
along the border of the Asian opium zone, which stretches across
5,000 miles of mountains from Turkey to Thailand. In Burma during
the 1950s, in Laos during the 1970s, and in Afghanistan during
the 1980s, the CIA allied with highland warlords to mobilize tribal
armies against the Soviet Union and China.
In each of these covert wars, Agency assets-local informants-used
their alliance with the CIA to become major drug lords, expanding
local opium production and shipping heroin to international markets,
the United States included. Instead of stopping this drug dealing,
the Agency tolerated it and, when necessary, blocked investigations.
Since ruthless drug lords made effective anti-communist allies
and opium amplified their power, CIA agents mounting delicate
operations on their own, half a world from home, had no reason
to complain. For the drug lords, it was an ideal arrangement.
The CIA's major covert operations-often lasting a decade-provided
them with de facto immunity within enforcement-free zones.
In Laos in the 1960s, the CIA battled local communists with
a secret army of 30,000 Hmong-a tough highland tribe whose only
cash crop was opium. A handful of CIA agents relied on tribal
leaders to provide troops and Lao generals to protect their cover.
When Hmong officers loaded opium on the ClA's proprietary carrier
Air America, the Agency did nothing. And when the Lao army's commander,
General Ouane Rattikone, opened what was probably the world's
largest heroin laboratory, the Agency again failed to act.
"The past involvement of many of these officers in drugs
is well known," the ClA's Inspector General said in a still-classified
1972 report, "yet their goodwill . . . considerably facilitates
the military activities of Agency-supported irregulars."
Indeed, the CIA had a detailed know ledge of drug trafficking
in the Golden Triangle-that remote, rugged corner of Southeast
Asia where Burma, Thailand, and Laos converge. In June 1971, The
New York Times published extracts from an other CIA report identifying
twenty-one opium refineries in the Golden Triangle and stating
that the "most important are located in the areas around
Tachilek, Burma; Ban Houei Sai and Nam Keung in Laos; and Mae
Salong in Thailand." Three of these areas were controlled
by CIA allies: Nam Keung by the chief of CIA mercenaries for northwestern
Laos; Ban Houei Sai by the commander of the Royal Lao Army; and
Mae Salong by the Nationalist Chinese forces who had fought for
the Agency in Burma. The CIA stated that the Ban Houei Sai laboratory,
which was owned by General Ouane, was ' believed capable of processing
100 kilos of raw opium per day," or 3.6 tons of heroin a
year-a vast output considering the total yearly U.S. consumption
of heroin was then less than ten tons.
By 1971, 34 percent of all U.S. soldiers in South Vietnam
were heroin addicts, according to a White House survey. There
were more American heroin addicts in South Vietnam than in the
entire United States-largely supplied from heroin laboratories
operated by CIA allies, though the White House failed to acknowledge
that unpleasant fact. Since there was no indigenous local market,
Asian drug lords started shipping Golden Triangle heroin not consumed
by the GIs to the United States, where it soon won a significant
share of the illicit market.
Within a few years, the currents of global geopolitics then
shifted in ways that pushed the CIA into new alliances with drug
traffickers. In 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the
Sandinista revolution seized Nicaragua, prompting two CIA covert
operations with some revealing similarities. During the 1980s,
while the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, the CIA, working through
Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence, spent some $2 billion to
support the Afghan resistance. When the operation started in 1979,
this region grew opium only for regional markets and produced
no heroin. Within two years, however, the Pakistan-Afghanistan
borderlands became the world's top heroin producer, supplying
60 percent of U.S. demand. In Pakistan, the heroin-addict population
went from near zero in 1979 to 5,000 in 1981 and to 1.2 million
by 1985-a much steeper rise than in any other nation.
CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujaheddin
guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants
to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan,
Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan
Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. During
this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests.
In May 1990, as the CIA operation was winding down, The Washington
Post published a front-page expose charging that Gulbudin Hekmatar,
the ClA's favored Afghan leader, was a major heroin manufacturer.
The Post argued, in a manner similar to the San Jose Mercury News's
later report about the contras, that U.S. officials had refused
to investigate charges of heroin dealing by its Afghan allies
"because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated
to the war against Soviet influence there."
In 1995, the former CIA director of the Afghan operation,
Charles Cogan, admitted the CIA had indeed sacrificed the drug
war to fight the Cold War. "Our main mission was to do as
much damage as possible to the Soviets. We didn't really have
the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the
drug trade," he told an Australian television reporter. "I
don't think that we need to apologize for this. Every situation
has its fallout.... There was fallout in terms of drugs, yes.
But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan."
Again, distance and complexity insulated the CIA from any
political fallout. Once the heroin left Pakistan's laboratories,
the Sicilian mafia managed its export to the United States, and
a chain of syndicate-controlled pizza parlors distributed the
drugs to street gangs in American cities, according to reports
by the Drug Enforcement Agency. Most ordinary Americans did not
see the links between the ClA's alliance with Afghan drug lords,
the pizza parlors, and the heroin on U.S. streets.
In Central America, proximity simplified the political equation.
According to sections of the San Jose Mercury News story that
the mainstream press have not contested, this "dark alliance"
began in the early 1980s when the contra revolt against Nicaragua's
leftist Sandinista government was failing for want of funds. In
1981, the CIA hired ex-Nicaraguan army Colonel Enrique Bermudez
to organize what became the main contra guerrilla army, the Nicaraguan
Democratic Front. Bermudez then accepted funds from two Nicaraguan
exiles active in the crack trade to supplement meager Agency funding.
In California, Danilo Blandon, the former director of Nicaragua's
farm-marketing program, used his business skills to open a new
drug-distribution network. Blandon allied with the rising young
black drug dealer "Freeway Rick" Ross to convert tons
of cocaine into low-cost crack for a growing market among the
city's poor African Americans. With supplies of cheap cocaine
from Central America, Ross undercut rival dealers and built a
booming drug business that spread up the California coast and
across the Midwest. Ross and Blandon avoided arrest for years.
But in the late 1990s, the operation lost its contra connection.
Both dealers were soon arrested on drug charges. Freeway Rick
started serving a ten-year sentence, while the Justice Department
intervened to free the contra-connected Blandon and send him home
as a well paid Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) informant.
Other responsible sources have made similar allegations about
contra involvement in cocaine smuggling to the United States In
December 1985, the Associated Press issued a story about the contra
alliance with cocaine smugglers. "Nicaraguan rebels operating
in northern Costa Rica have engaged in cocaine trafficking,"
wrote AP reporters Robert Parry and Brian Barger, "in part
to help finance their war against Nicaragua's leftist government,
according to U.S. investigators and American volunteers who work
with the rebels." As evidence, the reporters cited a CIA
intelligence report noting "the contras in Nicaragua had
bought aircraft with drug profits."
After lengthy investigations, a U.S. Senate subcommittee chaired
by John Kerry, the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, issued
a report in 1988 concluding that "individuals associated
with the contra movement" were traffickers; cocaine smugglers
had participated in "contra supply operations; and the U.S.
State Department had made "payments to drug traffickers .
. . for humanitarian assistance to the contras. in some cases
after the traffickers had been indicted . . . on drug charges."
During this decade of contra operations from bases in southern
Honduras, the region was effectively closed to narcotics investigations.
In 1983, at the height of the contra war, the DEA suddenly shut
down its Honduran office even though the agent there, Tomas Zepeda,
had, in his words, "generated a substantial amount of useful
intelligence" about Honduran military involvement in the
cocaine traffic to the United States. "The Pentagon made
it clear that we were in the way," an anonymous DEA agent
explained. "They had more important business." As host
to the main contra bases and the ClA's supply operation, the Honduran
military, like the commander of the Royal Laotian Army and Pakistani
Intelligence, were spared investigation of their involvement in
Alfred W. McCoy, a history professor at the University of
Wisconsin, is the author of "The Politics of Heroin: The
CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade."
and Third World