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The British East India Company exercised monopoly control of the growing of opium in India and its transport and importation to China as early as 1750. Chinese Emperors objected. They issued edicts against its use. Foreign traders were ordered to surrender their opium in 1839. The British sent in warships, beginning the First Opium War. In 1841 the British defeated the Chinese. The Chinese had to pay a large indemnity and surrender Hong Kong. A little later some Chinese threw chests of opium into the sea in imitation of the American Revolution. The British were not amused. The British and French renewed hostilities toward the Chinese, beginning the Second Opium War. The British won large indemnities, and the importation of opium was legalized in 1856.
As early as 1800 the British Levant Company was purchasing opium in Turkey for importation to the United States.

Smuggling was the sport of the ruling class in the first years of the 19th century. In 1805 Charles Cabot (of the Boston Cabots) was involved in trade from the British to the Chinese, and John Jacob Astor purchased 10 tons of opium in Turkey to sell to the Chinese. A lot of that opium found its way to America, either directly through importation to New York City or through the immigration of Chinese and consequent opium dens in San Francisco.

Heroin was invented by Heinrich Dreser in 1895 while working for Bayer Drug Company. Bayer introduced it as a substitute for morphine. By 1903 heroin addiction had risen to alarming rates. By 1924 heroin was made illegal and the black market and the underworld were born.

In the early years of the 20th century, Corsican gangsters purchased opium from Turkey and from Burma through the French colony of Vietnam. They refined it in Marseilles, making it into heroin, and they brought it to New York to be distributed by the Mafia.

WORLD WAR II, THE MAFIA AND THE OSS

World War II disrupted trade routes. Germany controlled much of the eastern Mediterranean, and the Japanese controlled Burma and Vietnam. The French convinced Hmong farmers to cultivate opium to insure a regular supply, but distribution routes to the United States were upset because Mussolini had virtually wiped out the Mafia in Sicily.

With Lucky Luciano in prison and the European connections cut off, the American Mafia was in a sad state of disrepair in 1942. But then, Mafia kingpin Meyer Lansky had a great idea: “Why not join the war effort, liberate Sicily and restart the business?” He was able to sell the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services, the early precursor of the CIA) on his idea that the Mafia in Sicily would operate as a local resistance movement. The Mafia would assist in the liberation of Sicily if they could run Sicily and Naples after the United States left. Also, Luciano would have to be released from prison. The OSS agreed and thus was born the first of many “bargains with the devil” that was to become the mold in which all future relations with the underworld and criminal class were cast. Most people in the OSS probably had no idea of the extent of the relationship. Many of those who did turned a blind eye to the role the Mafia played in the transportation of heroin to New York City. But some others did see the OSS setting up the drug smuggling operation on very similar lines to what would happen in Vietnam. [See, in particular, “A Pledge Betrayed,” Part 5, The OSS in Europe.]

VIETNAM

When the French lost at Dienbienphu in 1954, they agreed to leave Vietnam. They and the Viet Mihn agreed to a temporary partition of the country into North and South Vietnam, and then in a year there were to be national elections and unity. Eisenhower, in his book “Mandate for Change,” admits the United States couldn’t let elections happen because the Communists would have won them. So, even though the United States signed the agreements and said they would abide by them, the United States sent “advisors” into South Vietnam to set up a series of puppet governments to maintain the fiction of two Vietnams. The CIA also inherited the Meo tribes and the Hmong in the mountains. These people had been clients of the French, now they were clients of the Americans. They continued to grow opium, and planes still flew the opium to Marseilles, but now they were U.S. planes from Air America, the new CIA charter airline.

Narconon International says in the 1950s, before there were overt hostilities, “U. S. efforts to contain the spread of Communism in Asia involves forging alliances with tribes and warlords inhabiting the areas of the Golden Triangle, (an expanse covering Laos, Thailand and Burma), thus providing accessibility and protection along the southeast border of China. In order to maintain their relationship with the warlords while continuing to fund the struggle against communism, the U. S. and France supply the drug warlords and their armies with ammunition, arms and air transport for the production and sale of opium. The result: an explosion in the availability and illegal flow of heroin into the United States and into the hands of drug dealers and addicts.”

The general rule in dealing heroin is to cut it 10 times. If you bought it, and you’re going to sell it, you should cut it 10 times. That means adding powdered sugar or powdered milk to dilute the heroin to one-tenth its strength. An overdose on heroin happens when the drug has not been cut. But that’s the street talk at the bottom of the food chain. At the top of the food chain, the CIA is bringing in tons of opium. They buy it as raw opium from the Hmong and sell it to processors in Marseilles. They don’t cut it 10 times, but they do raise the price 10 times. They then use the money to buy guns and ammunition for drug lords back in the mountains. There has never been an accounting of the cash that changed hands during the Vietnam War, but it would be criminally naive to believe that many CIA operatives didn’t become very rich in the buying and selling of drugs and guns.
This raises another problem: The intelligence community that is supposed to provide impartial information upon which policy makers can make reasonable judgments has a financial interest in the continuation of hostilities on behalf of drug lords and gangsters. It is a classic example of the tail wagging the dog.

IRAN/CONTRA

One of the people playing in the Golden Triangle during the Vietnam War was Ollie North. He was a gung-ho, kick-ass-kind-of-guy. For fun he’d go out into the jungle at night with his body painted and play commando, and, during the day, he worked with the CIA in Laos. When Reagan took office in 1980, North was the guy in the basement of the White House that McFarlane could go to with black box problems. Reagan wanted to fund the Contras who were fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Congress had ordered that no money be spent to fight this legitimate government, but Reagan was determined, even after he had been warned that to do so was an impeachable offense. The solution was to talk to Ollie. Ollie went down to Honduras (where Negroponte, our new National Security Czar, was ambassador) and met with the Contras. He found them to be familiar types (they were dealing cocaine). He came back and met with the Mafia types where he had been unloading Vietnamese opium and heroin and arranged for the sale of the cocaine. Then he went to Iran to arrange for the purchase of Russian made guns and ammunition (so they couldn’t be traced back to the White House).

Once he got the planes rolling, with military and CIA security clearances, the triangle ran itself. The Contras would deliver the cocaine to a private airbase in Costa Rica. They’d get cash for the coke. Richard Secord, Ted Shackley and Thomas Clines or one of Ollie’s other buddies from Nam would fly the coke to an airbase in Florida and it would be delivered to the Mafia, who would pay 10 times the last amount. The cash (or some portion of it) would fly to Iran and buy guns, and the guns would fly to Costa Rica or Honduras to be given to the Contras. It was a great plan. Everyone got rich and nobody got hurt, except the people of Nicaragua and the people in the United States that got addicted to cocaine. And a Congressional investigation didn’t even lay a glove on ‘em.

YUGOSLAVIA/ALBANIA

Under the Clinton Administration things were going to be different. They were going to focus on “strengthening democratic governments” rather than covert activities. They were going to “foster law-abiding behavior and promote legitimate economic opportunity,” presumably in contrast to supporting drug lords and gangsters. It didn’t quite turn out that way.

Most cynics agree that the United States tilted against the Yugoslav government because they wouldn’t play ball with U.S. business interests. Every other country in Eastern Europe had rolled over and played dead when Bechtel and others came in to buy up their infrastructure—telephones, water, electricity, basic industry, etc. When Yugoslavia resisted, right-wing interests and the CIA decided to implode the country. They began to support former fascist elements that were willing to secede from the country. The support for the Ustashe elements in Croatia (the SS equivalents during the Nazi occupation) was among the most morally repugnant. Soon the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was calling for an independent Kosovo. There were atrocities committed on both sides. Serbs were trying to cleanse themselves of Albanians, and Albanians were trying to eliminate Serbs. Slobodan Milosevic was portrayed in the Western press as a ruthless dictator, and the KLA were portrayed as freedom fighters. The truth was that the KLA was made up of Albanian drug lords who were the principal suppliers of heroin to Europe. Europol (the European Police Organization based in The Hague) wrote a report that detailed the connection between the KLA and Albanian drug gangs. CIA support for the KLA had been active since the early ‘90s, so the pattern should not be surprising. The CIA helps the drug lords bring out the heroin, turns it into money, buys guns, gets the guns back to the KLA.

OLD HAT AND NEW FRIENDS

In an article in the Montreal Gazette, Michael Levine, a 25-year veteran of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, confirmed the connection: “They protected them in every way they could. As long as the CIA is protecting the KLA, you’ve got major drug pipelines protected from any police investigation.”

AFGHANISTAN

9-11 gave the CIA an opportunity to reclaim old friends and old sources of opium. The original opium production in Afghanistan was the exclusive property of the British Levant Company beginning in the 18th century. The drug warlords were well known and established friends of British and American intelligence. When the Taliban outlawed the production of opium, the warlords were out of business. Afghanistan went from the leading producer of opium under the former government to zero production under the Taliban. The drug lords were ready and willing accessories to the U. S. invasion.

Our man in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, is another old friend of the company. Wayne Madsen wrote on January 23 on the website Canada’s Centre for Research on Globalization, “According to Afghan, Iranian and Turkish government sources, Hamid Karzai, the interim Prime Minister of Afghanistan, was a top adviser to the . . . UNOCAL Corporation which was negotiating with the Taliban to construct a Central Asia Gas (CentGas) pipeline from Turkmenistan through western Afghanistan to Pakistan.”

Madsen says, “Karzai maintained close relations with CIA Director William Casey, Vice President George Bush, and their Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) interlocutors” during the Mujahedeen war. “Later, Karzai and a number of his brothers moved to the United States under the auspices of the CIA. Karzai continued to serve the agency’s interests, as well as those of the Bush family and their oil friends in negotiating the CentGas deal, according to Middle East and South Asian sources.” (www.ww3report.com)

Today Afghanistan produces three-quarters of the world’s opium. The sources of cultivation are protected by the CIA and the U.S. military. The drug lords who harvest and collect the opium are protected by the CIA. The transport of the opium to heroin processing plants is protected by the CIA. The delivery of the heroin to distributors in the U.S. is protected by the CIA. The only sensible conclusion is that the CIA is in control of heroin distribution in the United States. The major question is who are the people making money off of this? And how has it affected U. S. policy toward Afghanistan?

COLOMBIA

Bush’s budget for this year includes $750 million for the War on Drugs in Colombia. This money is for the Colombian military and for spraying coca fields. That sounds innocent enough, until you realize that the largest growers of coca and the largest dealers in cocaine are the large landowners who control the government and the military. Paul Wellstone was critical of this kind of aid before he died. Everyone in Colombia who has a patch of land grows coca. It’s a better cash crop than coffee. The government is interested in wiping out the small landowners, eliminating the competition, and protecting the large landowners. They spray the small farms and contaminate the land so nothing will grow on it.
CIA involvement in the drug trade in Colombia has deep roots. In 1980 they teamed up with Klaus Barbie (the Butcher of Lyon, the Nazi war criminal) to stage a Cocaine Coup, that failed.

CONCLUSION

In the 19th century the British fought two Opium Wars to gain the freedom to impose opium on the Chinese people. In the past 50 years the CIA has started and supported more wars than we can count. We haven’t begun yet to talk about Africa and the rest of South America. They have done this to support reactionary regimes and to suppress popular movements abroad, and they have financed their adventures by selling drugs to young people here in America.

It is way past time for Congress to hold them accountable. There must be a Congressional investigation of the role of the CIA in the international drug trade. We need to follow the money. Who profited? And how did this affect U. S. foreign policy? ||

Ed Felien is the owner of the Pulse of the Twin Cities and Southside Pride.