NYTimes | CIA ties to international drug trafficking date to
the Korean War. In 1949, two of Chiang Kai-shek's defeated generals, Li
Wen Huan and Tuan Shi Wen, marched their Third and Fifth Route armies,
with families and livestock, across the mountains to northern Burma.
Once installed, the peasant soldiers began cultivating the crop they
knew best, the opium poppy.
When China entered the Korean War, the CIA had a
desperate need for intelligence on that nation. The agency turned to the
warlord generals, who agreed to slip some soldiers back into China. In
return, the agency offered arms. Officially, the arms were intended to
equip the warlords for a return to China. In fact, the Chinese wanted
them to repel any attack by the Burmese.
Soon intelligence began to flow to Washington from
the area, which became known as the Golden Triangle. So, too, did
heroin, en route to Southeast Asia and often to the United States.
If the agency never condoned the traffic, it never
tried to stop it, either. The CIA did, however, lobby the Eisenhower
administration to prevent the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs,
the DEA's predecessor, from establishing monitoring posts in the area to
study the traffic. Today, the Golden Triangle accounts for about half
the heroin in circulation in the world.
During the Vietnam War, operations in Laos were
largely a CIA responsibility. The agency's surrogate there was a Laotian
general, Vang Pao, who commanded Military Region 2 in northern Laos. He
enlisted 30,000 Hmong tribesmen in the service of the CIA.
These tribesmen continued to grow, as they had for
generations, the opium poppy. Before long, someone - there were unproven
allegations that it was a Mafia family from Florida - had established a
heroin refining lab in Region Two. The lab's production was soon being
ferried out on the planes of the CIA's front airline, Air America. A
pair of BNDD agents tried to seize an Air America.
A pair of BNDD agents tried to seize an Air America
DC-3 loaded with heroin packed into boxes of Tide soap powder. At the
CIA's behest, they were ordered to release the plane and drop the
inquiry.
The CIA was made officially aware of Manuel Antonio
Noriega's involvement in the drug traffic in 1972, when Mr. Noriega was
chief of intelligence of the Panama National Guard, and a promising CIA
asset. The BNDD found evidence that Mr. Noriega was taking payoffs for
allowing heroin to flow from Spain, through Panama City airport, and on
to the United States. That information was part of a lengthy file on Mr.
Noriega compiled by Jack Ingersoll, then chief of the BNDD.
Mr. Ingersoll was aware of Mr. Noriega's ties to the
CIA, as was President Richard Nixon. When Mr. Nixon ordered Mr.
Ingersoll to Panama to warn the country's military dictator, General
Omar Torrijos, about the activities of Mr. Noriega and General
Torrijos's brother Moises, Mr. Ingersoll hoped that law enforcement was
finally "beginning to get the upper hand in its ongoing struggle with
the CIA." He was wrong. The Watergate break-in occurred shortly after
his visit. Mr. Nixon needed CIA support; his enthusiasm for the drug war
evaporated. Mr. Ingersoll's successors at the newly formed DEA - Peter
Bensinger, Francis Mullen and John Lawn - all told me they never saw his
file, although they had asked to see everything the DEA had on Mr.
Noriega. The material has disappeared.
Shortly after General Torrijos's death in a
mysterious airplane crash, Mr. Noriega, with CIA assistance, took
command of the Panama National Guard.
No one in the Reagan administration was prepared to
do anything about the Noriega drug connection. As Norman Bailley, a
National Security Council staff member at the time, told me, "The CIA
and the Pentagon were resolutely opposed to acting on that knowledge,
because they were a hell of a lot more worried about trying to keep
Panama on our side with reference to Nicaragua than they were about
drugs." Nowhere, however, was the CIA more closely tied to drug traffic
than it was in Pakistan during the Afghan War. As its principal conduit
for arms and money to the Afghan guerrillas, the agency chose the
Pakistan military's Inter-Services Intelligence Bureau. The ISI in turn
steered the CIA's support toward Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Islamic
fundamentalist. Mr. Hekmatyar received almost half of the agency's
financial support during the war, and his fighters were valiant and
effective. But many of his commanders were also major heroin
traffickers.
As it had in Laos, the heroin traffic blossomed in
the shadows of a CIA-sustained guerrilla war. Soon the trucks that
delivered arms to the guerrillas in Afghanistan were coming back down
the Khyber Pass full of heroin.
The conflict and its aftermath have given the world
another Golden Triangle: the Golden Crescent, sweeping through
Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of the former Soviet Union. Many of
those involved in the drug traffic are men who were once armed, trained
and financed by the CIA.
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