The War on Drugs, as so many almost instinctively know, has limited meaning when held up against the connections between CIA covert operations, drug smuggling, and the resulting rise in heroin and cocaine addiction in America, and all across the West (not to mention Pakistan, China, India, Indochina etc).
Nonetheless, just the other night a friend of mine who is in law enforcement in Vancouver was passionately telling me about the disastrous lack of rehab (0), detox (1) and mental health facilities in Vancouver, and how 5 percent of the “criminal” population in Vancouver literally commit 100% of the property crime.
Further, many of these people commit literally hundreds of property crimes without either being incarcerated or put into rehabilitation (for virtually all of them are drug addicts).
I might have got those stats all wrong, but something like that. I would like to write about this soon.
Judicially, the courts and the judges who have power, do not have whatever collective solidarity it takes to stand up and do something progressive about this problem: in short, demand more rehabilitation and mental health facilities.
What this means in detail, what sort of rehabilitation facilities are needed and so on, needs to be worked on and worked out, of course—probably most efficiently in partnership with drug addicts, or at least former drug addicts.
And what about the question of legalizing drugs, as is the case with alcohol and tobacco? For the record, the amount of death and the cost caused by their use and perhaps their legalization is staggering, and systematically encouraged.
Perhaps judges, by their generally “conservative” ideologies, believe endeavours like more rehab would increase the welfare state and would also be “soft on crime.”
To anyone remotely interested in reality, a cursory glance at what ‘conservative’ governments since and including President Reagan have done to the American economy would see the danger of these ideological misconceptions.
And I am no supporter of the Democrats/Liberals, either.
The cost of putting these “criminals” through the court system literally hundreds of times, only to be back on the street, overdosing and thus through the medical system, breaking and entering and then returning to the courts to be slapped on the wrist and kicked back onto the streets again is, evidently, insanely exorbitant and costly to the tax-payer.
Admittedly, any form of change, let alone finding answers to social mayhem, is more than difficult to enact. And even then you’ve got to get your friends at the banquet to agree.
Nonetheless, Ben Franklin once wrote: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
It seems this is true for both those addicted to drugs and those of us addicted to our ideology.
Incarceration is also unsustainable—and some could argue often inhumane—as we are all beginning to see in the US prison system, which has become Big Business for a few, and disastrous and expensive for the rest (both criminals and taxpayers).
But let’s save this essay for another, better informed day.
***
On Friday over lunch, a good friend of mine asked me to explain a different drug dynamic: the connection of drugs and the CIA—ie in Indochina, the Nicaraguan Contra scandal, Afghanistan in the 1980s and so on.
I couldn’t do it very well.
These covert, illegal, often immoral missions are remarkably confusing.
Nonetheless, before trying to delve into the “criminal” negligence on the East side of Vancouver, I’ve decided to try and put together a relatively simple synopsis of CIA drug involvement for me and for him—and of course, anybody else.
If anybody can add, enhance, clarify or question this simplification—or knows or can quote anyone who might—that would be great.
Here’s a little info. Despite all we know about the world, the troubles, the wars, this seemingly unstoppable unfairness and inhumane cruelty, it’s still, on some strange level, difficult to believe any of this CIA/drug involvement is true, or real. But alas…
In The Beginning, there was the Seed
Drug smuggling into China was undertaken in earnest by the British in the early to mid 1800s, at the height of her Empire. The negative response to this, or what is today known as “blowback,” resulted in the Opium Wars.
The very short of it was this: China’s goods were of value to the West, but China was not much interested in Western (British) goods, and was a very closed society in general.
As Britain’s deficit with China increased, Britain finally found a product the Chinese would, if they got a taste for it, find difficult to refuse:
Opium.
Opium, however, was not wanted in China, at least by the authorities. The smuggling of opium into China made Britain one of the great narco-traffickers in history.
By the 1830s, via the British smuggling of opium, to a large degree from India (whom the British were colonizing at the time), into China:
…opium had became a vice in China. Virtually all men under 40 smoked opium. The entire army was addicted. It affected all classes of people, from rich merchants to Taoists. The total number of addicts in China in the 1830′s was as high as 12 million.
Battles over trade continued. With opium addictions out of control, China made the drug illegal, with possible death as punishment for its use, and decided they would not be open to foreign trade at all. Britain opposed this, of course, and war broke out.
The British victory—due in part to China’s closed borders and resulting limited military technological advancement—forced open Chinese borders to trade.
Thus, Britain could now sell opium legally, like toothpaste and ipods, in a more open market, so-called. By all accounts, the victor’s post war treaties were deeply punitive upon China.
Nonetheless, according to American President John Quincy Adams the wars (1841, 1842) were not a result of opium any more “…than the throwing overboard of the tea in the Boston harbour was the cause of North American Revolution.”
After this time (sometime around the 1870s), and supposedly until the 1960s, Britain “farmed out” these narco-trafficking businesses to what are known as the Triads (roughly, underworld Asian criminal organizations in Hong Kong, Macau, mainland China, Taiwan etc).
This technique of supporting clandestine narco-traffickers and drug producing groups for funds would also be employed by the CIA.
DRUGS and THE CIA
At the end of World War II, the United States and the USSR became the two world superpowers, occupying a position that had primarily and previously been held by Great Britain.
Despite the USSR’s siding with America and Britain against Hitler’s Germany during the latter part of the WW II, with the war’s close Russia was considered different and dangerous (as they had been considered before the war with the Red Scare).
Thus began the Cold War, which became the dominant paradigm from 1946 onwards.
The battle was considered ideological, between democracy (so-called) and Communism (so-called).
The dominant feature of the struggle was massive arms build up.
At the same time, colonized countries all over the world—primarily India, and in Africa, Latin America and also the Middle East—were fighting for their independence against, generally, their former European occupiers.
The rebels in these colonized countries would generally adopt an ideology which defined their cause. This ideology would often be influenced further by whether they received support from the West (America, generally) or the USSR.
If rebel groups striving for independence from their colonial oppressors appeared to be adopting Communist (socialist/Marxist) tendencies that impinged on American interests, American foreign policy would often fund groups opposed to these rebels.
These are known as proxy wars.
According to Wikipedia, a “…proxy war is a war where two powers use third parties as a supplement or a substitute for fighting each other directly.”
The reasons behind American intervention have generally been explained as their commitment to freedom, and the necessity of stopping the evils of Communism rising and/or spreading.
A less mainstream response—but highly visible in say Vietnam (1962-1975) or Nicaragua in the 1980s—is the belief that America is simply fighting against these rebels to maintain or obtain American (Empirical) Business interests/resources in a specific country and its region.
Because proxy wars do not directly involve the United States and they are often brutal, impinge on sovereign rights and ignore international law, it can sometimes be difficult for the US government and Big Business interests to convince a democracy (and Congress) to help fund these wars.
Alternate sources of funding may be needed.
These funds can be created through the selling of arms for money—which is an aspect of what the Iran Contra scandal was about. These wars can also be funded directly or indirectly by the trafficking of narcotics, mostly heroin and cocaine.
So the main purpose for the CIA to be involved in drug trafficking is:
Drug trafficking offers huge financing possibilities for these proxy wars, and the the means (drugs) justify the ends (freedom from Communism and/or control of resources in a given area, and a geo-strategic stronghold).
This funding can take place by direct involvement or by turning a blind eye to drug cartels and letting them traffic drugs without interference (including into America).
In return, the CIA covert operation or the rebels it is backing receive funds from a given drug trafficking group.
From here I’ll give a limited timeline and greater detail of at least a few of these proxy wars. I may also get long-winded and confusing, so feel free to bow out now claiming: “You SOB, that’s way too long for a blog!”
For the record, the general dynamic as stated above seems to remain consistent.
EARLY DAYS
ITALY:
There appears to have been CIA (then known as its precursor the OSS or Office of Strategic Services) drug involvement during the invasion of Italy and Sicily in 1943 before the end of World War II.
This took place by using the connections of imprisoned American narcotics smuggler and mafia leader “Lucky” Luciano, for example, to help with intelligence and support the advancement of invading American troops.
In return—and because of Mafia’s staunch anti-communist views—the OSS deliberately helped the syndicates regain an “economic and social standing” they hadn’t enjoyed since the rise of Italian fascism under Mussolini.
According to Wikipedia, “…this became the true turning point of mafia history and the new foundation for its subsequent 60-year career.”
For more about Italy after the war, it’s worth looking up the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) created Gladio project, which allegedly included terrorist actions against western citizens by western governments and rebel groups to counter rising Communist influence.
FRANCE:
In the late 1940s and early 50s, there was CIA involvement with the Corsican underworld in a battle to stop the rising tide of Communisn in France.
CHINA:
CIA involvement and the use of drug trafficking funding also took place along the Burma-Chinese border. CIA objectives were to support the anti-Communist Chinese forces (the KMT or Kuomingtang) against Mao’s Communist regime in China, which had taken power in China in 1949.
With the funding of the KMT, CIA involvement, tolerance and complicity of drug trafficking took place in that grand opium producing area known as the Golden Triangle, a ‘relatively lawless area’ where Burma (now Myanmar), Thailand and Laos all intersect.
CIA funding of the defeated KMT narco-traffickers took place at the same time as the Chinese Revolutionairies under the diabolical Mao were theoretically beginning to undermine these traffickers. At the time the area was allegedly producing 85% of the world’s heroin.
Although no invasion by Chinese Nationalists back into China took place, the project led to a KMT monopolization of heroin operations in the area, wherein KMT leaders sometimes became drug traffickers.
INDOCHINA (LAOS/VIETNAM/CAMBODIA)
CIA connections to the drug trade are well-documented with the Vietnam war, and very specifically to the secret war in Laos (1960-1975) and the supporting of anti-communist Hmong peasants there by helping them develop their military funding cash crop of choice.
Battles took place near the North Vietnamese border, and according to scholar Mahmood Mamdani (pg 68, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim):
The Hmong’s main cash crop was opium, and the CIA readily turned the other way as the Hmong Commander, General Vang Pao, used a Corsican charter to export his crop to distant markets.
In 1965, when the escalating air war and the political infighting in the Laotian elite “forced the small Corsican charter airlines out of the opium business,” General Pao was able “to use the CIA’s Air America to collect opium from his scattered highland villages…
The story goes on, much of it from Mamdani, much cited from Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin.
There are two areas that I’m going to key on through a few cited writings.
One is Afghanistan and the massive rise in heroin trafficking during the CIA bringing together of Islamic extremists (mujahideen) from all over the world in the 1980s to fight Russia.
The other is Nicaragua, and the Iran-Contra affair, where mostly cocaine drug trafficking and the sales of arms to Iran for money were used to finance the American-backed Contras against the Sandanistas in Nicaragua, who had come to power by overthrowing the brutal Somoza regime that had ruled for some forty years.
DIRTY WARS, DIRTY MONEY: The CIA and Islamic Extremists, Afghanistan 1979-1989
As mentioned, the American government’s response to counter Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan (sometimes called Russia’s Vietnam) was to bring together Islamic extremists from all over the world to fight the Russians (in Afghanistan).
According to Mahmood Mamdani, (pg 126):
[S]ustained cooperation between the CIA and Pakistan’s [secret service, the] Inter Service Intelligence (ISI)…[came together] to provide maximum firepower to the mujahideen and, politically, to recruit the most radically anti-Communist Islamists to counter Soviet forces.
The combined result was to flood the region not only with all kinds of weapons but also with the most radical Islamist recruits. The Islamist recruits came from all over the world, not only Muslim-majority countries such as Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Indonesia, but also such Muslim-minority countries as the United States and Britain…
The groups [the CIA] trained and sponsored shared a triple embrace: of terror tactics, of holy war as a political ideology, and of a transnational recruitment of fighters, who acquired hyphenated identities (163).
By hyphenated identities, Mamdani is referring to, among many, the notorious terrorist group al-Qaida.
Al-Qaida, of course, were the heinous 9/11 attackers, killing nearly four thousand citizens in one day in America—and god knows how many people elsewhere.
Their leader, the notorious Osama bin Laden, if not officially funded by the CIA, nonetheless was trained and came of age during the CIA-arranged gathering of Islamic extremists in Afghanistan from across the globe.
Ronald Reagan on several occasions praised the Afghan “freedom fighters,” and even invited a group to the White House, saying on March 10th, 1982: “…the freedom fighters of Afghanistan are defending principles of independence and freedom that form the basis of global security and stability.”
Members of the mujahideen would become the most extreme, misogynist, Islamic government in the world: the dreaded Taliban.
HEROES OF HEROIN
According to almost anybody, opium and heroin played a significant role in funding the Islamic extremists/American war against Russian expansion, creating what some call a second Golden Triangle.
McCoy writes, as cited in Chossudovsky:
[T]he Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer [overtaking Golden Triangle production], supplying 60 per cent of U.S. demand.
In Pakistan, the heroin-addict population went from near zero in 1979 to 1.2 million by 1985, a much steeper rise than in any other nation…
CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujahideen 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 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.
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.
IRAN CONTRA(DICTIONS): The Destruction of Nicaragua
The Iran-Contra affair is remarkable for many reasons, one being it involved Ronald Reagan, uber-American Oliver North, drugs, terrorism, death squads, support for the arch enemy Iran, endless lies, abuse and disregard of Congress, and loads of illegalities, and yet its machinations remain difficult to explain with clarity.
For example, one of the most famous and respected reporters in the US is Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh. This is a funny exchange between him and Amy Goodman in a Democracy Now! interview.
AMY GOODMAN: And Seymour Hersh, for young people who don’t remember Iran-Contra, can you just fill people in on who Elliott Abrams is, his history?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Elliott Abrams was one of the key players in this incredibly wacky scheme we had in the Iran-Iraq war of two decades ago. Between 1980 and 1988, Iran and Iraq fought each other, and we supported Iraq.
We supported Saddam Hussein, the United States did, with a lot of secret arms, secret intelligence, even shipping him secret formulas that could be used to make biological weapons and chemical stuff and intelligence, etc, etc. And that was because of course, Khomeini—we had been kicked out of Iran, when our Shah, the Shah was overthrown.
We were terrified of the Shiite leadership there. And so, one of the plans, one of the schemes was, in the middle of all of this hostility, Ronald Reagan was so committed to the Contra War in Latin America, that is, defeating what he thought was a communist-led insurgency in Nicaragua in an election there, that he cut a deal to ship arms—let’s see. It’s complicated. They sold arms to Israel, which they were shipped, I think, into Iran. You help me out on this.
Anyway, the bottom line was that it was a policy that brought us into contact with Iran, secret trading. We were going to get weapons that were going to—the Israelis were going to buy weapons.
Money was—they were going to sell weapons to Iran. Money was going to be generated from that sale to support covertly, outside of Congress’s knowledge, to support aid for the opposition in Nicaragua that we favored—
AMY GOODMAN: For the Contras.
SEYMOUR HERSH: The Contras, yes, and so there we are. It was totally a crazy policy. When it unraveled, it should have probably led to, in a normal process, an impeachment proceeding for Ronald Reagan, but by that time, he was—everybody understood he was—he wasn’t well with Alzheimer’s or whatever.
That’s sweetly funny, but sadly revealing (not about Hersh, but about media and history). According to Wikipedia, in short:
The Iran-Contra affair (also called the Iran-Contra Matter and Iran-gate) was one of the largest political scandals during the 1980s. It involved several members of the Reagan administration who in 1986 helped sell arms to Iran, an avowed enemy [who were in a war with Iraq at the time], and used the proceeds to fund the Contras, an anti-Communist guerilla organization in Nicaragua.
In other words, the CIA-backed Contras, in fighting the Daniel Ortega led Sandanistas, had an income supplement to go with arms money from Iran:
Narco-trafficking.
Smugglers for the notorious Medellin cartel in Colombia would use Contra airstrips to smuggle drugs to other dealers (or they would do it themselves) on route primarily to North America—where cocaine use sky-rocketed.
For allowing this to happen, the CIA-backed Contras received funds to help in their brutal and terrorist war against the Sandinistas.
The CIA, according to McCoy, would also use these drug- smuggling planes to send arms back from the US to the Contras in Nicaragua.
Sometimes money was exchanged, from either the CIA or the Medellin Cartel to the Contras. Sometimes the exchange was purely weapons and cocaine—harkening back to the noble days of barter.
When the US Congress stopped financing the Contras at the very end of 1982, different methods were employed and deployed. This is where Colonel Oliver North came to prominence. He got former CIA operatives to sell arms to Iran—ruled by the Ayatollah Khomeini, an avowed enemy—to raise funds and buy airplanes for the Contra effort.
It was during these financially “challenging” times that the CIA became, literally, drug-traffickers.
REPORTER GARY WEBB
A series of articles by reporter Gary Webb outlined this, I believe in 1996. They were instructive by both the shocking CIA/drug entanglements and revelations, and how the mainstream media used so little of its potential to really uncover the sordid and extensive details.
In fact, many of Webb’s facts were brought into question by all three of the major American newspapers—the NY Times, the Washington Post and the LA Times—but the real and pervasive problem that had spread through the system, intensely criminal—the use of drug smuggling to support covert and illegal operations by the CIA—appeared beside the point.
All of this is even more ironic given the 49% increase in prison incarcerations in the United States over the last ten years is from drug crimes.
Webb himself said about the lack of media interest in the Contra/CIA drug scandal:
[F]or the past ten years [as of 1996], the major media outlets have studiously ignored or dismissed this topic, with very few exceptions. Now that it has been proven that the Contras were indeed selling drugs to Americans, I think they are hard pressed to explain their lack of attention to a topic that millions of Americans care very deeply about. To accept this story now is a tacit admission that the biggest media outlets in this country have been asleep at the switch for a decade—or worse…
The biggest obstacles were the total lack of cooperation and candor from the US government. All but one of the Freedom of Information Act requests were denied, often for the most absurd reasons, ie, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the FBI didn’t want to invade the privacy of these international drug lords.
Not a single government official with personal knowledge of these activities would agree to answer to questions.
We had public records disappear from court files. We had a witness disappear from a Nicaraguan prison. I was told that I would endanger the lives of DEA agents if we disclosed certain matters. I never felt threatened personally, but as my Nicaraguan colleague, George Hodell, noted at one point, “Things are moving all around us.
Supposedly airstrips in both Costa Rica and Honduras were also used for Contra operations.
When (soon-to-be Nobel Peace Prize winning) President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica discovered what was going on via Costa Rican congressional hearings—that North’s enterprise between Costa Rica and the White House was doubling as a narco-trafficking operation—North and his cohorts were banned from the country.
From Scott A Hunt’s The Future Of Peace, pg 217:
Despite the fact that Arias was highly educated and a proven leader, he was derided at the highest levels of the Reagan administration as the “Boy.”
Retired General Richard Secord, who was assisting White House national security adviser Oliver North in supplying the contras with secret aid, dispatched a message to Washington regarding Arias: “Boy needs to be straightened out by heavyweights.”
The heavyweights who tried to straighten him out included the assistant secretary of state, Elliott Abrams. Reporting back to Washington, Abrams said, “We’ll have to squeeze his balls…”
Aria found Abram’s tone imperious and retorted, “Not even [Margaret] Thatcher, the closest ally you have, supports your policy. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
The Costa Rican hearings, as reported in the Costa Rican Tico Times (7/28/29), stated:
These requests for Contra help were initiated by Colonel North to [Panama] General Noriega…They opened a gate so their henchmen could utilize [Costa Rican] territory for trafficking in arms and drugs.
Noriega, of course, was both a drug trafficker/facilitator and long on the CIA payroll, including while George Bush Sr was CIA Director of Intelligence. Noriega was also the excuse given by Bush when the USA invaded Panama in 1989, killing hundreds and possibly thousands of civilians, in what was known as Operation Just Cause.
As for the Iran-Contra debacle, beleaguered President Ronald Reagan denied having any knowledge of what went on, which speaks volumes for what he stood for, his mental well-being at the time, the legal system and the media—which remarkably didn’t collapse from endless laughing at the absurdity of its own inanity.
Of course, given the incredible amount of torture and death that has unfolded, none of it is funny.
According to Chomsky in Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World (pg 93-94):
When enemies commit crimes, they’re crimes. In fact, we can exaggerate and lie about them with complete impunity. When we commit crimes, they didn’t happen. And you see that very strikingly in the cult of Reagan worship, which was created through a massive propaganda campaign.
Reagan’s regime was one of murder, brutality, and violence, which devastated a number of countries and probably left two hundred thousand people dead in Latin America, with hundreds of thousands of orphans and widows. But this can’t be mentioned here. It didn’t happen.
The person responsible for one component of this terror, the Contra war in Nicaragua, was the person known as the “proconsul” of Honduras, John Negroponte [currently the Director of National Intelligence for the United States, serving President George W Bush] was U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, which served as the base for the terrorist army [the Contras] attacking Nicaragua. He had two tasks as proconsul. First, to lie to Congress about activities carried out by the Honduran security services so that military aid could continue to flow to Honduras…
And second, to supervise the camps in which the mercenary army was being trained, armend and organized to carry out the atrocities, atrocities for which it [the U.S. also] was condemned by the World Court.
But all of this didn’t happen and it soesn’t matter, because we did it. And that’s a sufficient reason for effacing it from history.
Throughout this historical period, Reagan supported the Apartheid government of South Africa, with what was called “constructive engagement”—against the wishes of Congress, who are often laughed at, incidentally. The impetus for “constructive engagement” was found in Reagan’s labelling of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress as one of the “more notorious terrorist groups” in the world, as they fought against the fascist policies of South Africa.
Okay. This is a very brief overview, that clarified some things for me and hopefully for you. More later…
Okay, one quick time to repeat, because I will get confused, I’ll garl darn quote myself:
Because proxy wars do not directly involve the United States and they are often brutal, impinge on sovereign rights and ignore international law, it can sometimes be difficult for the US government and Big Business interests to convince a democracy (and Congress) to help fund these wars.
Alternate sources of funding may be needed.
These funds can be created through the selling of arms for money—which is an aspect of what the Iran Contra scandal was about. These wars can also be funded directly or indirectly by the trafficking of narcotics, mostly heroin and cocaine.
So the main purpose for the CIA to be involved in drug trafficking is:
Drug trafficking offers huge financing possibilities for these proxy wars, and the the means (drugs) justify the ends (freedom from Communism and/or control of resources in a given area, and a geo-strategic stronghold).
This funding can take place by direct involvement or by turning a blind eye to drug cartels and letting them traffic drugs without interference (including into America).
In return, the CIA covert operation or the rebels it is backing receive funds from a given drug trafficking group.
And I still believe, or at least dream, that love is the principle and guiding force in the world, and in our hearts.
Sisters and brothers, love more.
