Another excellent, concise, and authoritative summary program in the Proven Conspiracies series.
What if the world’s most powerful intelligence agency was secretly funded by drug money? *Operation X: The CIA’s Secret Drug Trade Exposed* dives into the covert history of how U.S. agencies allegedly used illegal drug trafficking to finance anti-communist operations during the Cold War. From the French Connection to the Iran-Contra Affair, the web of drugs, politics, and covert operations has left a trail of violence and corruption across Latin America and Southeast Asia. Discover the untold stories of CIA-backed drug smuggling and the tragic figures like Enrique “Kiki” Camarena and Barry Seal who paid the ultimate price for uncovering the truth.
American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan — Book by Peter Dale Scott
This provocative, thoroughly researched book explores the covert aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Prominent political analyst Peter Dale Scott marshals compelling evidence to expose the extensive growth of sanctioned but illicit violence in politics and state affairs, especially when related to America’s long-standing involvement with the global drug traffic. Beginning with Thailand in the 1950s, Americans have become inured to the CIA’s alliances with drug traffickers (and their bankers) to install and sustain right-wing governments. The pattern has repeated itself in Laos, Vietnam, Italy, Mexico, Thailand, Nigeria, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Panama, Honduras, Turkey, Pakistan, and now Afghanistan to name only those countries dealt with in this book. Scott shows that the relationship of U.S. intelligence operators and agencies to the global drug traffic, and to other international criminal networks, deserves greater attention in the debate over the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. To date, America’s government and policies have done more to foster than to curtail the drug trade. The so-called war on terror, and in particular the war in Afghanistan, constitutes only the latest chapter in this disturbing story.
Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Columbia, and Indochina — Book by Peter Dale Scott
The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia — Book by Alfred W. McCoy.
The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia is a non-fiction book on heroin trafficking in Southeast Asia, which covers the period from World War II to the Vietnam War. Published in 1972, the book was the product of eighteen months of research and at least one trip to Laos by the principal author, Alfred W. McCoy. McCoy wrote Politics of Heroin while seeking a PhD in Southeast Asian history at Yale University. Cathleen B. Read (a graduate student who spent time in the region during the war) and Leonard P. Adams II are also listed as co-authors. Arguably, Politics of Heroin’s most notable feature was its documentation of CIA complicity and aid to the Southeast Asian opium/heroin trade. The CIA actively tried to suppress this book, and the rigorous research McCoy undertook to compile and compose its explosive contents. This volume established McCoy as the premier authoritative expert in this area of scholarly research.
McCoy later updated and expanded his research, and published The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. The first book to prove CIA and U.S. government complicity in global drug trafficking, The Politics of Heroin, includes meticulous documentation of dishonesty and dirty dealings at the highest levels from the Cold War until today. Maintaining a global perspective, this groundbreaking study details the mechanics of drug trafficking in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and South and Central America. New chapters detail U.S. involvement in the narcotics trade in Afghanistan and Pakistan before and after the fall of the Taliban, and how U.S. drug policy in Central America and Colombia has increased the global supply of illicit drugs.
(I had an opportunity to discuss his scholarly endeavors with Dr. McCoy several years ago.)
Along with McCoy’s Congressional testimony, this initially controversial thesis gained a degree of mainstream acceptance. The thesis of the book was that most of the world’s heroin was produced in the Golden Triangle. It is transported in the planes, vehicles, and other conveyances supplied by the United States. The profit from the trade has been going into the pockets of some of our best friends in Southeast Asia. The charge concludes with the statement that the traffic is being carried on with the indifference if not the closed-eye compliance of some American officials, and there is no likelihood of its being shut down in the foreseeable future.
In particular, Air America, covertly owned and operated by the CIA, was used to transport the illicit drugs. At the same time, the heroin supply was partially responsible for the perilous state of US Army morale in Vietnam. “By mid 1971 Army medical officers were estimating that about 10 to 15 percent of the lower-ranking enlisted men serving in Vietnam were heroin users.” Having interviewed Maurice Belleux, former head of the French intelligence agency SDECE, McCoy also uncovered parts of the French Connection scheme used by the agency to finance all of its covert operations during the First Indochina War through control of the Indochina drug trade.
The CIA reacted strongly to the book: “…high-ranking officials of the C.I.A have signed letters for publication to a newspaper and a magazine, granted a rare on-the-record interview at the agency’s headquarters in McLean, Va.” (the letters were to the Washington Star and were signed by William E. Colby and Paul C. Velte Jr. the letter to Harper & Row (the book’s publishers) on 5 July by CIA general counsel Lawrence R. Houston asked that they be given the galley proofs so that they could criticize errors and rebut unproven accusations “We believe we could demonstrate to you that a considerable number of Mr. McCoy’s claims about this agency’s alleged involvement are totally false and without foundation, a number are distorted beyond recognition and none is based on convincing evidence.”) and take whatever legal action they felt necessary before the book’s publication.
McCoy eventually overcame his initial reluctance to provide a copy to the CIA who then sent the promised list of criticisms and corrections. Harper & Row felt the material the CIA offered was extremely weak, but that the book was reasonably well sourced. (McCoy conducted “more than 250 interviews, some of them with past and present officials of the CIA He said that top-level South Vietnamese officials, including President Nguyen Van Thieu and Premier Tran Van Khiem, were specifically involved.”; a vice president and general counsel of Harper & Row said “We don’t have any doubts about the book at all. We’ve had it reviewed by others and we’re persuaded that the work is amply documented and scholarly.”) and not only published it, but published it two weeks before its scheduled release date.
CIA Covert Actions & Drug Trafficking — Alfred W. McCoy article
How a Pink Flower Defeated the World’s Sole Superpower: America’s Opium War in Afghanistan — Alfred W. McCoy article
Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism in Nationalist China, 1927-1945 — Jonathan Marshall article
Cooking the Books: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the China Lobby and Cold War Propaganda, 1950-1962 — Jonathan Marshall article
The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism, by Henrik Kruger
Danish investigative author Henrik Krüger set out to write a book about Christian David, a French criminal with a colorful past, and wound up writing a book—originally published in 1980—that spans all continents and names names all the way up to Richard Nixon. The Nixon administration and CIA wanted to eliminate the old French Connection and replace it with heroin from the Golden Triangle, partly in order to help finance operations in Southeast Asia. The book delves into the relationships between French and U.S. intelligence services and organized crime probing into the netherworld of narcotics, espionage, and international terrorism. It uncovers the alliances between the Mafia, right-wing extremists, neo-fascist OAS and SAC veterans in France, and Miami-based Cuban exiles. It lifts the veil on the global networks of parafascist terrorists who so frequently plot and murder with impunity, thanks to their relationships and services to the intelligence agencies of the so-called “free world.” In short, this updated edition tells a story which our own media have systematically failed to tell.
The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs, by Douglas Valentine
The Strength of the Wolf presents for the first time a definitive history of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) from its birth in 1930 until its wrenching termination in 1968. Carefully and extensively documented, the book is based largely on interviews with former FBN agents, and in this respect The Strength of the Wolf represents a new chapter in American history, one that introduces a cast of fabulous characters.
Douglas Valentine tells how the FBN’s premier case-making agents penetrated the arcane world of international drug trafficking and, by uncovering the Establishment’s ties to organized crime, brought about their own demise. As the book reveals in startling detail, the CIA and FBI were often protecting the FBN’s major targets in the Mafia and the French Corsican underworld. The CIA and its Nationalist Chinese allies were found to be the largest drug-trafficking syndicate in the world, but for political and national security reasons, the FBN was prevented from investigating this overarching conspiracy.
12:44 am on October 10, 2024
