[News] Armies, Addicts and Spooks: the CIA in Vietnam and Laos

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/29/armies-addicts-and-spooks-the-cia-in-vietnam-and-laos/ 



  Armies, Addicts and Spooks: the CIA in Vietnam and Laos

by Jeffrey St. Clair - Alexander Cockburn 
<https://www.counterpunch.org/author/f3e2aguc/> _ September 29, 2017
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At 7:30 a.m., on March 16, 1968, Task Force Barker descended on the 
small hamlet of My Lai in the Quang Nai province of South Vietnam. Two 
squads cordoned off the village and one, led by Lieutenant William 
Calley, moved in and, accompanied by US Army Intelligence officers, 
began to slaughter all the inhabitants. Over the next eight hours US 
soldiers methodically killed 504 men, women and children.

As the late Ron Ridenhour, who first exposed the massacre, said years 
later to one of the present authors, “Above My Lai were helicopters 
filled with the entire command staff of the brigade, division and task 
force. All three tiers in the chain of command were literally flying 
overhead while it was going on. It takes a long time to kill 600 people. 
It’s a dirty job, you might say. These guys were flying overhead from 
7:30 in the morning, when the unit first landed and began to move into 
those hamlets. They were there at least two hours, at 500 feet, 1000 
feet and 1500 feet.”

The cover-up of this operation began almost from the start. The problem 
wasn’t the massacre itself: polls right after the event showed 65 
percent of Americans approved of the US action. The cover-up was instead 
to disguise the fact that My Lai was part of the CIA killing program 
called Operation Phoenix. As Douglas Valentine writes in his brilliant 
book, The Phoenix Program 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1504032888/counterpunchmaga>,

    the My Lai massacre was a result of Phoenix, the ‘jerry-built’
    counter-terror program that provided an outlet for the repressed
    fears and anger of the psyched-up men of Task Force Barker. Under
    the aegis of neutralizing the infrastructure, old men, women and
    children became the enemy. Phoenix made it as easy to shoot a
    Vietnamese child as it was to shoot a sparrow in a tree. The
    ammunition was faulty intelligence provided by secret agents
    harboring grudges – in violation of the agreement that Census
    Grievance intelligence would not be provided to the police. The
    trigger was the blacklist.

The My Lai operation was principally developed by two men, the CIA’s 
Paul Ramsdell and a Colonel Khien, the Quang Nai province chief. 
Operating under cover of the US Agency for International Development, 
Ramsdell headed the Phoenix program in Quang Nai province, where it was 
his task to prepare lists of suspected NLF (called by the Americans 
“Viet Cong”) leaders, organizers  and sympathizers. Ramsdell would then 
pass these lists on to the US Army units that were carrying out the 
killings. In the case of My Lai, Ramsdell told Task Force Barker’s 
intelligence officer, Captain Koutac, that “anyone in that area was 
considered a VC sympathizer because they couldn’t survive in that area 
unless they were sympathizers.”

Ramsdell had acquired this estimate from Col. Khien, who had his own 
agenda. For one thing, his family had been hit hard by the Tet offensive 
launched by the NLF earlier in the year. In addition, the NLF had 
seriously disrupted his business enterprises. Khien was notorious for 
being one of South Vietnam’s most corrupt chieftains, an officer who had 
his hand in everything from payroll fraud to prostitution. But Khien 
apparently made his really big money from heroin sales to US soldiers.

For the CIA, the need to cover its involvement in the My Lai massacre 
became acute in August 1970, when Sergeant David Mitchell, a member of 
Task Force Barker, was put on trial for killing dozens of Vietnamese 
civilians at My Lai. Mitchell claimed that the My Lai operation had been 
conducted under the supervision of the CIA. The Agency’s lawyer, John 
Greaney, successfully prevented Mitchell’s lawyers from lodging 
subpoenas against any Agency personnel. But despite such maneuvers, high 
CIA and army brass were worried that the truth might trickle out, and so 
General William Peers of US Army Intelligence was given the task – so to 
speak – of straightening out the furniture.

Peers was a former CIA man whose ties to Agency operations in Southeast 
Asia dated back to World War II, when he supervised the OSS’s Detachment 
101, the Burma campaign that often operated under the cover of Shan 
opium trafficking. Peers had also served as CIA station chief in Taiwan 
in the early 1950s, when the Agency was backing the exiled KMT supremo, 
Chiang Kai-shek and his henchman Li Mi, Peers had helped design the 
pacification strategy for South Vietnam and was a good friend of Evan 
Parker, the CIA officer who headed ICEX (Intelligence Coordination and 
Exploitation), the command structure that oversaw Phoenix and other 
covert killing operations. It’s not surprising, then, that the Peers 
investigation found no CIA fingerprints on the massacre and instead 
placed the blame on the crazed actions of the enlisted men and junior 
officers of Task Force Barker.

In the immediate aftermath of My Lai the polls may have shown 65 percent 
approval by Americans, but it’s doubtful whether such momentary 
enthusiasm would have survived the brute facts of what Operation Phoenix 
involved. As Bart Osborn, a US Army Intelligence officer collecting 
names of suspects in the Phoenix Program testified before Congress in 1972,

    I never knew in the course of all of these operations any detainee
    to live through his interrogation. They all died. There was never
    any reasonable establishment of the fact that any one of those
    individuals was, in fact, cooperating with the VC, but they all died
    and the majority were either tortured to death or things like thrown
    out of helicopters.

One of the more outlandish efforts to protect the true instigators of My 
Lai came during the 1970 congressional hearings run by Senator Thomas 
Dodd (father of the present US senator from Connecticut). Dodd was 
trying to pin the blame for My Lai on drug use by US soldiers. He had 
seized on this idea after seeing a CBS news item showing a US soldier 
smoking marijuana in the jungle after a fire-fight. The senator 
forthwith convened hearings of his subcommittee on juvenile deliquency, 
and his staff contacted Ron Ridenhour, the man who had first brought the 
massacre to light prior to Seymour Hersh’s journalistic exposé. 
Ridenhour had long made it his quest to show that My Lai was planned 
from the top, so he agreed to testify on the condition that he would not 
have to deal with any foolishness about blaming the murder of over 500 
people on dope.

But no sooner had Ridenhour presented himself in the hearing chamber 
than Dodd began to issue pronouncements about the properties of 
marijuana so outlandish that Harry Anslinger himself would have 
approved. Ridenhour got nowhere, denounced the proceedings and 
expostulated outside the hearing room that “Dodd is stacking the 
evidence. Nobody mentioned drugs at My Lai after it happened and they 
would have been looking for any excuse. Many, many Americans are looking 
for any reason other than a command decision.”

Although Dodd had simply wanted to blame My Lai on drugs and move on, 
the press now began to take an interest in the whole question of drug 
use in Vietnam by US forces. The attention prompted a congressional 
delegation to travel to Vietnam headed by Rep. Robert Steele, a 
Connecticut Republican, and Rep. Morgan Murphy, a Democrat from 
Illinois. They spent a month in Vietnam talking to soldiers and medics 
and returned with a startling conclusion. “The soldier going to 
Vietnam,” Steele said, “runs a far greater risk of becoming a heroin 
addict than a combat casualty.” They estimated that as many as 40,000 
soldiers in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. A follow-up investigation 
by the New York Times reckoned that the count might be even higher – 
perhaps as many as 80,000.

The Pentagon naturally preferred a lower figure, putting the total 
number of heroin addicts at between 100 and 200. But by this time 
President Nixon had begun to mistrust the flow of numbers out of the 
Defense Department and dispatched his White House domestic policy 
council chief, Egil Krogh Jr., to Vietnam for another look. Krogh didn’t 
spend time with the generals, but headed out into the field where he 
watched soldiers openly light up joints and Thai sticks and brag about 
the purity of the grades of heroin they were taking. Krogh came back 
with the news that as many as 20 percent of the US troops were heroin 
users. The figure made a big impression on Richard Nixon, who readily 
appreciated that although Americans might be prepared to see their sons 
die on the front lines battling communism, they would be far less 
enthusiastic at the news that hundreds of thousands of these same sons 
would be returning home as heroin addicts.

Partially in response to these findings Nixon recruited the CIA into his 
drug war. The man the Agency chose to put forward as coordinator with 
the White House was Lucien Conein, a veteran of the CIA’s station in 
Saigon, where he had been involved in the coup in 1963 that saw South 
Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem, assassinated along with his brother 
Ngo Dhin Nhu. (The Diems were regarded by President Kennedy and his 
advisers as insufficiently robust in pursuing the war. What the CIA 
proposed, local South Vietnamese generals disposed, and the Diems died 
in a hail of machine-gun bullets.) At the time of his death Nhu was one 
of the largest heroin brokers in South Vietnam. His supplier was a 
Corsican living in Laos named Bonaventure Francisi.

Lucien Conein himself was of Corsican origin, and as part of his 
intelligence work had maintained ties to Corsican gangsters in Southeast 
Asia and in Marseilles. His role in the White House drug war team 
appears to have been not so much one of advancing an effective 
interdiction of drug supplies as in protecting CIA assets who were tied 
to the drug trade. For example, one of the CIA’s first recommendations – 
an instinctive reflex, really – was a “campaign of assassination” 
against global drug lords. The CIA argued that there were only a handful 
of heroin kingpins and that it would be easy to eliminate all of them. A 
White House policy memo from 1971 records this piece of Agency advice: 
“With 150 key assassinations the entire heroin-refining industry can be 
thrown into chaos.” On that list were relatively small-time players and 
those without any links to the CIA-backed KMT forces that controlled the 
crucial supply lines out of the Shan States. This discretion was nothing 
new, since there had been an agreement between Anslinger’s Bureau of 
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (the forerunner of the DEA) and the CIA 
not to run any of Anslinger’s agents in Southeast Asia, lest it 
discommode the CIA’s complex living arrangements in the region.

Another tactic advanced by Conein was to contaminate US cocaine supplies 
with methedrine, the theory being that users would react violently when 
dosing themselves with this potion and turn violently on their 
suppliers. There’s no evidence that either of these schemes – 
assassination or methedrine adulteration – was ever put into play. But 
the Agency was able to convince the Nixon administration that its 
eradication effort should be directed at Turkey rather than Southeast 
Asia, said effort culminating in an attempt at export substitution, with 
opium growers in Anatolia being helped to set up a factory to produce 
bicycles.

The CIA was well aware that Turkey provided only between 3 and 5 percent 
of the world’s supplies of raw opium at that time. In fact, the Agency 
had prepared an internal survey that estimated that 60 percent of the 
opium on the world market was coming from Southeast Asia and noted the 
precise whereabouts of the four largest heroin labs in the region, in 
villages in Laos, Burma and Thailand. This report was leaked to the New 
York Times, whose reporter relayed the main conclusions, without 
realizing that these villages were all next to CIA stations with the 
labs being run by people on the CIA’s payroll.

In April 1971, the CIA’s ties to the opium kings of Southeast Asia 
nearly sparked a major international confrontation. Crown Prince 
Sopsaisana had been appointed Laotian ambassador to France. On arrival 
in Paris, the prince angrily announced that some of his copious luggage 
was missing. He berated French airport officials, who meekly promised 
they would restore his property. In fact the prince’s bags had been 
intercepted by French customs after a tip that Sopsaisana was carrying 
high-grade heroin; indeed, his luggage contained 60 kilos of heroin, 
worth $13.5 million, then the largest drug seizure in French history. 
The prince had planned to ship his drug cargo on to New York. The CIA 
station in Paris convinced the French to cover up the affair, although 
the prince was not given back his dope. It hardly mattered. Sopsaisana 
returned two weeks later to Vientiane to nearly inexhaustible supplies 
of the drug.

Why the CIA interest in protecting the largest trafficker nabbed on the 
French soil? The opium used to manufacture the prince’s drugs had been 
grown in the highlands of Laos. It was purchased by a Hmong general, 
Vang Pao, who commanded the CIA’s secret air base in Laos, where it was 
processed into high-grade Number 4 heroin in labs just down the block 
from CIA quarters. The heroin was then flown to Vientiane on Vang Pao’s 
private airline, which consisted of two C-47s given to him by the CIA.

Vang Pao was the leader of a CIA-sponsored 30,000-man force of Hmong, 
which by 1971 consisted mostly of teenagers, fighting the Pathet Lao 
Communist forces. The Hmong had a reputation for fierceness, in part due 
to a century of conflict with the Chinese, who had, back in the 
nineteenth century, driven them into Laos after taking over their opium 
fields in Hunan. As one Hmong put it to Christopher Robbins, author of 
Air America, “They say we are a people who like to fight, a cruel 
people, enemy of everybody, always changing our region and being happy 
nowhere. If you want to know the truth about our people, ask the bear 
who is hurt why he defends himself, ask the dog who is kicked why he 
barks, ask the deer who is chased why he changes mountains.” The Hmong 
practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, with two crops – rice and opium, 
the first for sustenance and the latter for medicinal and trading purposes.

Vang Pao was born in 1932 in a Laotian hamlet called Nong Het. At the 
age of thirteen he served as an interpreter for the French forces then 
fighting the Japanese. Two years later he was battling Viet Minh 
incursions into Laos in the First Indochina War. He underwent officer 
training at the French military academy near Saigon, becoming the 
highest-ranking Hmong in the Royal Laotian Air Force. In 1954 Vang Pao 
led a group of 850 Hmong soldiers on a fruitless mission to relieve the 
beleaguered French during their debacle at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam.

The Hmong were first marshaled into a surrogate army by a French colonel 
called Roger Trinquier, who confronted a crisis in the French budget for 
local covert operations and intelligence in a fashion that covered more 
than one objective. “The money from the opium,” he wrote later, 
“financed the maquis [that is, the Hmong mercenaries] in Laos. It was 
flown to Cp. St. Jacques [a French military base sixty miles south of 
Saigon] in Vietnam in a DC-3 and sold.” The money was put into an 
account and used to feed and arm the guerrillas. Trinquier cynically 
added than the trade “was strictly controlled even though it was 
outlawed.” Overseeing the marketing in Saigon was the local French 
director of the Deuxiéme Bureau, Colonel Antoine Savani. A Corsican with 
ties to the Marseilles drug syndicates, Savani organized the Bin Xuyen 
River gang on the lower Mekong to run the heroin labs, manage the opium 
dens and sell the surplus to the Corsican drug syndicate. This 
enterprise, called Operation X, ran from 1946 through 1954.

Ho Chi Minh made opposition to the opium trade a key feature of his 
campaign to run the French out of Vietnam. The Viet Minh leader said, 
quite accurately, that the French were pushing opium on the people of 
Vietnam as a means of social control. A drugged people, Ho said, is less 
likely to rise up and throw off the oppressor.

During World War II, OSS officers working to oust the Japanese from 
Southeast Asia developed a cordial relationship with Ho Chi Minh, 
finding that the Viet Minh leader spoke fluent English and was well 
versed in American history. Ho quoted from memory lengthy passages from 
the Declaration of Independence, and chided the intelligence agents, 
noting that Vietnamese nationalists had been asking American presidents 
since Lincoln for help in booting out the French colonialists. As with 
Mao’s forces in China, the OSS operatives in Vietnam realized that Ho’s 
well-trained troops were a vital ally, more capable and less corrupt 
than Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang army and the pro-French forces in 
Indochina. When Ho was stricken with malaria, the OSS sent one of its 
agents, Paul Helliwell, who would later head up the CIA’s Overseas 
Supply Company, to treat the ailing Communist. Similar to Joe Stilwell’s 
view of Mao, many military and OSS men recommended that the US should 
back Ho after the eviction of the Japanese.

After arriving in Vietnam in 1945, US Army General Phillip Gallagher 
asked the OSS to compile a detailed background on Ho. An OSS operative 
named Le Xuan, who would later work for the CIA during the Vietnam War, 
acquired a dossier on Ho from a disaffected Vietnamese nationalist: Le 
Xuan paid the man off with a bag of opium. The dossier disclosed to US 
intelligence agencies that Ho had had extended stays in the Soviet 
Union, a revelation that doomed any future aid from the Americans for 
his cause. Le Xuan would later turn on the CIA, showing up in Paris in 
1968 to reveal his services to the Agency and denounce its murderous 
policies in Vietnam.

In 1953, Trinquier’s Operation X opium network was discovered by Colonel 
Edwin Lansdale, at the time the CIA’s military adviser in Southeast 
Asia. Lansdale later claimed that he protested about this French role in 
opium trafficking, but was admonished to hold his tongue because, in his 
words, exposure of “the operation would prove a major embarrassment to a 
friendly government.” In fact, the CIA’s director, Allen Dulles, was 
mightily impressed by Trinquier’s operation and, looking ahead to the 
time when the US would take over from the French in the region, began 
funneling money, guns and CIA advisers to Trinquier’s Hmong army.

The post–Dien Bien Phu accords, signed in Geneva in 1954, decreed that 
Laos was to be neutral, off-limits to all foreign military forces. This 
had the effect of opening Laos to the CIA, which did not consider itself 
a military force. The CIA became the unchallenged principal in all US 
actions inside Laos. Once in this position of dominance the CIA brooked 
no interference from the Pentagon. This point was driven home by the 
military attaché to Laos, Colonel Paul Pettigrew, who advised his 
replacement in Vientiane in 1961, “For God’s sake, don’t buck the CIA or 
you’ll find yourself floating face down on that Mekong River.”

 From the moment the Geneva Accords were signed, the US government was 
determined to undermine them and do everything in its power to prevent 
the installation of Ho Chi Minh as president of all Vietnam, even though 
elections would have clearly showed he was the choice of most 
Vietnamese, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously admitted. 
Eisenhower and his advisers decreed that Laos’s neutral status should be 
subverted. On the ground this meant that the neutralist government of 
Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma, which had amicable relations with the 
Pathet Lao, should be subverted by the CIA, whose preferred client was 
General Nosavan Phoumi. The Agency fixed elections in 1960 in an attempt 
to legitimize his rule. Also in 1960 the CIA began a more sustained 
effort to build up Vang Pao and his army, furnishing him with rifles, 
mortars, rockets and grenades.

After John Kennedy’s victory in 1960, Eisenhower advised him that the 
next big battleground in Southeast Asia would not be Vietnam but Laos. 
His counsel found its mark, even though Kennedy initially snooted Laos 
as “a country not worthy of engaging the attention of great powers.” In 
public Kennedy pronounced the country’s name as L-AY-o-s, thinking that 
Americans would not rally to the cause of a place pronounced “louse.” In 
1960 there were but a thousand men in Vang Pao’s army. By 1961 “L’Armée 
Clandestine” had grown to 9,000. By the time of Kennedy’s assassination 
in late 1963, Vang Pao was at the head of some 30,000 troops. This army 
and its air force were entirely funded by the United States to the tune 
of $300 million, administered and overseen by the CIA.

Vang Pao’s original CIA case officer was William Young, the Baptist 
missionary-become-CIA-officer we met in the preceding chapter. Young 
never had any problem with the opium trafficking of the Hmong tribes. 
After Young was transferred out of the area in 1962, the CIA asked the 
Frenchman Trinquier to return as military adviser to the Hmong. 
Trinquier had just completed his tour of duty in the French Congo and 
consented to perform that function for a few months before the arrival 
of one of the most notorious characters in this saga, an American named 
Anthony Posephny, always known as Tony Poe.

Poe was a CIA officer, a former US Marine who had been wounded at Iwo 
Jima. By the early 1950s he was working for the Agency in Asia, starting 
with the training of Tibetan Khamba tribesmen in Colorado (thus 
breaching the law against CIA activities inside the US), prior to 
leading them back to retrieve the Dalai Lama. In 1958 Poe showed up in 
Indonesia in an early effort to topple Sukarno. In 1960 he was training 
KMT forces for raids into China; his right hand was by now mangled after 
ill-advised contact with a car’s fanbelt. In 1963 Poe became Vang Pao’s 
case officer and forthwith instituted new incentives to fire up the 
Hmong’s dedication to freedom’s cause, announcing that he would pay a 
cash bounty for every pair of Pathet Lao ears delivered to him. He kept 
a plastic bag on his front porch where the ears were deposited and 
strung his collection along the verandah. To convince skeptical CIA 
superiors, in this case Ted Shackley in Vientiane, that his body counts 
were accurate, Poe once stapled a pair of ears to a report and sent it 
to HQ.

This souvenir of early methods of computing the slaughter of native 
Americans was not as foolproof as Poe imagined. He himself later 
described going up country and finding a small boy with no ears, then 
was told that the boy’s father had sliced them off “to get money from 
the Americans.” Poe shifted his incentive to the entire heads of Pathet 
Lao, claiming that he preserved them in formaldehyde in his bedroom.

This man, described by an associate as an “amiable psychopath,” was 
running Phoenix-type operations into Lao villages near the Vietnam 
border. The teams were officially termed “home defense units,” though 
Poe more frankly described them as “hunter-killer teams.” Poe later 
claimed that he was booted out of Long Tieng because he had objected to 
CIA tolerance of Vang Pao’s drug trading, but his description suggests 
more an envy for the French style of direct supervision of the opium 
trade. In a filmed TV interview at his home in Northern Thailand Poe 
said in 1987,

      You don’t let ’em run loose without a chain on ’em. They’re like
    any kind of animals, or a baby. You have to control ’em. Vang Pao
    was the only guy with a pair of shoes when I met him. Why does he
    need Mercedes and hotels and homes when he never had them before?
    Why are you going to give him them? He was making millions. He had
    his own avenue for selling heroin. He put his money in US bank
    accounts and Swiss banks, and we all knew it. We tried to monitor
    it. We controlled all the pilots. We were giving him free rides into
    Thailand. They were flying it [that is, the opium cargoes] into
    Danang, where it was picked up by the number two man to Thieu [at
    the time South Vietnam’s president]. It was all a contractual
    relationship, just like bankers and businessmen. A wonderful
    relationship. Just a Mafia. A big organized Mafia.

By the time Poe left this area of Laos in 1965, the situation was just 
as he described it twenty years later. The CIA’s client army was 
collecting and shipping the opium on CIA planes, which by now were 
flying under the American flag.

“Yes, I’ve seen the sticky bricks come on board, and no one challenged 
it,” Neal Hanson, an Air America pilot, said in a filmed interview in 
the late 1980s. “It was as if it was their personal property. We were a 
freebie airline. Whoever was put on our plane we flew. Primarily it was 
the smaller aircraft that would visit outlying villages and bring it 
[the opium] back to Long Tieng. If they put something on the airplane 
and told you not to look at it, you didn’t look at it.”

The Air America operation played a key role in expanding the opium 
market. CIA and US Agency for International Development funds went to 
the construction of more than 150 short, so-called LIMA landing strips 
in the mountains near the opium fields, thus opening these remote spots 
to the export trade – and also ensuring that such exports went to Vang 
Pao. The head of AID in that area at the time, Ron Rickenbach, said 
later, “I was on the air strips. My people were in charge of supplying 
the aircraft. I was in the areas where the opium was grown. I personally 
witnessed it being placed on Air America planes. We didn’t create the 
opium product. But our presence accelerated it dramatically.” In 1959 
Laos was producing about 150 tons. By 1971 production had risen to 300 
tons. Another boost to opium production, much of which was ultimately 
destined for the veins of Americans then fighting in Vietnam, was 
enabled by the USAID’s supplying rice to the Hmong, thus allowing them 
to stop growing this staple and use the land to cultivate opium poppies.

Vang Pao controlled the opium trade in the Plain of Jars region of Laos. 
By buying up the one salable crop the general could garner the 
allegiance of the hill tribes as well as stuff his own bank account. He 
would pay $60 a kilo, $10 over the prevailing rate, and would purchase a 
village’s crop if, in return, the village would supply recruits for his 
army. As a village leader described it, “Meo [that is, Hmong] officers 
with three or four stripes came from Long Tieng to buy their opium. They 
came in American helicopters, perhaps two or three men at one time. The 
helicopter leaves them here for a few days and they walk to the 
villages, then come back here and radio Long Tieng to send another 
helicopter for them and take the opium back.”

John Everingham, an Australian war photographer, was at that time based 
in Laos and visited the Hmong village of Long Pot; he recalled in the 
late 1980s that

      I was given the guest bed in a district village leader’s house. I
    ended up sharing it with a military guy, who I later discovered was
    a leader in Vang Pao’s army. I was wakened by a great confusion of
    people and noise at the bottom of the bed, where there was a packet
    of black sticky stuff on bamboo leaves. And the village leader was
    weighing it out and paying quite a considerable amount of money.
    This went on several mornings. I found out it was raw opium. They
    all wore American uniforms. The opium went to Long Tieng by
    helicopters, Air America helicopters on contract to the CIA. I know
    as a fact that shortly after Vang Pao’s army was formed, the
    military officers gained control of the opium trade. It not only
    helped make them a lot of money. It also helped the villagers who
    needed their opium carried out, a difficult task in wartime. The
    officers were obviously paying a very good price because the
    villagers were very anxious to sell it to them.

In the early 1960s the trading chain from Long Tieng was as follows: the 
opium would be shipped into Vietnam on Laos Commercial Air, an airline 
run jointly by Ngo Dinh Nhu and the Corsican Bonaventure Francisi. Nhu, 
brother of South Vietnam’s President Diem, had presided over a huge 
expansion in Saigon’s opium parlors in order to fund his own security 
operation. But after the Diem brothers’ assassination, Marshall Nguyen 
Cao Ky, the man selected by the CIA as South Vietnam’s new leader, began 
bringing the opium in from Long Tieng on Vietnamese air force planes. 
(Ky had previously been head of South Vietnam’s air force.) A CIA man, 
Sam Mustard, testified to this arrangement in congressional hearings in 
1968.

At the Laotian end, General Phoumi had placed Ouane Rattikone in charge 
of overall opium operations, and his dealings resulted in about a ton of 
opium a month being landed in Saigon. For his services, however, 
Rattikone was getting only about $200 a month from the parsimonious 
Phoumi. With the backing of the CIA, Rattikone rebelled and launched a 
coup in 1965 against Phoumi, driving his former boss into exile in 
Thailand. Rattikone now wanted to drop the contract with the Corsican’s 
Air Laos, which, despite Marshall Ky’s switch, was still doing business. 
Rattikone’s plan was to use the Royal Lao Air Force, entirely funded by 
the CIA. He referred to the opium shipments on the national air force as 
“requisitions militaires.” But CIA air commander Jack Drummond objected 
to what he deemed a logistically inefficient use of the Royal Lao Air 
Force’s T-28s and instead decreed that the CIA would furnish a C-47 for 
the dope runs “if they’d leave the T-28s alone.”

That’s precisely what happened. Two years later, in 1967, the CIA and 
USAID purchased two C-47s for Vang Pao, who opened up his own air 
transport company, which he called Xieng Khouang Air, known by one and 
all as Air Opium.

At the time the CIA decided to give Vang Pao his own airline, the CIA 
station chief in Vientiane was Ted Shackley, a man who had gotten his 
start in the CIA’s Paperclip project, recruiting Nazi scientists. Before 
he came to Laos Shackley had headed the Agency’s Miami station, where he 
orchestrated the repeated terror raids and assassination bids against 
Cuba and consorted with the local Cuban émigrés, themselves deeply 
involved in the drug trade. Shackley was an ardent exponent of the idea 
of purchasing the loyalty of CIA clients by a policy of economic 
assistance, calling this “the third option.” Tolerance – indeed active 
support – of the opium trade was therefore a proper military and 
diplomatic strategy. He also had a reputation for preferring to work 
with a team of long-term associates whom he would deploy in appropriate 
posts.

Thus one can follow, through the decades, the Shackley team from Miami, 
to Laos, to Vietnam (where he later became CIA station chief in Saigon) 
to his private business operations in Central America. When Shackley was 
in Vientiane, his associate, Thomas Clines, was handling business at 
Long Tieng. Another CIA man, Edwin Wilson, was delivering espionage 
equipment to Shackley in Laos. Richard Secord was supervising CIA 
operations, thus participating in a bombing program depositing more high 
explosive on peasants and guerrillas in the Plain of Jars than did the 
US on Germany and Japan during the whole of World War II. Shackley, 
Clines, Secord and Air America cargo kicker Eugene Hasenfus show up 
later in our story, in Central America, once again amid the CIA’s active 
complicity in the drug trade.

By the time Shackley moved to Saigon in 1968, the war had turned against 
Vang Pao. The Pathet Lao now had the upper hand. Over the next three 
years the story of the Hmong was one of forced marches and military 
defeats, and as the ground war went badly the CIA took to bombing 
campaigns that killed yet more Hmong. As Edgar “Pop” Buell, a missionary 
working in the hills, wrote in a memo to the CIA in 1968, “A short time 
ago we rounded up 300 fresh recruits [from the Hmong], 30 percent were 
14 years old. Another 30 percent were 15 or 16. The remaining 40 percent 
were 45 or over. Where were the ages between? I’ll tell you – they’re 
all dead.”

By the end of the war in Laos a third of the entire population of the 
country had become refugees. In their forced marches the Hmong 
experienced 30 percent casualty rates, with young children often having 
to put their exhausted parents, prostrated along the trail, out of their 
misery. By 1971 the CIA was practicing a scorched-earth policy in Hmong 
territory against the incoming Pathet Lao. The land was drenched with 
herbicides, which killed the opium crop and also poisoned the Hmong. 
Later, when Hmong refugees in Thai refugee camps reported this “yellow 
rain,” CIA-patronized journalists spread the story that this was a 
Communist essay in biological warfare. The Wall Street Journal editorial 
page ran an extensive propaganda campaign on the issue in the early 
Reagan years. Vang Pao ended up in Missoula, Montana. General Ouane 
Rattikone went into exile in Thailand.

This CIA-transported opium engendered an addiction rate among US 
servicemen in Vietnam of up to 30 percent, with the soldiers spending 
some $80 million a year in Vietnam on heroin. In the early 1970s some of 
this same heroin was being smuggled back to the US in the body bags of 
dead servicemen, and when DEA agent Michael Levine attempted to bust the 
operation, he was warned off by his superiors because it might have led 
to exposure of the supply line from Long Tieng.

In 1971 a second-year grad student at Yale named Alfred McCoy met the 
poet Allen Ginsberg at a demonstration for Bobby Seale in New Haven. 
Ginsberg found out that McCoy had studied up on the drug trade and also 
knew several Southeast Asian languages as well as the political history 
of the region. He encouraged McCoy to research allegations about CIA 
involvement in the drug trade. McCoy finished his term papers and 
traveled to Southeast Asia in the summer of 1971, where he embarked on a 
courageous and far-reaching investigation that yielded brilliant 
results. He interviewed troops and officers in Saigon, and there also 
met John Everingham, the photographer who had witnessed the opium 
dealings in Laos. Everingham took him back into Laos to that same 
village. McCoy interviewed Hmong, both villagers and chiefs. He tracked 
down General Ouane Rattikone in Thailand. He interviewed Pop Buell and 
the CIA agent William Young.

Back in the United States by the spring of 1972, McCoy had finished the 
first draft of what was to be the path-breaking The Politics of Heroin 
in Southeast Asia 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1556524838/counterpunchmaga>. In 
June of that year he was invited to testify before the US Senate by 
Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin. Following that testimony, he was 
called by his publisher Harper & Row, demanding that he come to New York 
and meet with the company’s president, Winthrop Knowlton. Knowlton told 
McCoy that Cord Meyer, a top-ranking CIA officer, had paid a visit to 
the owner of Harper & Row, Cass Canfield, and had told Canfield that 
McCoy’s book posed a national security threat. Meyer demanded that 
Harper & Row cancel the contract. Canfield refused, but did agree to let 
the CIA review McCoy’s book before publication.

While McCoy was deliberating what to do, the CIA’s approach to Canfield 
leaked out to Seymour Hersh, then working at the New York Times. Hersh 
promptly published the story. As McCoy wrote in the preface to a new 
edition of his book published in 1990, “Humiliated in the public arena, 
the CIA turned to covert harassment. Over the coming months, my federal 
education grant was investigated. My phones were tapped. My income tax 
was audited and my sources were intimidated.” Some of his interpreters 
were threatened with assassination.

The book was duly published by Harper & Row in 1972. Amid Congressional 
disquiet, the CIA told the Joint Committee on Intelligence that it was 
pressing forward with an internal review by the CIA’s Inspector General. 
The Agency sent twelve investigators into the field, where they spent 
two brief weeks in interviews. The report has never been released in its 
entirety, but this is its conclusion:

    No evidence that the Agency or any senior officer of the Agency has
    ever sanctioned, or supported drug trafficking, as a matter of
    policy. Also we found not the slightest suspicion, much less
    evidence, that any Agency officer, staff or contact, has ever been
    involved with the drug business. With respect to Air America, we
    found that it has always forbidden, as a matter of policy, the
    transportation of contraband goods. We believe that its Security
    Inspection Service which is used by the cooperating air transport
    company as well, is now serving as an added deterrent to drug
    traffickers.

    The one area of our activities in South East Asia that gives us some
    concern has to do with the agents and local officials with whom we
    are in contact and who have been or may still be involved in one way
    or another in the drug business. We are not referring here to those
    agents who are run as penetrations of the narcotics industry for
    collection of intelligence on the industry but, rather, to those
    with whom we are in touch in our other operations. What to do about
    these people is particularly troublesome in view of its implications
    for some of our operations, particularly in Laos. Yet their good
    will, if not mutual cooperation, considerably facilitates the
    military activities of the Agency-supported irregulars.

The report admitted that “the war has clearly been our over-riding 
priority in Southeast Asia and all other issues have taken second place 
in the scheme of things.” The report also suggested that there was no 
financial incentive for the pilots in Air America to be involved in 
smuggling, since they were “making good money.”

Reviews of McCoy’s book were hostile, suggesting that his hundreds of 
pages of well-sourced interviews and reporting amounted to 
conspiratorial rumor-mongering by a radical opponent of the war. McCoy’s 
charges were dismissed out of hand in the Church hearings of 1975, which 
concluded that allegations of drug smuggling by CIA assets and 
proprietaries “lacked substance.”

As McCoy himself summed it up in 1990, in words which no doubt strike a 
chord in the heart of Gary Webb, “Although I had scored in the first 
engagement with a media blitz, the CIA won the longer bureaucratic 
battle. By silencing my sources and publicly announcing its abhorrence 
of drugs, the Agency convinced Congress that it had been innocent of any 
complicity in the Southeast Asian opium trade.”

/This article is adapted from Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859842585/counterpunchmaga>./

***


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