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<h1 id="reader-title">Armies, Addicts and Spooks: the CIA in
Vietnam and Laos</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">by <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/f3e2aguc/"
rel="nofollow">Jeffrey St. Clair - Alexander Cockburn</a>
_ September 29, 2017<br>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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, <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1504032888/counterpunchmaga">The
Phoenix Program</a>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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,</p>
<blockquote>
<p> 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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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</p>
<blockquote>
<p> 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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Back in the United States by the spring of 1972, McCoy
had finished the first draft of what was to be the
path-breaking <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1556524838/counterpunchmaga">The
Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia</a>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><em>This article is adapted from <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859842585/counterpunchmaga">Whiteout:
the CIA, Drugs and the Press</a>.</em></p>
<p>***</p>
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