The Cold War played a direct and prominent role in the production and
trafficking of illicit drugs. Indeed, the financing of many
anti-Communist covert operations, such as those led by the
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), resorted to the drug
economy of various proxy states in which drug trafficking
was often condoned and even encouraged. Specific historical
cases illustrate how the anti-Communist agenda of the CIA
played a decisive role in spurring the global illicit drug
trade. These include the French Connection and the role of
the Corsican mafia against Communists both in France and in Southeast Asia (Laos and Vietnam), the propping up of the defeated Chinese Nationalist Party (Guomindang)
in northern Burma, the Islamic Mujahideen resistance in Afghanistan,
and the Contras in Nicaragua.
The United States, as the leader of the global struggle against communism, largely used
its special services and intelligence agencies to conduct
covert operations worldwide. However, to contain communism,
local aide was needed and widely found in local criminal organizations.
In the early 1930s, organized crime kingpins Salvatore Lucania,
aka Charles “Lucky” Luciano, and
Meyer Lansky trafficked heroin exported from China to support Jiang Jieshi's
Guomindang in the civil war there.
In 1936 Luciano was jailed, and, later, trafficking in Chinese
heroin was considerably disrupted by World War II.
It was during World War II that the American Office of Naval Intelligence
cooperated with Luciano: he was to be freed after the war
so long as he ordered his thugs to watch U.S. docks and ports to protect them from Nazi saboteurs. Then, the Office
of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, used
mafia assistance in the Allied invasion of Sicily. Such activities initiated what was to be a long-term feature of covert
operations led by American intelligence services when consent
of the U.S. Congress could not be obtained: the enlistment
of nefarious groups engaged in illicit activities in order
to wage secret wars through both proxies and alternative funding.
Basically, drug traffickers were useful to special services
and politicians, and in turn relied on such connections to
expand their activities.
Luciano was freed in 1946 and sent to Sicily where he was to cooperate with the CIA. Indeed, to counter the growing
Communist influence in France and Italy, the CIA turned to the mafia and condoned its drug trafficking activities.
The CIA soon asked Luciano to use his connections in France to break the strikes led by socialist unions in Marseille's docks,
from which arms and supplies were sent to Indochina. The sometimes-violent assistance of Corsican mobsters in cracking
down on the unions was notably motivated by their involvement
in the opium business in Indochina
and by the smuggling of raw opium from Turkey to Marseille, where it was refined into heroin for export to the United States. Luciano took advantage of such high refining capacities and helped
turn Marseille into the heroin capital of Europe. These Marseille syndicates, dubbed the "French Connection",
supplied the American heroin market for two decades.
The CIA most significantly influenced the drug trade in Southeast
Asia, Southwest Asia, and Latin America. Its anti-Communist covert operations benefited from the participation
of some drug-related combat units who, to finance their own
struggle, were directly involved in drug production and trafficking.
Considering the involvement of different groups in the drug
trade (for example, the Hmong in Laos, the Guomindang in Burma,
and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan), their CIA backing implied that the agency condoned the use of drug
proceeds and considerably increased opiate production in Asia. However, no evidence has surfaced to suggest that the CIA condoned
or facilitated the exportation of heroin to the United
States or Europe,
as happened with the Nicaraguan Contras.
In October 1949, the Communists defeated the Nationalist Guomindang
in China, and in the years that followed they cracked down on what was then
the world's largest opium production network. Opium production
then shifted to the mountainous and frontier areas of Burma,
Laos, and Thailand, where Guomindang remnants had fled and
became deeply involved in drug trafficking. Beginning in 1951,
the CIA supported the Guomindang
in Burma in an unsuccessful effort to assist it in regaining a foothold in
China's Yunnan province. Arms, ammunition, and supplies were flown into Burma from Thailand by the CIA's Civil Air Transport (CAT), later renamed Air America and Sea Supply Corporation, created to mask the shipments. The Burmese Army eventually
drove Guomindang remnants from Burma in 1961, but the latter resettled in Laos
and northern Thailand and continued to run most of the opium trade.
CAT not only supplied military aid to the Guomindang,
but it also flew opium to Thailand and Taiwan. There is no doubt that the CIA sanctioned both the Guomindang's
opium trade and the use of CAT, and later Air America aircraft, in that trade. The Guomindang would eventually increase its role in the opium
trade after the CIA withdrew its financial and logistical
support, and Burma eventually became one of the world's two main opium producers.
Following the 1954 French defeat in Indochina, the United States gradually took over the intelligence and military fight against Communism
in both Laos and Vietnam. It also took over the drug trafficking business developed by the
French by buying the opium produced by the Hmong and Yao hill tribes to enlist them in counterinsurgency operations against
the Viet Minh. To meet the costs
of this war, the French intelligence service, or SDECE (Service
de documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage), allied
itself with the Corsican syndicates trafficking opium from
Indochina to Marseille to take over the opium trade that the colonial government
had outlawed in 1946. The CIA ran its secret army in Laos, composed largely of Hmong tribesmen led by General Vang
Pao. Air America
would fly arms to the Hmong and take back their opium to the
CIA base at Long Tieng, where Vang Pao had set up a huge heroin
laboratory. Some of the heroin was then flown to South Vietnam, where part of it was sold to U.S. troops, many of whom became addicts. After the Americans pulled out
of Vietnam in 1975, Laos became the world's third opium producer.
However, Vietnam was not the only battleground of Cold War drug operations. The CIA
launched a new major covert operation in Southwest Asia in the early 1980s to support Afghanistan's Mujahideen guerrillas in their fight against Soviet occupation.
U.S. President Ronald Reagan was determined to counter what
he viewed as Soviet hegemony and expansionism, a goal shared
by his CIA director, William Casey. To support the Mujahideen
with arms and funds, the CIA resorted to the Pakistani intelligence
services, the ISI, which chose which Afghan warlords to back
and used trucks from Pakistan's military National Logistics Cell (NLC) to carry arms from Karachi to the Afghan border. However, the ISI not only chose Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, a leading opium trafficker, as its main beneficiary,
but also allowed NLC trucks to return from the border loaded
with opium and heroin. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, U.S. aid to the Mujahideen stopped, and the internecine conflict that ensued
in the country favored an increase
in opium production in order to maintain rival warlords and
armies. Afghanistan
eventually became the world's biggest opium-producing country,
a situation that still existed in 2005.
In Europe, Southeast and Southwest Asia, the Cold War saw many drug-related covert operations and secret wars
in which the CIA clearly and deliberately ignored evidence
of drug production and trafficking by its allies. South America, however, was not to be left out, and when Reagan vowed to topple
the pro-Marxist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, Vice President George H. W. Bush approved the creation of the anti-Sandinista
Contra force to which the CIA allied itself. Of course, the
CIA had full knowledge that the Contras were involved in drug
trafficking and that the planes bringing them arms were returning
to the United
States loaded with cocaine. However, the Boland Amendment of 8 December 1982, effectively cut off funding to the Contras. This led the Reagan administration
to undertake arms for drugs deals, and illegal weapon sales
to Iran.
Illicit drug production and trafficking increased during the Cold War.
During this period, the United States government was less interested in waging the "war on drugs"
begun in 1971 than in using drug traffickers to support its
wars abroad. Indeed, had the CIA cracked down on drug trafficking
during the Cold War, it would had forgone valuable intelligence
sources, political influence, and much needed funding for
its covert, and sometimes illegal, operations. Ironically,
there is no evidence that the Soviet Union or its intelligence service, the KGB, resorted to drug sales to fund
activities during the Cold War.
Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy
-----------
References:
Chouvy, Pierre-Arnaud.
Les territoires de l'opium.
Conflits et trafics du Triangle d'Or et du Croissant d'Or
[The Opium Territories.
Conflicts and Traffic of
the Golden Crescent and the Golden Triangle].
Geneva: Olizane, 2002.
McCoy, Alfred. The Politics of Heroin.
CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.
Rev. ed. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003.
Meyer, Kathryn and Terry Parssinen.
Webs of Smoke. Smmuglers, Warlords, Spies, and the History of the International Drug Trade.
New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998.
