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Afghanistan Producing More Heroin Than Ever

Afghanistan now supplies over 90 percent of the world’s heroin, generating nearly $200 billion in revenue. Since the U.S. invasion on Oct. 7, 2001, opium output has increased 33-fold (to over 8,250 metric tons a year).

The U.S. has been in Afghanistan for over seven years, has spent $177 billion in that country alone, and has the most powerful and technologically advanced military on Earth. GPS tracking devices can locate any spot imaginable by simply pushing a few buttons.

Still, bumper crops keep flourishing year after year, even though heroin production is a laborious, intricate process. The poppies must be planted, grown and harvested; then after the morphine is extracted it has to be cooked, refined, packaged into bricks and transported from rural locales across national borders. To make heroin from morphine requires another 12-14 hours of laborious chemical reactions. Thousands of people are involved, yet—despite the massive resources at our disposal—heroin keeps flowing at record levels.

Common sense suggests that such prolific trade over an extended period of time is no accident, especially when the history of what has transpired in that region is considered. While the CIA ran its operations during the Vietnam War, the Golden Triangle supplied the world with most of its heroin. After that war ended in 1975, an intriguing event took place in 1979 when Zbigniew Brzezinski covertly manipulated the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan.

Behind the scenes, the CIA, along with Pakistan’s ISI, were secretly funding Afghanistan’s mujahideen to fight their Russian foes. Prior to this war, opium production in Afghanistan was minimal. But according to historian Alfred McCoy, an expert on the subject, a shift in focus took place. “Within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer.”

Soon,  as Professor Michel Chossudovsky notes, “CIA assets again controlled the heroin trade. As the mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant poppies as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories.”

Eventually, the Soviet Union was defeated (their version of Vietnam), and ultimately lost the Cold War. The aftermath, however, proved to be an entirely new can of worms. During his research, McCoy discovered that “the CIA supported various Afghan drug lords, for instance Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The CIA did not handle heroin, but it did provide its drug lord allies with transport, arms, and political protection.”

By 1994, a new force emerged in the region—the Taliban—that took over the drug trade. Chossudovsky again discovered that “the Americans had secretly, and through the Pakistanis [specifically the ISI], supported the Taliban’s assumption of power.”

These strange bedfellows endured a rocky relationship until July 2000 when Taliban leaders banned the planting of poppies. This alarming development, along with other disagreements over proposed oil pipelines through Eurasia, posed a serious problem for power centers in the West. Without heroin money at their disposal, billions of dollars could not be funneled into various CIA black budget projects. Already sensing trouble in this volatile region, 18 influential neo-cons signed a letter in 1998 which became a blueprint for war—the infamous Project for a New American Century (PNAC).

Fifteen days after 9-11, CIA Director George Tenet sent his top-secret Special Operations Group (SOG) into Afghanistan. One of the biggest revelations in Tenet’s book, At the Center of the Storm, was that CIA forces directed the Afghanistan invasion, not the Pentagon.

In the Jan. 26, 2003, issue of Time magazine, Douglas Waller describes Donald Rumsfeld’s reaction to this development. “When aides told Rumsfeld that his Army Green Beret A-Teams couldn’t go into Afghanistan until the CIA contingent had lain the groundwork with local warlords, he erupted, ‘I have all these guys under arms, and we’ve got to wait like little birds in a nest for the CIA to let us go in?’”

ARMITAGE A MAJOR PLAYER

But the real operator in Afghanistan was Richard Armitage, a man whose legend includes being the biggest heroin trafficker in Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War; director of the State Department’s Foreign Narcotics Control Office (a front for CIA drug dealing); head of the Far East Company (used to funnel drug money out of the Golden Triangle); a close liaison with Oliver North during the Iran-Contra cocaine-for-guns scandal; a primary Pentagon official in the terror and covert ops field under George Bush the Elder; one of the original signatories of the infamous PNAC document; and the man who helped CIA Director William Casey run weapons to the mujahideen during their war against the Soviet Union. Armitage was also stationed in Iran during the mid-1970s right before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the shah. Armitage may well be the greatest covert operator in U.S. history.

On Sept. 10, 2001, Armitage met with the UK’s national security advisor, Sir David Manning. Was Armitage “passing on specific intelligence information about the impending terrorist attacks”? The scenario is plausible because one day later—on 9-11—Dick Cheney directly called for Armitage’s presence down in his bunker. Immediately after WTC 2 was struck, Armitage told BBC Radio, “I was told to go to the operations center [where] I spent the rest of the day in the ops center with the vice president.”

These two share a long history together. Not only was Armitage employed by Cheney’s former company Halliburton (via Brown & Root), he was also a deputy when Cheney was secretary of defense under Bush the Elder. More importantly, Cheney and Armitage had joint business and consulting interests in the Central Asian pipeline which had been contracted by Unocal. The only problem standing between them and the Caspian Sea’s vast energy reserves was the Taliban.

Since the 1980s, Armitage amassed a huge roster of allies in Pakistan’s ISI. He was also one of the “Vulcans”—along with Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Rabbi Dov Zakheim—who coordinated Bush’s geo-strategic foreign policy initiatives. Then, after 9-11, he negotiated with the Pakistanis prior to our invasion of Afghanistan, while also becoming Bush’s deputy secretary of state stationed in Afghanistan.

Our “enemy,” or course, was the Taliban “terrorists.” But George Tenet, Colin Powell, Porter Goss, and Armitage had developed a close relationship with Pakistan’s military head of the ISI—General Mahmoud Ahmad— who was cited in a Sept. 2001 FBI report as “supporting and financing the alleged 9-11 terrorists, as well as having links to al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

The line between friend and foe gets even murkier. Afghan President Hamid Karzai not only collaborated with the Taliban, but he was also on Unocal’s payroll in the mid-1990s. He is also described by Saudi Arabia’s Al-Watan newspaper as being  “a Central Intelligence Agency covert operator since the 1980s that collaborated with the CIA in funding U.S. aid to the Taliban.”

Capturing a new, abundant source for heroin was an integral part of the U.S. “war on terror.” Hamid Karzai is a puppet ruler of the CIA; Afghanistan is a full-fledged narco-state; and the poppies that flourish there have yet to be eradicated, as was proven in 2003 when the Bush administration refused to destroy the crops, despite having the chance to do so. Major drug dealers are rarely arrested, smugglers enjoy carte blanche immunity, and Nushin Arbabzadah, writing for The Guardian, theorized that “U.S. Army planes leave Afghanistan carrying coffins empty of bodies, but filled with drugs.” Is that why the military protested so vehemently when reporters tried to photograph returning caskets?

Tags: afghanistan, CIA, drug smuggler, drugs, heroin, morphine, smuggling

Failed CIA Coup in Laos

Vang Pao, prominent Laotian exile leader and legendary CIA asset during the CIA’s clandestine Indochinese wars of the 1960s and 1970s was among 10 men arrested on June 4, 2007, and accused of plotting a catastrophic military strike against the Laotian government using mercenary forces. According to US attorney Bob Twiss, the ten individuals are the plot leaders, but “thousands of co-conspirators remain at large, many in other countries.”

The other leading co-conspirator arrested was Harrison Ulrich Jack, a member of the California National Guard, and a retired Army officer who was a CIA covert operative in Southeast Asia before leaving active duty in 1977. According to the ATF agent, Jack quoted Lo Cha Thao, the president of the nonprofit organization United Hmong International, and one of the other Hmong co-conspirators, as saying that “the CIA was preparing to assist the Hmong insurgency once the takeover of Laos had begun”.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle report, “the complaint says Jack was hired as an arms broker and organizer by the other men because of his ‘contacts in the American defense, homeland security and defense contractor community”.

An arsenal, including Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, AK-47 machine guns, C-4 explosives, Claymore land mines, night-vision goggles, and other automatic weapons had already been purchased. The weapons, which were seized by undercover agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives (ATF), were to be used against military and civilian targets in Laos, including “an attack on the nation’s capital intended to reduce government targets to rubble, and make them look like the results of the attack upon the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001”, federal authorities said. The group had agents in the Laotian capital of Vientiane.

Back to the future: General Vang Pao and Air America redux The return of Vang Pao (in any active political capacity whatsoever), and any CIA role whatsoever behind the aborted coup, is yet another ominous sign that the Bush administration is hellbent on imposing its geopolitical will, through criminal covert operations and manufactured holocausts, which include violent black operations in Asia that are not only reminiscent of the most brutal operations of the Vietnam War era, but far worse.

General Vang Pao, a CIA “cutout”, led a guerrilla army of CIA-backed Hmong tribesmen in the secret Laos proxy wars in the 1960s, and in the 1970s as a general in the Royal Army of Laos. When the US finally left Vietnam in 1975, Pao, with assistance from the American intelligence community, fled to the United States, with many of his associates in a mass exodus. The former general, 77, has been a resident of Orange County, California, but has reportedly “never given up the fight” to retake Laos. Pao heads various Hmong “liberation” groups, such as Neo Hom and the United Laotian Liberation Front, which have been recipients of money from Hmong expatriates and exiles, designated for guerrilla activities, and the eventual overthrow of the communist government in Laos.

The CIA’s Air America military/intelligence/narco-trafficking operation, and Vang Pao, are richly detailed in two definitive histories, Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade and Peter Dale Scott’s Drugs, Oil and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia and Indochina.

Air America was one of the most notorious of CIA proprietary airlines and a key component in the US government’s notorious Golden Triangle heroin trafficking operations in the 1960s and 1970s. Air America began in 1950 as CAT (Civil Air Transport), and was the largest CIA proprietary in Asia. CAT itself was a proprietary with roots to the OSS-China and joint US-Kuomintang operations during World War II. According to Scott, “the CIA owned 40 percent of the company; the KMT bankers owned 60 percent. The planes had been supplying the KMT opium bases continuously since 1951.

The CIA, primarily through Air America, owned a monopoly over this traffic until 1960 (after which an expansion took place, behind many CIA proprietary fronts, including Air America, and, according to Scott “the opium-based economy of Laos continued to be protected by a coalition of opium-growing CIA mercenaries, Air America planes and Thai troops.”). Air America was involved in various aspects of the Indochinese war and clandestine operations, including (but not limited to) narcotics trafficking, false flag operations, logistics, tactical support, troop (guerrilla) transport and defoliation.

Furthermore, Air America was not just a CIA front, but a complex apparatus with deep intelligence roots, as noted by Scott:

“Underlying Southeast Asian history in these years was the politically significant narcotics traffic. The CIA was intimately connected to this traffic, chiefly through its proprietary Air America. But it was not securely in control of this traffic and probably did not even seek to be. What it desired was ‘deniability’, achieved by the legal nicety that Air America, which the CIA wholly owned, was a corporation that hired pilots and owned an aircraft maintenance facility in Taiwan. Most of its planes, which often carried drugs, were 60 percent owned and frequently operated by Kuomintang (KMT) Chinese.

“The CIA was comfortable in this deniable relationship with people it knew were reorganizing the postwar drug traffic in Southeast Asia. The US government was determined to ensure that drug-trafficking networks and triads in the region remained under KMT control, even if this meant logistic and air support to armies in postwar Burma whose chief activity was expanding the local supply of opium. The complex legal structure of the airline CAT—known earlier as Civil Air Transport and later as Air America—was the ideal vehicle for this support.”

“…Air America, whose managers overlapped with those of the CIA in one direction and Pan Am [the airline-LC] in another, was thrust into an escalating role in Laos that was contrary to US interests but supplied Pan Am with the needed military airlift business to survive in the Far East.

Scott also noted that Air America and its personnel “did contract work in Southeast Asia for the large oil companies, many of which maintain their own ‘intelligence’ networks recruited largely from veterans of the CIA”.

“Air America itself had a private stake in Southeast Asia’s burgeoning oil economy, for it flew ‘prospectors looking for copper and geologists searching for oil in Indonesia, and provided pilots for commercial airlines such as Air Vietnam and Thai Airways, and took over CAT’s passenger services.’

McCoy summarizes the Air America/Vang Pao relationship in the following excerpt [my emphasis in bold-LC]:

“The CIA ran a series of covert warfare operations along the China border that were instrumental in the creation of the Golden Triangle heroin complex…in Laos from 1960 to 1975, the CIA created a secret army of Hmong tribesmen to battle Laotian Communists near the border with North Vietnam. Since Hmong’s main cash crop was opium, the CIA adopted a complicitous posture toward the traffic, allowing the Hmong commander General Vang Pao, to use the CIA’s Air America to collect opium from his scattered highland villages. In late 1969, the CIA’s various covert action clients opened a network of heroin laboratories in the Golden Triangle. In their first years of operation, these laboratories exported high grade no. 4 heroin to US troops fighting in Vietnam. After their withdrawal, the Golden Triangle laboratories exported directly to the United States, capturing one-third of the American heroin market.”

Factoring in the military-intelligence aspect, Scott noted:

“In the 1960s, the largest of these operations was the supply of the fortified hilltop positions of the 45,000 Hmong tribesmen fighting against Pathet Lao behind their lines in northeast Laos…Air America’s planes also served to transport the Hmong’s main cash crop, opium.

“The Hmong units, originally organized and trained by the French, provided a good indigenous army for the Americans in Laos. Together with their CIA and US Special Forces ‘advisors’, the Hmong were used to harass Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese supply lines. In the later 1960s, they engaged in conventional battles in which they were transported by Air America’s planes and helicopters. The Hmong also defended, until its capture in 1968, the key US radar installation at Pathi near the North Vietnamese border; the station had been used in the bombing of North Vietnam….Farther south in Laos, Air America flew out of the CIA operations headquarters at Pakse…Originally the chief purpose of these activities was to observe and harass the Ho Chi Minh trail, but ultimately the fighting in the Laotian panhandle, as elsewhere in the country, expanded into a general air and ground war. Air America’s planes were reported to be flying arms, supplies and reinforcements into this larger campaign as well.”

Vang Pao: CIA murderer Vang Pao was not only a CIA favorite, but a ruthless killer. McCoy wrote:

“With his flair for such cost-effective combat, Vang Pao would become a hero to agency bureaucrats in Washington. ‘CIA had identified an officer…originally trained by the French, who had not only the courage but also the political acumen…for leadership in such a conflict…,’ recalled retired CIA director William Colby. ‘His name was Vang Pao, and he had the enthusiastic admiration of the CIA officers, who knew him…as a man who… knew how to say no as well as yes to Americans.’ Many CIA field operatives admired his ruthlessness. When agent Thomas Clines, commander of the CIA’s secret base at Long Tieng, demanded an immediate interrogation of six prisoners, Vang Pao ordered them executed on the spot. Clines was impressed.” [Clines was both a legendary CIA operative and a lifelong friend and political associate of the Bush family.—LC]

“For ‘several years’”, according to Scott, “seven hundred members of the ‘civilian’ USAID mission (working out of the mission’s ‘rural development annex’ had been former Special Forces and US Army servicemen responsible to the CIA station chief and working in northeast Laos with CIA-supported Hmong guerrillas of General Vang Pao. Vang Pao’s Armee Clandestine was not even answerable to the Royal Lao government or the army, being entirely financed and supported by the CIA.”

“(Hmong commander) Touby Lyfoung had once remarked of Vang Pao, ‘He is a pure military officer who doesn’t understand that after the war there is peace. And one must be strong to win the peace.’”

It appears that today, decades later, the general still does not understand the need for peace.

Towards new warfare and instability in Asia In addition to questions about the return of Golden Triangle/CIA cutout Vang Pao, this development raises new and disturbing questions about the Bush administration’s Pacific-Southeast Asia geostrategy.

Initial reports suggest that this aborted coup was not simply a rogue operation, but one that was supported by CIA and other US agencies, and US defense contractors. Who would have benefited from this pure Cold War/Vietnam War-era insurrection and coup? What interests would have been served by a 9/11-type catastrophe in Vientiane, and the installation of a regime headed by CIA-supported military-intelligence figures and narco-trafficking expatriates?

Does the agenda involve Golden Triangle narco-trafficking, and new attempts to revitalize or restructure heroin traffic, and laundered funds into a fragile world economy?

Does the control of oil and oil transport routes, a perennial US objective in Southeast Asia, play a role? How about the “war on terrorism”? Southeast Asia has been the target of numerous real and fabricated “terror” operations (such as the bombing of Bali). A major event in Laos would have triggered similar political effects.

Then there is the larger agenda aimed at containing or competing with nearby China—a return to the same confrontational politics of the Cold War era. In Drugs, Oil, and War, Scott wrote that the CIA’s role in deliberately fomenting conflict in Laos in the 1960s may have been aimed at provoking a war with China, and polarizing the various factions. “What made the Pentagon, CIA and Air America hang on in Laos with such tenacity? …at least as late as 1962, there were those in the Pentagon and the CIA ‘who believed that a direct confrontation with Communist China was inevitable’” and the expectation that “Laos was sooner or later to become a major battleground in a military sense between the East and the West”. The aim, according to Scott, “was achieved” the country became a battlefield where U.S. bombings, with between four hundred and five hundred sorties a day in 1970, generated 600,000 refugees.”

Is the US looking to create a similar conflict again, this time against a new emerging Chinese superpower threat?

“Vietnam, in other words, was not an isolated event”, as emphasized by Scott. “It was the product of ongoing war-creating energies located chiefly in this country, which to this day have not yet been properly identified and countered. Of these forces, none is deeper and more mysterious than the involvement yet again of the CIA, and airlines working for it, with major drug traffickers…Such forces will continue to haunt us until they are better understood.”

While the details of this case continue to be revealed, what is abundantly clear and obvious is that the CIA’s many criminal operations, directly authorized and/or tacitly endorsed by a Bush administration, continue to intensify, in every corner of the world.

Note: If you are interested in Researching Air America Operations from the 60’s and 70’s this page at the CIA will get you started, and they pretty much deny that any drug running was conducted during that time.

Tags: air america, CIA, coup, drugs, heroin, laos, opium