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The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P.Adams II

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The Politics of Heroin

CIA Complicity In The Global Drug Trade
a book by Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P.Adams II
1972
http://www.drugtext.org/library/books/McCoy/default.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_Southeast_Asia
BACK COVER
"To an average American who witnesses the dismal spectacle of the
narcotics trafc at the street level, it must seem inconceivable that the
government could be implicated in the international drug trade.
Unfortunately, American diplomats and CIA agents have been involved in
the narcotics trafc at three levels: 1) coincidental complicity by allying
with groups actively engaged in the drug trafc; 2) support of the trafc by
covering up for known heroin trafckers and condoning their involvement;
and 3) active engagement in the transport of opium and heroin. It is ironic,
to say the least, that America's heroin plague is of its own making."
Twenty years of research have led to this revised and updated edition of Alfred W. McCoy's classic, The politics
of Heroin in Southeast Asia. In it, he concludes that, with global production and consumption of narcotics at
record levels and heroin use in America on the rise, it is time to confront the failure of the U.S. government's
drug policy and to put an end to the CIA's complicity in the narcotics trade, which since World War II has been
an integral part of the agency's efforts to maintain U.S. power abroad. A remarkable expose of ofcial U.S.
hypocrisy in its approaches to one of the world's greatest social problems, The Politics of Heroin offers an
analysis that is destined to inuence the public debate on drugs for years to come.
Alfred W. McCoy:
Writing this book has been a long journey, from america to Asia and from youth to middle age. In 1971, then
twenty-ve and in my second year at Yale Graduate School, I set out on a trip around the world to study the
politics of the global heroin trade. Somehow I survived the unanticipated adventures that followed and two years
later I published The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, a book that was more expose than explanation. Over
the next fteen years, I returned to Southeast Asia several times to research revisions to that rst book and to
gather materials for a second, entitled Drug Trafc, a study of heroin's impact on crime and corruption in
Australia. Finally, in the summer of 1990, I combined my own data on Southeast Asia with the research of others
on Central America and South Asia to produce the present volume.
My work on the heroin trade began in the fall of 1970 as an outgrowth of a book I had edited on Laotian politics.
Elisabeth Jakab, my editor at Harper & Row, suggested that I use my knowledge of Southeast Asian politics to
write a book providing a historical perspective on the sudden spread of heroin addiction among American troops
in South Vietnam. What began as a small project based on library research soon mushroomed into a much larger
one after three more or less chance encounters.
During spring break, I took time off from research in Yale's Sterling Memorial Library to conduct interviews in
Paris with former French ofcers about the opium trade during their Indochina War of the early 1950s. My
meeting with General Maurice Belleux, the former chief of French intelligence for Indochina, inadvertently
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The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P.Adams II

revealed that the CIA was involved in the opium trade as their French counterparts had been before them.
Receiving me in the ofces of a helicopter company he now headed, Belleux responded to a broad question
about opium by explaining in detail how his agency had controlled Indochina's illicit drug trade and used it to
nance clandestine operations against Communist guerrillas. The general added that "your CIA" had inherited
his network of covert action allies when the French quit Vietnam in 1964. He suggested that a trip to Saigon
would reveal that American intelligence was, like its earlier French counterpart, involved in the opium trafc.
Other French veterans, notably the paratroop commander Colonel Roger Trinquier, conffrmed both the general's
information and his suggestion.
It was not only General Belleux who convinced me that the Vietnam drug problem needed investigation. At a
street demonstration in New Haven for Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, I met the beat poet Allen Ginsberg,
who insisted that the CIA was deeply involved in the Southeast Asian opium trade. To back his claims and aid
my research, he mailed me a carton containing years' worth of unpublished dispatches from Time-Life
correspondents that documented the involvement of America's Asian allies in the opium trafc.
The third chance encounter was the most unlikely of all. At a society wedding in New York City for the sister of
a former Columbia fraternity brother, I was astonished to hear a group of marine ofcers, guests of the groom,
tell stories of North Vietnamese soldiers found dead with syringes in their arms on the slopes of Khe Sanh and
Communist truck convoys rolling down the Ho Chi Minh trail in South Vietnam loaded with heroin for
American troops.
After submitting overdue term papers to my tolerant Yale professors, Karl Pelzer and John Whitmore, I started
for Southeast Asia in the summer of 1971. On the way, I stopped in Washington, D.C. to interview the legendary
CLA operative Edward Lansdale, General Belleux's successor in Saigon. Both Lansdale and his former CIA aide
Lucien Conein received me in their modest suburban homes not far from the CIA's Langley headquarters and
told stories about drug trafcking in Saigon by the French, the Corsicans, and the intimates of President Ngo
Dinh Diem. A former Saigon coup leader, General Nguyen Chanh Thi, now exiled to an apartment near Dupont
Circle, conrmed the CIA stories and, more important, gave me introductions to some of his friends in South
Vietnam. The Washington bureau of Dispatch News Service, a edgling agency best known for its expose of the
My Lai massacre, told me that one of its stringers, an Australian named John EveAngham, was writing about
CIA helicopters carrying opium in Laos.
How could I nd him? Easy. Everingham was the only white man in Saigon who wore a blond ponytail and "Viet
Cong-style black pajamas."
During one of my last interviews in the States, I received the rst of the death threats that accompanied this
research. Moving west, I stopped at a restored nineteenth-century our mill on the banks of a stream in
Readyville, Tennessee. Its owner, a young man named Joe Flipse, had recently returned from volunteer service
with tribal refugees in Laos. Over coffee at his kitchen table, he nished the interview by threatening to kill me if
I sourced any information to him.
By the time I landed at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut airport in July, I was armed with some introductions and an idea
for a new way to ask controversial questions. Instead of working like a journalist tracking the visible signs of the
current heroin trail, I would start my interviews with questions about opium use in the past-when it was legal and
not at all controversial. Working forward to the present, I would compile information about the illicit traff~c and
individual involvement that would lead, slowly perhaps, to those who controlled the current trade. Instead of
confronting the protectors and drug dealers with direct accusations, an unproductive and dangerous method, I
would try oblique and apparently unrelated questions, seeking to conrm the prole I had built up from
documents and other interviews. In short, I would use historical methods to probe the present.
During my rst days in Saigon, General Thi's introduction opened the door to the home of Colonel Pham Van
Lieu, an inuential leader of South Vietnam's "third force" who had once commanded the country's marines and
national police. Over the next month, Lieu arranged meetings in his living room with senior Saigon ofcers who
presented details and documentation about the role ~f senior government ofcials in the sale of heroin to U.S.
troops.
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A number of young Americans working in Saigon as stringers and researchers for the famous by-line reporters
helped me check this information. Mark Lynch, now a Washington lawyer, gave me access to the les in
Newsweek's ofces, where he worked as a researcher. A Cornell graduate student, D. Gareth Porter, was in
Saigon working on current politics and shared information. A friend from Yale Graduate School, Tom Fox, now
editor of the National Catholic Reporter, was then in Saigon stringing for The New York Times. One night he
took me on a six-hour odyssey from the ashy neon bars at Saigon's center to the tin-shed brothels at the fringe
of Cholon's sprawling shantytowns, rebuff~ng the advances of prostitutes and calling for heroin at every stop.
For an outlay of twenty dollars, I returned to my hotel room with pockets bulging from vials of high-grade
heroin worth maybe ve thousand dollars on the street in New York. As I ushed the powder down the drain that
night, I thought about trying it just once. I can recall raising a vial to my nose before hesitating and tipping it into
the toilet.
During my last week in Saigon, I was walking up and down Tu Do Street at Saigon's center looking for the
Dispatch stringer when I spotted a tall white man in black pajamas striding down the other side of the street. I
screamed out "Everingham, Everingham" above the roar of the rock music spilling from the bars and the revs of
the Saigon-cowboy motorcycles. He paused. Over coffee, we agreed to meet at 5:00 P.M. two weeks later at the
bar of the Constellation Hotel in Vientiane, Laos. Yes, he had been in tribal villages where CIA helicopters had
own out the opium. He could take me to those villages to see for myself. He was trying to get a start as a
photographer and asked that I use his pictures in my book.
Two weeks later, I was sitting at the bar of the Constellation Hotel nursing a Coca-Cola when John Everingham
walked in with Phin Manivong, our young Lao interpreter. Next day at dawn, we took a taxi out of Vientiane,
hitched a ride on a USAID highway truck north for most of the day, and then started hiking up a steep path that
climbed from road's edge into the hills. By nightfall we were sleeping in a Yao hill tribe village near the peak of
a mile-high mountain. After a few days spent watching the women plant opium in the valleys around the village,
we traveled north through mist-shrouded mountains with the look of ancient Chinese scroll paintings to Long Pot
village, a Hmong settlement at the edge of the battle lines. Approaching just before dark, we were escorted to the
house of Ger Su Yang, the local Hmong leader who held the post of district ofcer.
Over a dinner of pig fat and sticky rice, Ger Su Yang asked Everingham, through our interpreter, what we were
doing in his village. Knowing the Hmong leader from earlier visits, Everingham was frank and told him that I
was writing a book on opium. For a man who did not read a daily newspaper, Ger Su Yang proposed a bargain
that showed a keen sense of media management. He would provide armed men to escort us anywhere in his
district and would allow us to ask anything we wanted about the opium. If he did that, could I get an article in a
Washington newspaper reporting that the CLt had broken its promise? For ten years, he explained, the men of his
village had died ghting in the CLA's army until only the fourteen-year-old boys were left. When he refused to
send these boys to die, the CIA had stopped the rice airdrops that fed his village of women and children. After
six months the children were visibly weak from hunger. Once the Americans in Washington knew about his
situation, surely, said Ger Su Yang, they would send the rice. I promised.
Over the next ve days, we conducted our opium survey, door-to-door, at every house in the village. Do you
grow opium? Yes. After the harvest, how do you market the opium? We take it over to that hill, and the
American helicopters come with Hmong soldiers who buy the opium and take it away in the helicopters.
We also learned that we were being watched. A Hmong captain in the CIA's Secret Army was radioing reports to
the agency's secret base at Long Tieng. On our fourth day in Long Pot, a helicopter marked "Air America," the
CIA's airline, spotted us on a nearby hill as it took off from the village. It hovered just above our heads, pilot and
copilot staring for a long minute before ying off. On the f~fth day, we were hiking to the next village with an
escort of f~ve Hmong armed with carbines when a shot rang out. The escort went ahead to the next ridge and
waited momentarily before motioning for us to proceed. As we slipped down the face of that slope wet from the
monsoon rains, several automatic weapons opened up from the next ridge, spraying the hillside with bullets. We
fell back into a small hollow. While our escorts gave us a covering f~re, we slithered on our bellies through the
elephant grass to get away. Overweight and out of shape from months in Sterling Memorial Library, I rose to my
knees. Everingham slammed my face into the mud. Somehow we all made it to safety behind the ridge and
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The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P.Adams II

assembled, laughing at our luck to escape from the "Communist guerrillas" who we assumed were the authors of
our ambush.
The next day, as we were interviewing in a nearby village, a tribesman whispered to our interpreter that it had not
been the Communists. We had been ambushed by the Hmong soldiers of General yang Pao, commander of the
CIA's Secret Army. The next morning, we cut short our research and ed down the path toward the highway,
later hitching a ride on a truck heading north, not south for Vientiane, fearful of another ambush. An hour later,
we came to a junction where a U.S. army major was supervising a helicopter ferrying Royal Lao troop
detachments into the Communist zone. Worried about what might be waiting for us on the road south to
Vientiane, I decided to lie. I told the major that I was an adviser to the U.S. embassy on tribal matters and needed
to borrow his helicopter for an urgent trip to Vientiane. He was going back to the capital anyway and would give
us a lift. When we landed at the outskirts of the city later that afternoon, two unshaven Americans approached us
with light machine guns slung over their shoulders. They demanded that we go with them, claiming that they
were U.S. embassy security ofcers. We refused and took a taxi instead.

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