Drugs and death squads: The CIA connection (1989)
From the US-based Freedom Socialist Party’s (Trotskyist) newspaper June 1989 Robert Crisman
Imagine you’re a CIA operative in the early 1960s — E. Howard Hunt perhaps. You’re a star in the spook trade, a real growth industry. With luck, you can prosper in the years ahead.
You and your colleagues are charged with organizing the covert aspect of U.S. capital’s drive to maintain and extend the American Empire. And successful empire requires the subjugation of the world’s peoples, markets, resources, and investment arenas. Profits must flourish or America, Inc. will die.
You do the dirty work. You bribe amenable leaders and recruit mercenaries to overthrow unfriendly governments. Your work has enabled the empire to spread like leukemia in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
You can point with pride to past successes, such as the 1953 overthrow of elected Iranian premier Mohammad Mossadegh and the subsequent installation of the hated Shah Reza Pahlavi. Then, a year later, you engineered the brisk removal of the social democrat Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. There will undoubtedly be future triumphs. Still, you’ve got your problems.
To begin with, your job is a tricky one, condemned as it is by world legal and moral opinion and officially disavowed (though privately extolled) by your mandarin employers in Washington, D.C. And despite your best efforts, and the near-global chill of ’50s reaction, the world stubbornly refuses to roll over and play dead for the U.S. colossus. When kicked it snarls, even louder today than yesterday. Africa is shrugging off the last of the old colonial rulers, and the anti-imperialist Patrice Lumumba now speaks for the continent. Southern Asia is threatening to burst the Western encirclement that stretches from the Middle East to Hong Kong. In Cuba — a mere 90 miles from Florida’s Gold Coast — an upstart named Castro has bounced the mobsters out of Havana, expropriated U.S.-owned sugar mills, and lit a fuse to smoldering Latin America.
Behind them all stand the Russians, of course, H-bomb and all.
This is the stuff nightmares are made of. Worse yet, winds of unwelcome change are stirring in the heartland: increasingly unquiet civil rights rabble, peaceniks, and commies, always commies to contend with.
If the commies ever have their way in the Land of the Free, your dreams of power and gold are history.
What to do about the commies?
Time to step up the covert wars in defense of the American Way!
But war is expensive. Congress, mindful of the charades a democracy must play, is coy with the purse strings. Private monied interests are generous, but there is so much work to be done!
Ah, never fear. There is a gold mine waiting for someone with the good sense to tap it. Illegal drugs! Heroin, cocaine — bliss for sale, and at high prices; because these most delicious of commodities are officially banned, they are perhaps the most profitable substances, gram for gram, on the world market today.
Hmmm… If you and your friends could control the supply … you could lavishly grease the guns of clandestine wars without suffering the hassle of appropriations hearings, and without the nosy public looking over your shoulder.
Present at the creation. Actually, the CIA was never really a stranger to the narcotics underworld.
In 1947 and ’48, U.S. agents financed and helped organize Corsican mobsters battling French communists for control of Marseilles. After the communists were routed, the Corsicans established a heroin pipeline into the U.S. as spoils of war.
The CIA was also tight with Kuomintang generals who’d ruled northern Burma, Thailand, and Laos since Mao booted them out of China in 1949. These generals, with Taiwan’s blessing, controlled the opium trade in the Golden Triangle, where Burma, Thailand, and Laos converge. American secret agents, staunch allies of Chiang Kai-shek, got a piece of the action.
When the wars for global domination intensified in the ’60s, the CIA went big-time into the drug trade, buying into or wresting control of major networks and establishing new ones from Panama to Pakistan. Narco-dollars financed the recruitment of mercenary armies and the spread of illicit arms to rightwing strike forces worldwide. The money facilitated coups, counterrevolutions, and “destabilizations” of governments hostile to White House goals. It also was essential in crystallizing repressive military/police regimes (along with their inevitable death squads) from one end of Latin America to the other.
Nouveau riche drug lords put generals and cops on their payrolls, and in some countries came to vie for outright control of the government.
That’s not all. Dope played a major role in the decimation and “depoliticization” of the turbulent U.S. social movements in the late ’60s and ’70s. Then it served to facilitate the ongoing “pacification” of the ghettoes, barrios, and American youth in general. Not pretty, perhaps. But the pacifiers figured that, with austerity chewing at the future of millions, better that untold numbers rot in drug-sugared limbo than contemplate the dismantling of the capitalist misery factory.
By the middle of the ’80s, the drug scourge took its place alongside AIDS as a banner-headline horror story. Anti-drug hysteria mushroomed and the government whipped up an all-out War Against Dope. What better excuse to justify sending anti-insurgency armies into Bolivia, and at the same time erase the First Amendment at home?
Government officials do exist, of course, who are actually, genuinely, hell-bent to knock out the drug trade. Who in their right minds wants to manage a stinking Necropolis, after all?
But the efforts of these straight-arrow narcs are worth only a snigger up the sleeve to the pushers on the government payroll. Just Say No indeed. There’s a war going on for control of the earth, and without the drug trade — and the death squads it pays for — the American Empire is done for.
The Cuban connection. A dealer can’t deal without product access and a worked-out distribution network. No problem here for the CIA.
Castro’s coming to power in 1959 sealed an alliance between the agency and Santo Trafficante, Jr., once the facto overlord of Fulgencio Batista’s Cuba, and the premier U.S. importer of Marseilles heroin. The CIA enlisted Trafficante’s help in several attempts to assassinate or overthrow Castro.
The change of regime in Cuba bequeathed the CIA a ready-made army: thousands of rightwing Cuban exiles — formerly pimps, pushers, police and patrones under Batista — now capos and soldiers in Trafficante’s Florida mob.
These are the cadres the agency sent against Castro at the Bay of Pigs and in subsequent operations financed and armed via massive dope-for-munitions deals.
The arms came from such firms as Interarmco, founded by former CIA agent Samuel Cummings. Cozy? You bet.
After the Bay of Pigs, the CIA placed exiles throughout the Western Hemisphere as key personnel for coups and destabilization efforts in Honduras, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico.
Especially chilling is the collusion of the CIA and Cuban exiles with the Chilean secret police after Salvador Allende’s overthrow. Out of it came the 1975 murder of Chilean Christian Democrat leader Bernardo Leighton in Rome and the 1976 assassination of diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. Also following, predictably, was the takeover of Chile’s cocaine distribution network by Augusto Pinochet’s right-hand man, General Manual Contreras.
The CIA put the exiles to work in the U.S. as well, where they penetrated the very highest levels of government. Under Richard Nixon, E. Howard Hunt secured them key positions in a succession of “anti-drug” agencies used by the administration for undercover operations against domestic political opponents. The most notorious of these, ODALE (Office for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement), specialized in a no-knock, door-smashing reign of terror, earning the nickname “American Gestapo.”
Myles Ambrose, the head of ODALE, resigned in disgrace in 1973 after he was discovered hobnobbing with indicted dope-and-gunrunner Richmond Harper at Harper’s Texas ranch.
And all the while, the CIA’s own godfather, Trafficante, was flooding the U.S. with top-grade China White heroin.
Blitzkrieg below the border. Beginning in 1973, CIA operatives and exiled Cubans fanned out across Latin America as agents of the newly created Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Officially, they worked with host governments in “eradicating the drug trade.” But in reality, their job was to funnel U.S. arms, torture expertise, “development aid,” and drug profits to rightwing armies, police, and death squads for their war on insurgent workers and peasants.
Operation Condor was launched in Mexico in 1976 under the pretext of providing U.S. military equipment and training to Mexican narcotics agents supervised by DEA. Later disclosures revealed that landowning patrones used DEA helicopters and U.S. guns, rockets, and napalm in a war of extermination against revolutionary peasants. Major dope dealers prospered untouched, though smaller independent dealers were rounded up, tortured, and killed.
Colombia passed a law in 1978 declaring the military and police “exempt from any legal responsibility for their actions against violence and drug trafficking.” Later that year, at DEA’s instigation, President Julio César Turbay gave the military the power to arrest anyone it considered subversive without observing constitutional guarantees. During the next two years, more than 60,000 people were arrested by the military. Amnesty International documented massive cases of “prolonged incarceration without trial, torture … and political assassinations,” especially of Indian and labor leaders.
Meanwhile, Colombian cocaine exports shot up over $3 billion by 1979, surpassing coffee as Colombia’s number one cash crop. Many of Colombia’s politicians and top cops (all U.S.-trained) were among those making the fattest profits. Colombian dope kings paid out hundreds of millions of dollars yearly in bribes — and still had enough left over to fund the elections of 15 to 20 percent of the Colombian Congress.
U.S. and host country propaganda typically fingered leftists as the drug smugglers. In a classic 1974 TV appearance with U.S. ambassador Robert Hill to promote the U.S./Argentine “anti-drug” war, Argentina’s Social Minister and Anticommunist Alliance death squad leader Jose López Rega declared that “guerrillas are the main users of drugs … Therefore, the anti-drug campaign will automatically be an anti-guerrilla campaign as well.”
One year later, an Argentine military intelligence report identified López Rega as a ringleader of — guess what? — an enormous network supplying cocaine to the U.S.
Globe-trotting villains. In the ’60s and ’70s, drug-running and counterinsurgency kept the CIA as busy as flies on a side of bad beef, and not only in Latin America. At that time, Southeast Asia was the hottest spot on earth for covert operations. The CIA ran some dandies there: the secret war against Laotian communists, the Operation Phoenix program of terror and assassination, and the marketing of heroin to GIs in Saigon.
The careers of some of the period’s key U.S. figures active in Southeast Asia will help to illustrate the continuity between the Vietnam war-era operations and later affairs like the Iran/contra dope-for-arms deal. This rogues’ gallery will also further illuminate how CIA drugrunning is the financial linchpin of global para-fascist networks and a crucial component of imperialist existence.
First up for examination is Theodore Shackley. A young CIA up-and-comer, Shackley was brought in from Berlin after the Bay of Pigs fiasco to head the agency’s Miami station, JM/Wave, which fought the secret war against Cuba from 1961 to 1965. It was Shackley who oversaw the deployment of Cuban exiles throughout Latin America in the mid-’60s, and who left behind a highly trained force of 6000 thugs, drugrunners, and rightwing fanatics when he was shipped off to Southeast Asia in 1966.
While based in Vientiane, Laos, Shackley organized the opium-growing Meo (Hmong) tribesmen for a war on communism. Capitalizing on the CIA’s 20-year friendship with the Golden Triangle’s Nationalist Chinese generals, he rapidly turned Vientiane into the center of the Southeast Asian heroin trade.
Interestingly, one of the men involved in the Laotian war was a young Marine fire-eater named Oliver North.
Shackley left Laos to run the CIA station in Saigon, where the heroin traffic flowed like the Mekong River (thanks to the cooperation of Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky). After Shackley arrived, high-quality heroin from Laotian labs flooded Vietnam and turned an estimated 15 percent of the U.S. GIs there into addicts.
Alarmed army and U.S. narcotics bureau investigators actually tried to shut down the heroin labs. But the U.S. embassy in Saigon— where future CIA director William Colby was second-in-command — hushed up and otherwise impeded investigations.
The U.S. heroin market mushroomed, naturally, when addicted GIs returned home.
It is useful to recall that Santo Trafficante, Shackley’s partner in crime from the Miami days, had traveled to Southeast Asia in 1968 and successfully concluded a deal with the dope mavens there for exclusive U.S. import rights. Also noteworthy is the fact that one of the chemicals necessary to the production of China White was shipped in from Taiwan, where the government held a godfatherly interest in Golden Triangle opium production.
Another point of interest: two of Shackley’s Saigon crew were Bay of Pigs veteran Felix Rodríguez and CIA warhorse Donald Gregg. Nearly twenty years later, Gregg and Rodríguez would surface in congressional testimony as key players in the Iran/contra scheme. As Vice President George Bush’s national security adviser, Gregg sent Rodríguez to El Salvador to oversee the shipment of arms to the contras. Rodríguez also laid down the pipeline through which Colombian cocaine kings sluiced $10 million to the contras.
Bush, an ex-CIA chief, has admitted meeting with Rodríguez personally three times, but he claims he knew nothing of Rodríguez’ role!
Old spooks never die. Shackley was back in the Western Hemisphere as chief of its covert CIA operations in time to ramrod Allende’s overthrow in 1973.
He popped up in Teheran in the mid-’70s, just as the Shah’s CIA-trained secret police, SAVAK, were pumping up Iranian heroin production. This was an important undertaking. Who knew how long the Golden Triangle network would last after the fall of Saigon?
In 1979, after Senate investigations into covert activities, Shackley resigned from the CIA — or was “sheep-dipped,” that is, given a new cover. He went to work as a consultant for the Stanford Technology weapons brokerage firm. In 1984, he was the American first approached by the Iranian government about cutting a direct arms deal with the U.S. government. His contact was former SAVAK agent Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian munitions dealer and Ollie North’s political confidant and arms supplier for the Iran/contra project.
Even the names remain the same. Shackley’s odyssey through the spook underworld provides a singularly useful map to the path that led from the Bay of Pigs to the Iran/contra mess. A glance at the careers of two other Laotian war bigwigs — retired U.S. Army Major General John Singlaub and retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord — will help fill in the topography.
Singlaub was the army’s operations chief in Laos, Shackley’s military counterpart there. Secord, one of Singlaub’s air-wing commanders, worked closely with Shackley, undoubtedly overseeing the transport of heroin.
In 1978, Singlaub, long a far-right luminary, helped organize the remnants of Somoza’s army into an anti-Sandinista fighting force. Picked by Oliver North of the National Security Council to head up private contra fundraising efforts in 1984, he tapped reactionaries in Taiwan, South Korea, and Latin America for millions.
Secord became the top U.S. Air Force official in Iran in the mid-’70s, and by 1979 had advanced to the position of top Pentagon weapons broker. In 1986, he again joined his good friend Shackley, this time on the payroll of the private arms merchants at Stanford Technology. It wasn’t hard for the Iranians and contras to guess where to go for the guns.
Red-hating agents of Empire. The ideological tie binding all these high-level arms smugglers and dope dealers together, of course, is anti-communism.
John Singlaub is head of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), the world’s premier neo-fascist lobby. WACL’s membership ranges from U.S. reactionaries, Taiwanese drug magnates, and Latin American death squad leaders to Afghani mujahideen and unreconstructed old-line Nazis scattered in exile throughout Europe and the Americas.
WACL is the most sophisticated political expression to date of fascism’s global agenda and methods, and is the mask under which the face of U.S. ambition increasingly shows itself. WACL’s history vividly reveals the fascist essence of empire-and pinpoints the source of the Empire’s addiction to drugrunning.
Founded in Taiwan in 1967 by CIA and Taiwanese intelligence personnel, WACL has roots in the old China Lobby, which urged the unleashing of Chiang Kai-shek against revolutionary China in the ’50s. The Lobby’s leading lights — E. Howard Hunt and William Pawley to name two — were instrumental in stitching together the CIA’s Cuban exile and Kuomintang networks.
Hunt and Pawley in fact embody the convergence of these networks: Hunt was a special agent in the CIA’s precursor, the OSS, in South China, where the Americans forged bonds with Chinese officials trading in opium and gold. He went on to aid in the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala and helped establish the Latin American branch of W ACL. Pawley, once a lobbyist and arms-runner for Taiwan, also owned the Havana bus system during the days of Batista. He was involved with Hunt in the dispatching of Arbenz, and accompanied Trafficante on a gunboat raid against Castro.
China Lobby/WACL bigwigs and their associates — Hunt, Pawley, Secord, Singlaub, Shackley, et al. — lodged themselves tightly in the postwar U.S. intelligence, military, government, and business establishments. They were the drumbeaters and spear-carriers for stepped-up anti-Castro warfare and the Vietnam war. They were responsible for coups, counterrevolutions, and the formation of death squads from Mexico to Brazil; CIA/DEA “anti-drug” torture and counterinsurgency; the Chilean slaughter; support for the Shah and rightwing Afghani “freedom fighters”; and the contra war.
Everywhere you look the red-hating generals and spies were there. And everywhere, drugrunning financed their opium dreams of Empire.
