Drug Trafficking by Intelligence Agencies

Drug Trafficking by Intelligence Agencies

Officially, America is engaged in a 'war on drugs.' The implication of this phrase is that the drug lords and dealers are the 'bad guys' while the American government, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), is made up of the 'good guys' fighting to keep the nation and its citizens drug-free and free of drug-related crime. However, as authors such as Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair illustrate in their text Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press and Alfred McCoy in his book the Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, this is far from the case. In a supposed effort to preserve national security, the CIA has become heavily involved with various aspects of the international drug trade, including the mafia, the opium and heroin traders of Southeast Asia and fundamentalist Islamic resistance fighters. While the American government has preached 'just say no,' the CIA engaged in experiments upon American citizens to determine how illegal drugs could be used in interrogation and function as weapon against America's enemies abroad. The effects of these policies have been to bolster the international trade in heroin and other hard drugs, as well as to create a population of domestic drug users and abusers.

The connections between the CIA and the international drug trade date back to the early days of the organization. During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the CIA's parent and sister organizations, recruited members of the Sicilian Mafia including Charles 'Lucky' Luciano, to collect intelligence on the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and also the Italian communist resistance. Anti-communism was to become the justification for most of the CIA's dealings with gangsters involved in the drug trade. Because of his usefulness as an informant, Luciano was given a pardon for his criminal activities in the U.S. And deported to Sicily. He began to build what became known as 'The French Connection' of the heroin trade. Before this, "at the end of World War II, there was a strong chance that heroin addiction could be eliminated in the United States" (McCoy, 2003, p. 1). The OSS and ONI also worked closely with the Chinese suppliers of the world market of opium, morphine and heroin. This became the source of the so-called 'third pillar' of the post-World War II heroin trade spanning though the regions of Thailand, Burma, Laos and the Yunnan Province of China ("A tangled web," 1999, Institute of Policy Studies). Later, during the Vietnam War, the CIA, in search of helpful intelligence to advance the U.S. war in Vietnam renewed its connections with Laotian, Burmese and Thai drug merchants, causing a spike in the rise of heroin production. The CIA's relationship with Luciano continued into the 1950s when the organization worked with the well-known heroin dealer in a plot to illegally and covertly assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. "Lansky, who was Luciano's money man in the States, offered to put out a $1 million contract on Castro's head shortly after the revolution" and the CIA agreed (Cockburn & St. Clair, 1999, p.104).

The CIA's involvement in the drug trade even connects to the current 'War on Terror.' After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, through Pakistan Inter-Service Intelligence, the CIA began supplying covert arms and money to Islamic fundamentalist resistance groups. As these groups gained control over liberated zones inside Afghanistan, the Afghan guerrillas required that its local supporters grow opium to support the resistance (McCoy 1997). Even the United States State Department complained publicly as well as privately about the drug production and trafficking of various anti-Soviet guerrilla factions supported financially and politically by the CIA (Scott 2007). At present, Al-Qaeda is known to finance its terror operations through drug-trafficking. "[the New York Times reported] that 'militants linked to Al Qaeda also established connections with Bosnian organized crime figures. The officials said Al Qaeda and the Taliban found a route for the trafficking of heroin from Afghanistan into Europe through the Balkans.'... In other words, the CIA knew that Al-Qaeda was involved in heroin-trafficking, but (as is so often the case with big-time drug-traffickers) was not widely sharing it...Bin Laden's network now uses the drug connections which Bin Laden developed with his friend, the former CIA protege Gulbuddin Hekmatyar" during the Soviet occupation (Scott 2007)

The CIA did not merely turn a blind eye to the drug backgrounds of organized criminals, spies, and rebel factions. Even while it condemned the use of LSD by the American counterculture, it used the drug in its own experiments, often without the knowing consent of the subjects, ostensibly to improve its interrogation methods. In at least one recorded incident, the subjects, reflecting agency prejudice were African-American servicemen (Cockburn & St. Clair, 1999, p. 153). In 1977 Senate hearings with the CIA director revealed the nature and extent of these past experiments. Senator Chaffee called the experiments: "bungled, amateurish experiments that don't seem to have been handled in a very scientific way, at least from the scanty evidence we have" ("CIA Director Stansfield Turner's Testimony," 1977 Senate Hearings on MKULTRA, pp. 35-34). The best-known example of these experiments was the MKULTRA subproject, "a project involving the surreptitious administration of LSD on unwitting persons...the Director of Central Intelligence wrote to the technical services staff officials criticizing their judgment because they had participated in an experiment involving the administration of LSD on an unwitting basis to Dr. Frank Olson, who later committed suicide but the experiments still continued for a number of years afterwards ("CIA Director Stansfield Turner's Testimony," 1977 Senate Hearings on MKULTRA, pp. 34-35).