LETTER TO ALAN CRANSTON AND JOHN TUNNEY FROM WESTSIDE COMMUNITY MENTAL HEALTH CENTER, INC.

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 14
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 14, 2003
• Sequence Number: 21
• Publication Date: April 28, 1971
• Content Type: LETTER

App 21-0
SENDER WILL CHECK CLASSIFICATION TOP AND BOTTOM
?
UNCLASSIFIED L
I CONFIDENTIAL SECRET
_
OFFICIAL ROUTING SLIP
TO
NAME AND ADDRESS
DATE
INITIA
1
The Director 1 1
MAY 1971
2
Mr. John Maury
jv~
3
Mr. Larry Houston
4
5
6
ACTION
DIRECT REPLY
PREPARE REPLY
APPROVAL
DISPATCH
RECOMMENDATION
COMMENT
FILE
RETURN
CONCURRENCE
INFORMATION
SIGNATURE
Remarks :
To 2 and 3:
Let's meet this afternoon to talk
about this his. wA
FOLD HERE TO RETURN TO SENDER
FROM. NAME, ADDRESS AND PHONE NO.
DATE
UNCLASSIFIED CONFIDENTIAL
SECRET
Approved F2Ujele6sei2OGW1r2/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R00030006OO21-0
1-17
 } x'cutive Registry
Approved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021- 1 Ll~
Westside Community Mental Health Center, Inc.
ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICES
2201 Sutter Street ? San Francisco, California 94115 ? Telephone [phone]
April 28th, 1971
The Honorable Alan Cranston
The Honorable John Tunney
The United States Senate
Capitol Building
Washington, D. C. 20005
Gentlemen:
The burden of this letter is to call your attention to the leading article in
the May, 1971, issue of Ramparts magazine, "The New Opium War," a copy of which
is enclosed for your convenience.
The authors of this letter are members of the Westside Drug Planning Council,
an advisory body to the Westside Community Mental Health Center, Inc. Individ-
ually, we are directing or otherwise deeply involved operationally with four
(4) drug-abuse programs in the Westside catchment area of San Francisco, of
which the Fillmore and the Haight-Ashbury are principal constituencies. These
programs are member-agencies in the Westside Community Mental Health Center's
Consortium. Collectively, we are attempting to meet the challenge of drug-
abuse in San Francisco with policies and programs commensurate with the problem.
That we are not succeeding is self-evident. The reasons for our failure are
less clear.
"The New Opium War" raises questions that are so distressing and so fundamental
to our attempts to deal with persons involved in drug-abuse, which today in San
Francisco means heroin-abuse (except for junior high and high school barbiturate
abuse), that we genuinely wonder whether our programs should continue.
That a vary large nu .fiber of A -- rican _:.ilitary personnel are getting "strung-out"
on high grade heroin in c_itn ast t', sit is not the discovery of Ccn~=,res:a . to Murphy
and Steel (see enclosed clipping from the San Francisco Chronicle, April 20th,
1971). Veterans of-Vietnam, etc. have been appearing in our facilities for a
long time; and while the number of overdoses (O.D.'s) has not skyrocketed, it has
increased due to the introduction of high-quality heroin in the prevailing 57.
maximum street-supply.
But what has u1 nearly na Jy cd is tie arparently ludicrous position w are in.
If the allegations rm.de by .' its c }rr_ernin the vast personnel and l.> :istical
support given to the Southeast Asian opiur traffic by the C.I.A. and t'ia Ameri-
can military (not to mention higher-level political sanctions) are true, why
should we (or, indeed, any,drug programs) be funded by such public monies as are
available for this purpose through the National Institute for Mental Health,
"Safe Streets Act" (in California, the California Council on Criminal Justice),
the Office of Economic Opportunity, etc.
If the Ramparts case is factually true, and we would very much welcome an official
(Senatorial) opinion on this question; then there is no way financially that Amer-
icans at home in the drug-treatment and abuse-prevention business can compete with
those American activities in Southeast Asia that develop and expand the "pandemic
virulence" of heroin traffic and addiction.
Approved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0
 The HonoraApprAted I raRstmse 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0
The Honorable John Tunney
April 28th, 1971 Page Two
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Therefore, flying in the face of our own self-intereit as employees of the
bourgeoning "drug-treatment business," we would actively s'ipport thoughtful
legislators at either the State or Federal levels who seriously proposed
legislation banning public funding of drug treatment programs ""ntil such
time as an accurate report of federally funded drug-addiction and int^rua-.
tional trade programs was compil^d. Understandably, we are dismayed, be-
wildered, appalled, and angered by the Ramparts article.
We appeal to you for investigation, clar+fication, and action. The rep~_:tive
meaninglessness of a Sisyphean labor face^ us starkly. We can't cope, and
we believe the tax-payer deserves a better return on his dollar.
Looking forward to your response, we are
Sincerely yours,
WESTSIDE DRUG PLANNING COUNCIL
dd: The Honorable J. William Fulbright, Senator
The Honorable William Rogers, Secretary of State
The Honorable Melvin Laird, Secretary of Defense
The Honorable Richard Helms, Director of the C.I.A.
The Honorable T'hilip Burton, "ongressman
The Honorable Willie Brown, Assemblyman
The Honorable John Vasconcellos, Assemblyman
The Honorable Nicholas Petri.s, Senator
'Approved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0
 Approved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0
liras , Apr. J._
9
tai: on They have visited Turkey. TO from o v c r d o a e s last ;sir; .Efforts to w x t will provide a compelling
Two U.S. congressmen chief supplier of opium for year. p! ul Diem have only be;gim ;;u _i reason to speed up the tisith?
said yesterday 10 to 15 per 'Me the illicit U.S. market; Iran, The drug is so easy to oh so ;'ur are ineffective drawal of troops from Viet-
cent of American troops in , and Laos and Thailand, the , tarn in Vietnam that the U.S. Murphy said he and S t c el nem." fs.uciated Press
Vietnam-30,000 to 40.000' latter two a tnaior source of Command is almost power- were approached by Vi!:a-
men-use high-grade her- heroin supplies in Vietnam. less in trying to control ad- nan:ese heroin dealers in S t-
nin and addiction is of epi-! Murphy and Steel blasted diction. they reported. They gon. About a gram of he Train Derailed
ck mic proportions. corrupt Vietnamese officials praised the recent amnesty drngr, sells for S1.80 -S2.10. he
'They are Representatives and said the South Vietnam- program of the U.S. Cot Ad. Catat .aro. Italy
Morgan Murphy tDem-I11.) ese government has done lit- mand. Under this plan serv- These boys will need a lot T 1) e Milan Syracuse I:-.-
and Robert H. Steel IR.ep- tie about the problem. ice;uen who turn themselves of money to support their press was derailed 2.5 miles
Conn.) sent out by the House They quoted the heroin use in for treatment are not pro- ON in the States." Murphy north of here yesterday and
Foreign Affairs Committee ftgums given them by the seculcd. observed. policesaid one person was
to look into the drug problem Us Command and add0d "The problem has 1cached -Unless the p r o b 1 e in is I;illed and about 39 others in-
around the would. that 6') to 90 U.S. soldiers epidemic proportions." Steel checked." auded Stc~i. it ,lured. l ewers
Approved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0
 The New i 'rf alvaSA20V q 1c 6 9 0 1-epidemic
& the New Nixon Doctrine; A Ginsberg Poem; Bankers' Lobby;
Blue Cross Boondoggle; Bo Diddley; Anais Nln: An Interview 75c
Approved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0
 Approved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0
R. PRESIDENT, THE SPECTER OF heroin addic-
tion is haunting nearly every community in
the nation." With these urgent words, Sen-
ator Vance Hartke spoke up on March 2 in
support of a resolution on drug control being considered in
the U.S. Senate. Estimating that there are 500,000 heroin
addicts in the U.S., he pointed out that nearly 20 percent
of them are teenagers. The concern of Hartke and others
is not misplaced. Heroin has become the major killer of
young people between 18 and 35, outpacing death from
accidents, suicides or cancer. It has also become a major
cause of crime: to sustain their habits, addicts in the U.S.
spend more than $15 million a day, half of it coming from
the 55 percent of crime in the cities which they commit and
the annual $2'5 billion worth of goods they steal.
Once safely isolated as part of the destructive funkiness
of the black ghetto, heroin has suddenly spread out into
Middle America, becoming as much a part of suburbia as
the Saturday barbecue. This has gained it the attention it
otherwise never would have had. President Nixon himself
says it is spreading with "pandemic virulence." People are
becoming aware that teenagers are shooting up at lunch-
time in schools and returning to classrooms to nod the day
away. But what they don't know-and what no one is tell-
ing them-is that neither the volcanic eruption of addiction
by Frank
in this country nor the crimes it causes would be possible
without the age-old international trade in opium (from
which heroin is derived), or that heroin addiction-like in-
flation, unemployment, and most of the other chaotic forces
in American society today-is directly related to the U.S.
war in Indochina.
The connection between war and opium in Asia is as old
as empire itself. But the relationship has never been so sym-
biotic, so intricate in its networks and so vast in its implica-
tions. Never before has the trail of tragedy been so clearly
marked as in the present phase of U.S. involvement in South-
east Asia. For the international traffic in opium has ex-
panded in lockstep with the expanding U.S. military pres-
ence there, just as heroin has stalked the same young people
in U.S. high schools who will also be called on to fight that
war. The ironies that have accompanied the war in Vietnam
since its onset are more poignant than before. At the very
moment that public officials are wringing their hands over
the heroin problem, Washington's own Cold War crusade, re-
plete with clandestine activities that would seem far-fetched
even in a spy novel, continues to play a major role in a
process that has already rerouted the opium traffic from the
Middle East to Southeast Asia and. is every. day opening new
channels for its shipment to the U.S. At the :;acne time the
government starts crash programs to rehabilit.tte drug users
4ik6g(l 4A 7~600296R000300060021-0
 Approved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296ROO0~300060021-0
W
ium `Jar
among its young people, the young soldiers it is sending to
Vietnam are getting hooked and dying of overdoses at the
rate of one a day. While the President is declaring war on
narcotics and on crime in the streets, he is widening the war
in Laos, whose principal product is opium and which has
now become the funnel for nearly half the world's supply
of the narcotic, for which the U.S. is the chief consumer.
There would have been a bloodthirsty logic behind the
expansion of the war into Laos if the thrust had been to
seize supply centers of opium the communists were hoard-
ing up to spread like a deadly virus into the free world. But
the communists did not control the opium there: proces-
sing and distribution were already in the hands of the free
world. Who are the principals of this new opium war? The
ubiquitous CIA, whose role in getting the U.S. into Viet-
nam is well known but whose pivotal position in the opium
trade is not; and a rogue's gallery of organizations and
people-from an opium army subsidized by the Nationalist
Chinese to such familiar names as Madame Nhu and Vice
President Nguyen Cao Ky-who are the creations of U.S.
policy in that part of the world.
The story of opium in Southeast Asia is a strange one at
every turn. But the. conclusion is known in advance: this
war has come home again-in a silky grey powder that goes
from a syringe into America's mainline.
OST OF THE OPIUM IN Southeast Asia is grown
in a region known as the "Fertile Triangle," an
area covering northwestern Burma, northern
Thailand, and Laos. It is a mountainous jungle
inhabited by tigers, elephants, and some of the most poison-
ous snakes in the world. The source of the opium that
shares the area with these exotic animals is the poppy, and
the main growers are the Meo hill tribespeople who inhabit
the region. The Meo men chop back the forests in the wet
season so that the crop can be planted in August and Sep-
tember. Poppies produce red, white or purple blossoms be-
tween January and March, and when the blossom withers,
an egg-sized pod is left. The women harvest the crop and
make a small incision in the pod with a three-bladed knife.
The pod exudes a white latex-like substance which is left to
accumulate and thicken for a day or two. Then it is care-
fully gathered, boiled to remove gross impurities, and the
sticky substance is rolled into balls weighing several pounds.
A fraction of the opium remains to be smoked by the vil-
lagers, but most is sold in nearby rendezvous with the local
smugglers. It is the Meos' only cash crop. The hill tribe
growers can collect as much as $50 per kilo, paid in gold,
silver, various commodities, or local currency. The same
kilo will bring $200 in Saigon and $2000 in San Francisco.
There are hundreds of routes, and certainly as many
methods of transport by which the smugglers ship opium-
some of it already refined into heroin-through and out of
Southeast Asia. But here are three major networks. Some
of the opium from Burma and northern Thailand moves
into Bangkok, then to Singapore and Hong Kong, then via
military aircraft, either directly or through Taiwan, to the
United States. The second, and probably major, route is
from Burma or Laos to Saigon or to ocean drops In the Gulf
of Siam; then it goes either through the Middy Last and
Marseille to the U.S. or through Hong Kong and Singapore
to the West Coast. A final route runs directly from outposts
held by Nationalist Chinese troops in Thailand to Taiwan
and then to the U.S. by a variety of means.
One of the most successful of the opium: entrepreneurs
who travel these routes, a Time reporter wrote in 1967, is
Chan Chi-foo, a half-Chinese, half-Shan (Burmese) mod-
ern-day warlord who might have stepped out of a Joseph
Conrad adventure yarn. Chan is a soft-spoken, mild-man-
nered man in his late thirties who, it is said, is totally ruth-
less. He has tremendous knowledge of the geography and
people of northwestern Burma and is said to move easily
among them, conversing in several dialects. Yet he is also
able to deal comfortably with the bankers and other busi-
nessmen who finance his operations from such centers as
Bangkok and Vientiane. Under Chan Chi-foo's command
are from 1000-2000 well-armed men, with the feudal hier-
archy spreading down to encompass another 3000 hill tribes-
men, porters, hunters and opium growers who pay him feal-
ty and whom he regards about the same as the more than
500 small mules he uses for transport.
Moving the opium from Burma to Thailand or Laos is a
big and dangerous operation. One of Chan's caravans, says
one awe-struck observer, may stretch in single file for well
Collage by Louise KolienbApproved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021M1MI'iRTS 33
 Approved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0
over a mile, and may include 200 mules, 200 porters, 200
cooks and camp attendants, and about 400 armed guards.
Such a caravan can easily carry 15 to 20 tons of opium,
worth nearly a million dollars when delivered to syndicate
men in Laos or Thailand.
To get his caravans to market, however, Chan must pay
a price, for the crucial part of his route is heavily patrolled
not by Thais or Laotians but by nomadic Nationalist Chi-
nese or Kuomingtang (KMT) troops. Still supported by the
ruling KMT on Taiwan, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's
93rd Division controls a major part of the opium flowing
out of Burma and Thailand. Roving bands of mercenary
bandits, they fled to northern Burma in 1949 as Chiang's
armies were being routed on the Chinese mainland, and have
maintained themselves since by buying opium from the
nearby Meo tribesmen which they then resell, or by exacting
tribute payments from entrepreneurs like Chan Chi-foo. As
travellers to the area attest, these troops also supplement
their income by running Intelligence operations into China
and Burma for the U.S.
HE BURMESE GOVERNMENT regularly complained
about all this activity to the United Nations, the
Taiwan government and the United States, charg-
ing the Americans and Taiwanese with actively
supplying and supporting the KMT, which in turn has
organized anti-government guerrillas. In 1959 Burmese
ground troops seized three opium processing plants set up
by the KMT guerrillas at Wanton; the troops also took an
airstrip the Chinese had used to fly in reinforcements. By
February 1961 the Burmese had pushed the KMT troops
southeast into the Thai-Burmese and Thai-Laotian border
areas, where they now hold at least eight village bases. Just
last year a reporter who was at Chieng Mai, Thailand, saw
Thai troops and American advisors as well as military sup-
plies provided by the Taiwan government. The Taiwan gov-
ernment, he noted, maintains an information office there
and regularly accompanies the KMT troops on their forays
into China to proselytize among the peasants of Yunnan
province. These sorties are coordinated by the CIA (which
is feverishly active if not wholly successful in this area),
and the United States even provides its own backwater R&R
for the weary KMT, flying its helicopters from hilltop to
hilltop to pick up the Chinese (and the Establishment re-
porter who supplied this information) for organized basket-
ball tournaments.
Although the KMT troops are often referred to as "rem-
nants," they are not just debris left behind by history. They
are in fact an important link in American and Taiwan policy
toward Communist China. Not only does Chiang Kai-shek
maintain direct contact with his old 93rd, but fresh recruits
are frequently sent to maintain a troop level of from 5000
to 7000 men, according to a top-ranking foreign aid official
in the U.S. government. And, as the New York Times has
noted, Chiang Kai-shek's son, Chiang Ching-Kuo, is widely
believed. to be in. charge of the KMT operations from his
position as chief of the Taiwan secret police.
The KMT are tolerated by the Thais for several reasons:
they have helped in the counterinsurgency efforts of the
Thai and U.S. governments against the hill tribespeople in
Thailand; they have aided the training and recruiting of
Burmese guerrilla armies for the CIA; and their offer a pay-
off to the Border Patrol Police (BPP), and through them to
the second most powerful man in Thailand, Minister of the
Interior Gen. Prapasx Charusathira. The BPP were trained
in the 'S0s by the CIA and now are financed and advised by
AID and are flown from border village to border village by
Air America. The BPP act as middlemen in th4 opium trade
between the KMT in the remote regions of Thailand and the
Chinese merchants of Bangkok. These relationships, of
course, are flexible and changing, with each group wanting
to maximize profits and minimize antagonisms and dangers.
But the established routes vary, and sometimes double-
crosses are intentional.
In the summer of 1967 Chan Chi-foo set ou` from Burma
through the KMT's territory with 300 men and 200 pack-
horses carrying nine tons of opium, with no int-ntion of pay-
ing the usual fee of $80,000 protection money. 3ut troops cut
off the group near the Laotian village of Ban Houci Sai in an
ambush that turned into a pitched battle. Neither group,
however, had counted on the involvement of the kingpin of
the area's opium trade: the CIA-backed Royal Lao Govern-
ment Army and Air Force, under the comma.id of General
Ouane Rathikoune. Hearing of the skirmish, the general
pulled his armed forces out of the Plain of Jars in north-
eastern Laos where they were supposed to Le fighting the
Pathet Lao guerrillas, and engaged two companies and his
entire air force in a battle of extermination against both sides.
The result was nearly 30 KMT and Burmese dead and a
half-ton windfall of opium for the Royal Lao Government.
N A MOMENT OF revealing frankness shortly after the
battle, General Rathikoune, far from denying the role
that opium had played, told several reporters that the
opium trade was "not bad for Laos." The trade pro-
vides cash income for the Meo hill tribes, he argued, who
would otherwise be penniless and therefore a threat to Laos's
political stability; He also argued that the trade- gives the Lao
elite (which includes government officials) a chance to ac-
cumulate capital to ultimately invest in le,,.itimate enter-
prises, thus building up Laos's economy. But tf these ration-
alizations seemed weak, far less convincing was the general's
assertion that, since he is in total control of the trade now,
when the time comes to put an end to it he will simply put
an end to it.
It is unlikely that Rathikoune, one of the chief warlords
of the opium dynasty, will decide to end the trade soon.
Right outside the village of Ban Houei Sai, hidden in the
jungle, are several of his refineries-calle,l "cookers"-
which manufacture crude morphine (which is refined into
heroin at a later transport point) under the supervision of
professional pharmacists imported from B= ngkok. Rathi-
kounc also has "cookers" in the nearby villages of Ban
Khwan, Phan Phung and Ban Kheung (the litter for opium
grown by the Yao tribe). Most of the opium he procures
comes from Burma in caravans such as Chats Chi-foo's; the
rest comes from Thailand or from the hill trig espeople (Meo
and Yao) in the area near Ban Houci Sai. Pathikoune flies
the dope from the Ban Houei Sai area to Luang Prabang, the
Royalist capital, in helicopters given by the United States
military aid program.
Approved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0
34 RAMPARTS
 Approved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0
Others in the Lao elite and government own refineries.
There are cookers for heroin in Vientiane, two blocks from
the King's residence; near Luang Prabang; on Khong Island
in the Mekong River on the Lao-Cambodian border; and
one recently built by Kouptasith Abhay (head of the mili-
tary region around Vientiane, but also from the powerful
Abhay family of Khong Island) at Phou Khao Khouai, just
north of Vientiane. Other Lords of the Trade are Prince
Boun Ourn of Southern Laos, and the Sananikone family,
called the "Rockefellers of Laos." Phoui Sananikone, the
clan patriarch, headed a U.S.-backed coup in 1959 and is
presently President of the National Assembly. Two other
Sananikones are deputies in the Assembly, two are generals
(one is Chief of Staff for Rathikoune), one is Minister of
Public Works, and a host of others are to be found at lower
levels of the political, military and civil service structure.
And the Sananikones' airline, Veha Akhat, leases planes and
pilots from Taiwan for paramilitary operations which lend
themselves easily to commerce with opium-growing tribes-
people. But the opium trade is popular with the rest of the
elite, who rent RLG aircraft or create fly-by-night airlines
(such as Laos Air Charter or Lao United Airlines) to do
their own direct dealing.
CONTROL OF THE OPIUM TRADE has not always been
in the hands of the Lao elite, although the U.S.
has been at least peripherally involved in who
the beneficiaries were since John Foster Dulles's
famous 1954 commitment to maintain an anti-communist
Laos. The major source of the opium in Laos has always
been the Meo growers, who were selected by the CIA as its
counterinsurgency bulwark against the Pathet Lao guerrillas.
The Meos' mountain bastion is Long Cheng, a secret base
80 miles northeast of Vientiane, built by the CIA during the
1962 Geneva Accords period. By 1964 Long Cheng's pop-
ulation was nearly 50,000, comprised largely of refugees
who had come to escape the war and who were kept busy
growing poppies in the hills surrounding the base.
The secrecy surrounding Long Cheng has hidden the
trade from reporters. But security has not been complete:
Carl Strock reported in the January 30 Far Eastern Eco-
nomic Review, "Over the years eight journalists, including
myself, have slipped into Long Cheng and have seen Ameri-
can crews loading T-28 bombers while armed CIA agents
chatted with uniformed Thai soldiers and piles of raw opi-
um stood for sale in the market (a kilo for $52). It's old hat
by now, but Long Cheng is still so secret that in the past
year both the U.S. embassy press attache and the director
of USAID's training center were denied clearance to visit
the mountain redoubt." The CIA not only protects the opi-
um in Long Cheng and various other pick-up points, but
also gives clearance and protection to opium-laden aircraft
flying out.
For some time, the primary middle-men in the opium
traffic had been elements of the Corsican Mafia, identified
in a 1966 United Nations report as a pivotal organization in
the flow of narcotics. In a part of the world where transpor-
tation is a major problem and where air transport is a solu-
tion, the Corsicans were able to parlay their vintage World
War II airplanes (called "the butterfly fleet" or, according
to "Pop" Buell, U.S. citizen-at-large in the area, "Air Opi-
uni") into a position of control. But as the Laotian civil
war intensified in the period following 1963, it became in-
creasingly difficult for the Corsicans to operate, and the
Meos started to have trouble getting their crop out of the
hills in safety.
The vacuum that was created was quickly filled by the
Royal Lao Air Force, which began to use helicopters and
planes donated by the U.S. not only for fighting the Pathet
Lao but also for flying opium out from air'trips pockmark-
ing the Laotian hills. This arrangement was politically more
advantageous than prior ones, for it consolidated the in-
terests of all the anti-communist parties. 'I he enfranchise-
ment of the Lao elite gave it more of an incentive to carry
on the war Dulles had committed the U.S. '.o back; the safe
transport of the Meos' opium by an ideologically sanctioned
network increased the incentive of these CIA-equipped and
-trained tribesmen to fight the Pathet Lao. The U.S. got
parties that would cooperate with its foreign policy not only
for political reasons, but on more solid economic grounds.
Opium was the economic cement binding all the parties to-
gether much more closely than anti-communism could.
As this relationship has matured, Long Cheng has become
a major collection point for opium grown in Laos. CIA
protege General Vang Pao, former officer for the French
colonial army and now head of the Meo counterinsurgents,
uses his U.S.-supplied helicopters and STOI . (short-take-off-
and-landing) aircraft to collect the opium from the sur-
rounding area. It is unloaded and stored in hutches in Long
Cheng. Some of it is sold there and flown out in Royal
Laotian Government C-47s to Saigon or the Gulf of Siam
or the South China Sea, where it is dropped to waiting fish-
ing boats. Some of the opium is flown to Vientiane, where
it is sold to Chinese merchants who then fly it to Saigon or
to the'ocean drops. One of Vang Pao's main sources of trans-
port, since the RLG Air Force is not under his control, is
the CIA-created Xieng Khouang Airline, which is still super-
vised by an American, though it is scheduled soon to be
turned over completely to Vang Pao's men. The airline's two
C-47s (which can carry a maximum of 4000 pounds) are
used only for transport to Vientiane.
Prior to Nixon's blitzkrieg in Laos, the opium trade was
booming. Production had grown rapidly since the early '50s
to a level of 175-200 tons a year, with 400 of the 600 tons
produced in Burma, and 50-100 tons of that grown in Thai-
land, passing through Laotian territory. But if the opium
has been an El Dorado for the Corsicans, the Lao elite, the
CIA and others, it has been a nemesis for the Meo tribes-
men. For in becoming a pawn in the larger strategy of the
U.S., the Meos have seen the army virtually wiped out, with
the average age of recruits now 15 years, and their popula-
tion reduced from 400,000 to 200,000, The Meos' reward
for CIA service, in other words, has been their destruction
as a people. (See Hard Times section, page 14)
OTH THE COMPLEXITY AND THE FINALITY Of the
opium web which connects Burnia, Thailand, Laos
and South Vietnam stretch the imagination. So
bizarre is the opium network and so pervasive the
Approved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0 RAMPARTS 35
 Approved For Release. 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0
MAN DALAY
?
Chiang Rai
Muang Lampang
?
r; - . Sam Neual
Ban Houel Sai d"", +aj
Luang Prabang Oeti
L u a n g O PLAI N OF F JARS
Xieng
Khouang
? SAM THONG
? LONG CHENG
Vientiane
?
Udon Thani
? GULF OF
MARTABAN
? THAILAND
? GULF OF SIAM
? PEOPLES REPUBLIC
OF CHINA
? GULF OF TONKIN
Khong
-0
? Pleiku Y
Qu:Nhon
Nha Trang ?
? SOUTH VIE-( 'NAM
Saigon
Approved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0
? Khe
L Sanh
? Savannakhet Hue ?~
Da Nan:
 Approved For Release 2003/1/02 :
would pass it off as torturing the credibility of thriller fic-
tion. But the trade is real and the net has entangled govern-
ments beyond the steaming jungle of Indochina. In 1962,
for instance, an opium-smuggling scandal stunned the entire
Canadian Parliament. It was in March of that year that
Prime Minister Diefenbaker confirmed rumors. that nine
Canadian members of the immaculate United Nations In-
ternational Control Commission had been caught carrying
opium from Vientiane to the International markets in Sai-
gon on UN planes.
The route from Laos to Saigon has long been one of the
well-established trails of the heroin-opium trade. In August
1967, a C-47 transport plane carrying two-and-a-half tons
of opium and some gold was forced down near Da Lat, South
Vietnam, by American gunners when the pilot failed to
identify himself. The plane and its precious cargo, report-
edly owned by General Rathikoune's wife, were destined
for a Chinese opium merchant and piloted by a former
KMT pilot, L. G. Chao. Whatever their ownership, the
dope-running planes usually land at Tan Son Nhut airbase,
where they are met in a remote part of the airport with the
protection of the airport police.
A considerable part of the opium and heroin remains in
Saigon, where it is sold directly to U.S. troops or distributed
to U.S. bases throughout the Vietnamese countryside. One
G.I. who returned to the states an addict was August
Schultz. He's off the needle now, but how he got on is most
revealing. Explaining that he was "completely straight, even
a right-winger" before he went into the Army, August told
RAMPARTS how he fell into the heroin trap: "It was a regu-
lar day last April [1970] and I just walked into this bunker
and there were these two guys shooting up. I said to them,
`What you guys doing?' Believe it or not I really didn't
know. They explained it to me and asked me if I wanted to
try it, I said sure."
Probably a fifth of the men in his unit have at least tried
junk, August says. But the big thing, as his buddy Ronnie
McSheffrey adds, was that most of the officers in his com-
pany-including the MPs-knew about it. McSheffrey saw
MPs in his own division (6th Battalion, 31st Infantry, 9th
Division) at Tan An shoot up, just as he says they saw him.
He and his buddies even watched the unit's sergeant-major
receive payoffs at a nearby whorehouse where every kind of
drug imaginable was available.
An article by Kansas City newspaperwoman Gloria Em-
erson inserted into the Congressional Record by Senator
Stuart Symington on March 10 said: "In a brigade head-
quarters at Long Binh, there were reports that heroin use in
the unit had risen to 20 percent . . . 'You- can salute an offi-
cer with your right hand and take a "hit" (of heroin) in
your left,' an enlisted man from New York told me. Along the 15-mile Bien Hoa highway running north to Sai-
gon from Long Minh, heroin can be purchased at any of a
dozen conspicuous places within a few minutes, and was by
this reporter, for three dollars a vial."
Adding glamour to the labyrinthine intrigue of Viet-
nam's opium trade throughout the late 1950s and early '60s
was the famous Madame Nhu, the Dragon Lady of Saigon.
Madame Nhu was in a position to be very likely coordinator
for the entire domestic opium traffic in Vietnam; yet so
great is the power she still wields from her palatial exile in
1 ~q- ~I~ti~~sO11'tt~i?titla~IA publisher and
kept him from publishing the story. In his book Mr. Pop,
Don Schanche, former editor of Horizon and Dormer man-
aging editor of the Saturday evening Post, recounts the fol-
lowing interchange on the Plain of Jars during august 1960
between Edgar "Pop" Buell-the Indiana fanner who left
his home to work with the Meo tribes people- and a local
restaurateur:
.. Buell drove with Albert [Foure] to Phong Savan
and watched from the side of the airstrip as a modern
twin-engined plane took on a huge load of cspium. Be-
neath the wing, talking heatedly with the plane's Cor-
sican pilot, was a slender woman dressed in long white
silk pants and ao d'ai, the side-slit, high-necked gown
of Vietnam. Her body was exquisitely formed. and her
darkly beautiful face wore a clear expression of author-
ity. Even Buell could see that she was Vietnamese, not
Lao.
"Zat," said Foure, "is ze grande madame of opium
from Saigon." Edgar never learned her name, but he
recognized the unforgettable face and figure when the
picture of an important South Vietnamese politician
appeared months later in arl American news magazine.
Though Schanche's publisher, David McKay Co., refused
to publish her name for fear of reprisals, the unforgettable
face was that of Madame Nhu.
UT SAIGON'S OPIUM TRADE is not ne_w. Its history
stretches back to 1.949, when the French appointed
former Vietnamese Emperor Bao hai as chief of
state. Bao Dai brought with him as chief of po-
lice Bay Vien, the undisputed leader of Saigon's criminal
underground, which controlled not only the gambling and
narcotics trade in Saigon but also the important Chinese
suburb of Cholon. Bao Dai and Bay Vien held power until
they were displaced after the 1954 Geneva Accords by Ngo
Dinh?Nhu, Diem's brother. Nhu had gained prominence in
Vietnam as an organizer of a Catholic trade union move-
ment modeled after the French Force Ouvr!`-re, which the
CIA had helped supply in the 1940s to break France's com-
munist dockworkers' union, the CGT.
At first Nhu feigned support for Bay Vien and Bao Dai,
but by the end of 1955 he had taken contrcl of the Saigon
secret police and-thereby-the city's opium and heroin
trade as well. Just as the Nhus were consolidating their own
power, a little-known figure entered the Diom military ap-
paratus-a man who through the years would carefully ex-
tend his control over the air force and end up eventually
heir not only to the South Vietnamese government but to
the opium and heroin trade as well. That man was Nguyen
Cao Ky, who had just returned from Algeria to take charge
of the South Vietnamese air transport's C-47 cargo planes.
At what particular point in time Ky became involved
with the Nhus in the opium trade is not known, but by the
end of the 'S0s he was cutting quite a figure in Saigon's elite
circles. In an interview with RAMPARTS, retired Marine
Corps Colonel (and author of the book Th.,, Betrayal) Wil-
liam CQrson. described Ky's life in the late 1950s in the fol-
RAMPARTS 37
Approved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0
 Approved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0
lowing fashion: "Ky of course was a colonel in the Air
Force back then and he used to have these glittering cock-
tail parties at the top of the Caravelle [Hotel] in Saigon.
He laid out a fantastic spread-which was all very inter-
esting because the amount of money he made as a soldier
was maybe $25 to $30 a month and he didn't have any
other outside income."
The first real light shed on the possible sources of Ky's
extracurricular income came only in the spring of 1968,
when Senator Ernest Gruening revealed that four years
earlier Ky had been in the employ of the CIA's "Operation
Haylift," a program which flew South Vietnamese agents
"into North Vietnam for the purpose of sabotage, such as
blowing up railroads, bridges, etc." More important, Ky
was fired, Grucning's sources claimed, for having been
caught smuggling opium from Laos back into Saigon. Sig-
nificantly, Ky and his flight crews were replaced by Nation-
alist Chinese Air Force pilots.
Neither the CIA, the Pentagon, nor the State Department
ever denied Ky worked on Operation Haylift. Nor did they
deny that he had smuggled opium back into Saigon. How-
ever, a U.S. embassy spokesman categorically denied Ky
was ever fired from "any position by any element of the
U.S. Government for opium smuggling or for any other
reason." When Ky came to power in February 1965, most
observers supposed he had relinquished participation in the
opium traffic (although it was "common knowledge" that
Madame Ky had replaced Madame Nhu as Saigon's Dragon
Lady and dealt in opium directly with Prince Boun Oum in
Southern Laos). However, a high Saigon military official to
whom Ky at one time offered a place in the opium traffic
says Ky continued to carry loads ranging from 2000 to 3000
kilos of opium from Pleiku to Saigon in the spring of 1965
after he had assumed power and after Operation Haylift
had been discontinued. Those runs included regular pickups
near Dak To, Kon Turn and Pleiku. Since then there has
been no indication that Ky has in any way altered the trans-
port. Corson, who returned to Vietnam in 1965, observed
that Ky's involvement in the trade had become so routine
that it had lost almost all its adventure and intrigue.
ITII GROSS RETURNS FROM the Indochinese traf-
fic running anywhere from $250 to $500 mil-
lion per year, opium is one of the kingpins of
Southeast Asian commerce. Indochina has not
always had such an enviable position. Historically most of
the world's supply of opium and heroin came through well-
established routes from Turkey, Iran and China. Then it
was refined in chemical kitchens and. warehouse factories in
Marseille. The Mediterranean trade was controlled by the
Corsican Mafia (which itself has long been related to such
American crime lords as Lucky Luciano, who funneled a
certain amount of dope into the black ghettoes). But high
officials in the narcotics control division of the Canadian
government, and in Interpol, the International Police Agen-
cy, confirm that since World War II-and paralleling the
U.S. expansion in the Pacific-there has been a major re-
direction in the sources and routing of the worldwide opium
traffic.
According to the United Nations Commission on Drugs
and Narcotics, since at least 1966 80 percent of the world's
1200 tons of illicit opium has come from Southeast Asia-
directly contradicting most official U.S. claims that the pri-
mary sources are Middle Eastern. In 1966 Interpol's former
Secretary General Jean Nepote told investigators from Ar-
thur D. Little Research Institute (then under contract to
the U.S. Government Crime Commission) that the Fertile
Triangle was a principal production center of opium. And
last year an Iranian government official told a United Na-
tions seminar on narcotics control that 83 percent of the
world's illegal supply originated in the Fertile Triangle-the
area where opium is controlled by the U.S.-supplied troops
of Laos and Nationalist China.
It is odd that the U.S. government, with the most massive
Intelligence apparatus in history, could miss this innovation.
But though it may seem to be an amazing oversight, what
has happened is that Richard Nixon and the makers of
America's Asian policy have completely blanked Indochina
out of the world narcotics trade. Not even Joe Stalin's re-
moval of Trotsky from the Russian history looks parallels
this historical reconstruction. In his recent State of the
World address, Richard Nixon dealt directly .with the inter-
national narcotics traffic. "Narcotics addiction has been
spreading with pandemic virulence," he said, adding that
"this affliction is spreading rapidly and without the slightest
respect for national boundaries." What is needed is "an in-
tegrated attack on the demand for [narcotics], the supply
of them, and their movement across international borders.
... We have," he says, "worked closely with a large num-
ber of governments, particularly Turkey, France, and Mexi-
co, to try to stop the illicit production and smuggling of
narcotics." (authors' emphasis)
It is no accident that Nixon has ignored the real sources
of narcotics trade abroad and by so doing has effectively
precluded any possibility of being able to deal with heroin
at home. It is he more than anyone else who has underwrit-
ten that trade through the policies he has formulated, the
alliances he has forged, and most recently th political ap-
pointments he has made. For Richard Nixon's rise to
power has been intricately interwoven with tl-e rise of pro-
ponents of America's aggressive strategy in 'Via, a group
of people loosely called the "China Lobby" %ho have been
in or near political power off and on since 1950.
Among the most notable members of the "China Lobby"
are Madame Anna Chennault, whose husband, General
Claire Chennault, founded Air America; columnist Joe
Alsop; FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover; former California
Senator William Knowland; and Ray Cline, currently
Chief of Intelligence for the State Department. They and
such compatriots as the late Time magaz;ne publisher
Henry Luce and his widow, Congresswoman C_ faire Boothe
Luce, have been some of the country's strongest proponents
of the Nationalist Chinese cause.
In 1954 Chiang Kai-shek formed the Asian People's
Anti-Communist League (APACL), which was to be-
come one of the vital links between the China Lobby and
the Taiwan government. (It was also in that year Nixon
urged that U.S. troops be sent into Indochina following
38 RAMPARTS Approved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0
 the French defeat in Dien Bien Phu--a proposal which
failed because of the lack of public support for such policy
following the Korean war.) As soon as the APACL was
formed, Chiang announced that it had established "close
contact" with three American politicians-the most im-
portant of whom was Vice President Richard Nixon.
VER THE, YEARS THE CHINA LOBBY has continued to
spring to Nixon's support. It was Madame Chen-
nault, co-chairman in 1968 of Women for Nixon-
Agnew Advisory Committee, who helped raise a
quarter of. a million dollars for the campaign; it was she
who just before the election entered into an elaborate set
of arrangements to sabotage a White House peace plan.
Within 30 hours. of the announced plan, South Vietnam
President Thieu rejected the new negotiations it proposed
-a rejection Madame Chennault had helped arrange as a
last-minute blow at Hubert Humphrey and the Democrats.
It is not only his debts, associations and sympathies to
the China Lobby which have linked Nixon with Kuoming-
tang machinations in Indochina and helped plunge the U.S.
deeper into the morass there. One of his most important
foreign policy appointments since taking office has been the
reassignment of Ray Cline as State Department Director of
Intelligence and Research. Cline, the controversial CIA sta-
tion chief in Taiwan who helped organize KMT forays into
Communist China, in 1962 promoted Nixon's old project
of a Bay of Pigs invasion of China. Within a month of
Cline's recent appointment, the resumption of pilotless In-
telligence flights over mainland China was approved.
The entire cast of the China Lobby has relied on one
magic corporation, the same corporation established just
after World War II by General Claire Chennault as Civil
Air Transport and renamed in the 1950s Air America. Car-
rier. not only of men and personnel for all of Southeast
Asia, but also of the policies that have turned Indochina
into the third bloodiest battlefield in American history, Air
America's chief contract is with the American Central In-
telligence Agency.
Air America brings Brahmin Bostonians and wealthy
Wall Streeters who are the China Lobby together with
some of the mgst powerful men in Nationalist China's
financial history. One of its principal services has been
to fly in support for the "remnant" 93rd Division of the
KMT, the "opium army" in Burma; another has been as a
major carrier of opium itself. Air America flies through all
of the Laotian and Vietnamese opium pick-up points, for
aside from the private "butterfly fleet" and various military
transports, Air America is the "official" Indochina airline.
A 25-year-old black man recently returned from Indochina
told RAMPARTS of going to Vietnam in late 1968 as an ad-
venturer, hoping to get in on the dope business. But he
found that the business was all controlled by a "group like
the Mafia. It was tight and there wasn't room for me." The
only way he could make it in the dope trade, he says, was
to go to work for Air America as a mechanic. He found
there "was plenty of dope in Laos-lots of crystals [heroin]
all over the place." Air America was the only way to get
in on it.
Approved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R0003000600211 Oclina i
n s
re
s mo
IIAT HAS TAKEN PLACE In
than a flurry of corruption among select
dramatis personae in America's great Asian
Drama. The fact that Meo tribesmen have
been nearly wiped out, that the Corsican Mafia's Air
Opium has been supplanted by the.CIA's Air America,
that Nationalist Chinese soldiers operate as narcotics
bandits, that such architects of U.S. democracy for the
East as the Nhus and Vice President Ky have been dope
runners-these are only the bizzare cameo roles in a
larger tragedy that involves nothing less than the uproot-
ing of what had been the opium trade for decades-
through the traditional lotus-land of the Middle East into
Western Europe-and the substitution of another network,
whose shape is parallel to that of the U.S. presence in
Southeast Asia. The ecology of narcotics has been dis-
rupted and remade to coincide with the structure of
America's Asia strategy-the stealthy conquest of a con-
tinent to serve the interests of the likes of the China Lobby.
The shift in the international opium traffic is also a
metaphor for what has happened in Southeast Asia itself.
As the U.S. has settled in there, its presence radiating a
nimbus of genocide and corruption, armadas of air-
planes have come to smash the land and lives of a help-
less people; mercenary armies have been trained by the
U.S.; and boundaries reflecting the U.S. desires have been
established, along with houses of commerce and petty
criminality created. in the American image. One of the
upshots has been that the opium trade has been systema-
tized, given U.S. technological expertise and a shipping and
transportation network as pervasive as the U.S. presence
itself. The piratical Corsican transporters have been re-
placed by pragmatic technocrats carrying out their jobs
with deadly accuracy. Unimpeded by boundaries, scruples
or customs agents, and nurtured by the free flow of mil-
itary personnel through the capitals of the Orient, the
United States has-as a reflex of its warfare in Indochina-
built up a support system for the trade in narcotics that
is unparalleled in modern history.
The U.S. went on a holy war to stamp cut communism
and to protect its Asian markets, and it brought home
heroin. It is a fitting trade-off, one that characterizes the
moral quality of the U.S. involvement. This ' ugly war
keeps coming home, each manifestation more terrifying
than the last; home to the streets of the teeming urban
ghettos and the lonely suburban isthmus where in the
last year the number of teenage heroin addicts has taken
a quantum leap forward. Heroin has now become the
newest affliction of affluent America-of mothers in West-
port, Connecticut, who only wanted to die when they
traced track-marks on their daughters' elc ant arms; or of
fathers in Cicero, Illinois, speechless in outrage when
their conscripted sons came back from the war bringing
home a blood-stained needle as. their only lasting souvenir.
Researchers for RAMPARTS' report on opium traffic
and the war were Michael Aldrich, Adam Bennion.
and Joan Medlin. Special thanks go to author Peter
Scott for permission to draw on unpublished ma-
terial regarding Laos and the China Lobby.
Approved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0 RAMPARTS . 39
 Zproved For Release 2003/12/02: CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0
Z3~ I
.r u17 w o curnr(-,T ()N POST DATE PAGE
tetnam.
Sar, to Be Addicts
TOKYO, April 22 (UPI)
Two U. S. Congressmen said
today that more than 30,000
American servicemen in South
Vietnam are heroin. addicts
and wt11 bring the habit back
to the, United States.
The statement came from
Reps, 14organ F. Murphy Jr.
(]D-Ill.) and Robert 11ft the
(R-Coo, n.), n
I;ou$O Foreign Affairs Com-
mittee who toured Vietnam
for a}1 on-the-spot investiga-
tion o drug trafficking.
"-re to 15 per scent of our
300,00 troops in South Viet-
nam re addicted to heroin,"
Steeltsaid. "We got this infor-
matt* f _" ee onsible
Approved For Release 2003/12/02 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300060021-0