Opium (40 page)

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, opium had been a major. Iranian export commodity, accounting for 15 per cent of its foreign income. Medicine was backward and opium so commonly used it was known as
teriac
(cure-all) rather than
afyon,
the Persian for opium. When official smoking shops were introduced in 1931, ostensibly as a form of treatment clinic, the already widespread addiction rocketed. By 1949, it was estimated 11 per cent of the adult population were habituated with 90 per cent of the population smoking opium in some regions. Villages of 600 inhabitants might have up to 16 smoking shops whilst Tehran contained 500 opium dens: the country had an estimated two million addicts who consumed two tons of opium per day in the mid-1950s. The ruling families, including those closely allied to the Shah, owned vast acreages of poppies and earned substantial incomes from them. Weak laws and corruption made sure they were protected.

In 1950, Iran began to reduce opium production until, in 1955, poppy cultivation was halted and addicts given six months to cure themselves, after which poppy growing and opium smoking, selling or possessing meant imprisonment. It was reported the Shah took this move because of the poor quality of military recruits due to addiction and under international pressure.

After the 1955 ban, addict numbers reduced but many turned to the black market for supplies. Production increased in Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The traffickers demanded payment in gold bullion. Such was the size of the trade, the national reserves began to dwindle. Then heroin grew in popularity, particularly amongst the urban young, because it was less obvious when used. Illicit refineries were established in Tehran, linked to suppliers in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

By 1968, 70 per cent of the Iranian prison population were inside on narcotics offences and the government did a
volte face.
Blaming neighbouring countries for their plight and the failure of the outright ban, which was accepted to be ineffectual, they announced a provisional resumption of poppy cultivation and opium production.

The international community was incensed: it was said the decision was the greatest setback to global drug control since 1945. Yet Iran was adamant and cited the social and economic effects the blanket ban had had on the country. A law was ratified in June 1969 authorising opium production to satisfy domestic demand, poppy cultivation being condoned only in rigidly controlled areas. No sooner was the law passed than poppy fields sprang up everywhere.

Under the provision of the law, opium could only be legally used by addicts over sixty years old and by those who were unable on medical grounds to undergo detoxification. Most addicts overcame the restriction by failing to register and by buying their opium illegally. Although the law carried the death penalty for trafficking, corruption and the widespread use of opium made it impractical.

Until about 1972, the drug output of the Golden Crescent stayed largely contained within the confines of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. As long as the Iranian ban lasted, there was good money to be made from a sizeable addict population there. With the ban lifted and Iran growing her own opium again, some of the Golden Crescent product was released for the international market but it was several more years before it was to become a significant source.

With the collapse of the French Connection, therefore, the Mafia and other criminals were unable at that time to obtain large scale supplies of narcotics from the Golden Crescent and they set their sights further afield on South-east Asia. The region was already producing up to 70 per cent of the world's illicit opium and Chinese chemists in laboratories in Hong Kong were refining heroin of comparable purity to that of Cesari. This, the gangsters decided, was the area in which to expand so contacts were built up between them and both Corsican syndicates operating in Indo-China and Chinese criminal fraternities existing in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand and Taiwan.

The next development in the opium story, and one of the most shameful, was just around the corner.

14

Soldiers and Secrets

In 1969, the US Bureau of Narcotics reckoned only 5 per cent of the heroin on American streets originated in South-east Asia. This was more than likely a gross underestimate. However, in three years, the guestimate had gone up to 30 per cent and was rising. The source of the heroin was the Golden Triangle.

The Golden Triangle, a name made popular by journalists in the 1970s, is an area of at least 225,000 square kilometres, roughly three-sided and straddling the frontiers of Laos, Thailand and Burma, just south of the Chinese border. It is a mountainous, isolated region of sharp ridges, wide plateaux and tall peaks, the uplands formed of limestone and ideal opium poppy country, especially for the Yunnanese variety of the opium poppy which prefers a temperate climate: at altitudes above 1000 metres, conditions are perfect.

Other factors make the Golden Triangle a top quality opium producing region. Opium has been a trade commodity here for at least two centuries. Like the Mahaban Mountains on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border, the area is remote and inaccessible, beyond the laws of the respective governments and politically chaotic: that the Thai, Laotian and Burmese governments are also riddled with corruption more than helps. The collusion of many politicians, officials and military leaders is virtually certain. If not, a tolerance of the trade may be relied upon.

The population consists of independent hill tribes for whom opium is a traditional part of everyday life. They are not indigenous to the region but migrated here from the southern Chinese coastal provinces in the latter half of the nineteenth century, bringing their opium habit with them. The main tribes are the Hmong (also known as the Meo, a derogatory name given them by the Chinese and used by European colonials) and the Yao who migrated to escape Chinese persecution: lesser tribes include the Lisu, Kachin and Lahu who settled on the Burma-Thailand border. Some of the tribes occupy hilltop villages, others leading semi-nomadic existences and cultivating opium in slash-and-burn jungle clearings. Opium poppy farming is the main livelihood of these tribes and, suitable land being at a premium, has caused considerable deforestation. In some areas, 90 per cent of cultivated land is devoted to poppies.

Itinerant traders, often of Chinese origin, move through the villages, purchasing opium and selling trade goods, the opium subsequently sold to warlords and drug merchants. The main purchasers are, or have been, army units of the Kuomintang (KMT), the Nationalist Chinese losing side led by Chiang Kai-shek in the war against Mao Zedong in 1949, various ethnic rebel armies in particular bands from the northern Shan states of north-eastern Burma who have been trying since 1960 to secede from Burma, and Yunnanese-descended opium warlords who are, in essence, autarchic warlords with private armies to guard their trade routes and opium caravans. Nowadays, they command forces of several thousand well-trained and armed soldiers, often with their own uniforms.

Just who rules in the Golden Triangle or any segment of it – or has done over the last three or four decades – is beyond firm definition. It is impossible to be succinct about the situation. Opium being the only main source of finance, the region has been, and remains, in a state of flux with different forces fighting to control the opium harvest, the opium highlands and to retain or gain military supremacy with different parties forming and breaking and reforming allegiances in a continual search for wealth and power.

Being land-locked and remote, the region has no direct outlet to international drug markets so private armies are essential to escort the opium through the mountains and jungles to remote heroin factories in Burma, Thailand and Laos. There have been two primary routes along which the opium and heroin reached the outside world. One, by air from isolated airstrips in northern Laos to Saigon, was closed after the fall of Saigon in 1975: the other main route exists to this day and goes overland through Burma and Thailand to Bangkok, now the world's chief heroin distribution centre.

Opium has always been important to South-east Asia. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, government monopolies supplying a predominantly Chinese opium smoking population imported it by sea from India and by mule caravan from Yunnan, taxing the trade and thereby creating a black market, especially in Yunnanese opium. En route, the traders from Yunnan bought and sold the tiny domestic harvest raised by the hill tribes, promoting trade and creating a link between them and demand in the lowlands: some tribes inevitably began growing opium as a cash crop for the illegal market but their contribution was minuscule.

Prior to the 1940s, French and British colonial government campaigns to halt poppy cultivation kept local production low and government revenue high for imports were taxed and addicts charged inflated prices. However, as the 1950s progressed and colonial power waned, outside influences came to the fore and greatly affected the regional narcotics trade. The moving force behind this was the fight against Communism.

In order to check the spread of Communism in Asia, tribal headmen and warlords struck deals with the French intelligence services and, more especially, with the CIA. By associating themselves with local leaders, CIA operatives were also building links with the opium business for the two went unequivocally hand in hand. Furthermore, to keep the warlords in power, the CIA allowed them to maintain their opium dealing and even provided them with open access to American munitions and air transport to further their opium or heroin distribution. In short, the CIA became inextricably entangled with the Golden Triangle opium trade, handling opiate consignments, flying drug runs and tolerantly turning a blind eye to the affairs of their criminal allies.

For those who served in the Vietnam War, or covered it as journalists, CIA involvement in the narcotics trade was suspected, if not publicly acknowledged: it was McCoy's
The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
which blew the whistle. The CIA went to great lengths to ban his book, claiming it was a threat to national security whilst it was really an embarrassing exposé of America's obsession with and mismanagement of the Communist threat, and the ineffectuality of Cold War strategies.

The background to CIA involvement is important to the understanding of how the present-day international heroin situation arose.

As soon as the Japanese were defeated and left South-east Asia in 1945, opium imports started again, supplies coming from Iran and Yunnan. The number of addicts quickly rose but it was not long before their supplies were heavily curtailed. The Communist victory in China in 1949, and the subsequent banning of poppy growing and closure of the Chinese border, halted the Yunnan trade whilst the signing of the UN protocol in 1953, in which opium producing nations agreed not to sell on to the international market, further cut imports. The only answer seemed to lie in domestic production and this set off widespread poppy cultivation in the Golden Triangle.

Anxious to dam the flood-tide of Communism arising from China's change of political structure, in 1950 the CIA set in motion a number of covert operations along the Chinese border in the Golden Triangle area and purchased a local airline, Civil Air Transport (CAT). This had belonged to General Claire Chennault, the leader of the famous ‘Flying Tigers' during the Second World War and had flown military cargoes over ‘The Hump', the mountains of Indo-China, into Kunming and Chungking in support of the Allies and Chiang Kai-shek's army. CAT was later renamed Air America, although there were those who nicknamed it Air Arlington (after the Arlington, Virginia, headquarters of the CIA) and, more pertinently, Air Opium.

As they had done in the war, the aircraft continued to support the Nationalist Chinese cause by supplying and arming remnants of the KMT which had fled China to settle along the border in the Shan states. Within months of buying CAT, the CIA was parachuting in arms and ammunition with military advisers who trained the KMT survivors, along with some hill tribesmen, into a 12,000-strong guerrilla army with which it optimistically invaded southern China in 1951–2.

These invasions unavoidably failing, the force then extended itself along the Burma-China border against anticipated Communist Chinese incursion. Then, in late 1952, it began to expand into the Shan states, soon becoming the only effective government in the remote region. This was fortuitous for the Shan states were the prime Burmese opium producing area: it was only a matter of time before the KMT started to trade in opium, financing themselves from the same source as they had been funded under Chiang Kai-shek in China. Members of the KMT have confirmed the instructions to deal in opium were personally made by Chiang Kai-shek with his son and eventual successor as president of Taiwan, General Chiang Ching-kuo, again ratifying it on the Generalissimo's death in 1975.

Equipped with the latest American arms and expertise, the KMT were able to dominate the local population. With characteristic Chinese entrepreneurialism, they levied general taxes to finance and increase their hold on the opium traffic, centralised the opium market and charged an annual opium duty to every poppy farmer. They also consolidated their infiltration of the hill tribes by marrying into them. With their hopes dashed of winning back China, they metamorphosed into a highly proficient opium militia. By 1962, they had transformed the Golden Triangle into the world's single largest poppy growing area with opium production increasing drastically. UN statistics assessed Burmese annual output as rising from 40 tons in 1945 to 400 in 1962, Thai annual output from 7 to 100 tons and Laotian from 30 to between 100 and 150 tons per annum.

From time to time, conflict flared up between Burmese forces and KMT troops. The latter considered the former a threat to their opium business whilst the Burmese were worried the KMT were inciting separatist tendencies in the historically volatile Shan states. In 1953, Burma protested to the UN and a number of KMT soldiers were flown out to Taiwan but nothing changed: the KMT were keen to retain control because of opium.