Американская военная машина. Глубинная политика, глобальная связь ЦРУ с наркотиками и путь в Афганистан - Питер Дейл Скотт

followed by a less candid explanation: “Sinay [his Thai counterpart] wanted to get married. He said he didn’t have enough money, but if we could do that we could make some money on this, see, from the reward. It’s always a split according to rank on how much. So, I got money out of it, too, because [sic] I never kept any of the things that they ever paid me. What I did was the money that I got out of that I used to buy some mules.” Using the reward cited by Berrigan ($1.2 million for a twenty-ton seizure), we can perhaps calculate that Lair’s seizure would have earned well over $2 million, enough to pay for a lot more than a wedding and “some mules.”

55. “An Interview with Willis Bird Jr,” http://www.irrawaddy.org/database/2004/vol12.5/interview.html.

56. Bertil Lintner, Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency since 1948 (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1999), 192; Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 51, 187, 192–93. But Phao’s role in the Thai drug economy was short lived compared to that of his banker, Chin Sophonpanich, a leader in the local Chinese Teochew community. According to an informed study, “Chin became Thailand’s richest man, the king of banks, and was listed as one of the world’s top ten tycoons” (“The Tycoons of Thailand,” http://www.geocities.com/wallstreet/district/1193/tycoon.htm).

57. Ross Y. Koen, The China Lobby in American Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1960), ix; discussion in Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 193–94.

58. Other examples include John Newman’s JFK and Vietnam (New York: Warner Books, 1992), and my own book The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1972), a copy of which once reportedly sold for $1,400.

59. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 214–15, cf. 206.

60. I do not know how much was paid to Helliwell by the Thai government, which was receiving some 15 percent or more of its income from its still licit opium monopoly in addition to the sums, perhaps larger, from the illegal drug traffic. Fineman tells us that Donovan, after retiring as ambassador was hired by Thailand “as an ‘economic advisor’ (i.e. lobbyist) . . . they gave him $25,000 for his ‘expenses’ and, over the remainder of [1955], reportedly added another $75,000” (Fineman, A Special Relationship, 206–7). Ever since, there have been scattered reports, usually not investigated, of dubious money from Asia reaching American politicians (as noted in chapter 2). For the noninvestigation of sources like the “Committee of United States Citizens in Asia for Nixon,” headed by Chennault’s widow Anna Chan Chennault, see Renata Adler, Canaries in the Mineshaft: Essays on Politics and Media (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 65–68. For the political contributions in the 1980s from the drug-tainted Pakistani Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), see chapter 7. For the contributions to Clinton in the 1990s from the BCCI-linked Riadys in Indonesia (the so-called Lippo-gate), see Peter James Rimmer and H. W. Dick, The City in Southeast Asia: Patterns, Processes and Policy (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), 215–16. The Riadys were protégés of the Indonesian godfather Lim Sioe Liong, who in turn had been launched with the assistance of Chin Sophonpanich (Joe Studwell, Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia [New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007], 95–96).

61. My personal impression is that the CIA may have been paying salaries by 1957, but this does not address the mystery of the 1953–1954 period. In any case, as a nominee of Phao’s enemy Sarit Thanarat, Sawai was by no means a neutral observer. In 1957 he attacked Sea Supply and PARU because of his and Sarit’s mistaken fears that Phao would use PARU to oppose Sarit’s successful ousting of Phao and assumption of power. The CIA used his attack to achieve its goal of severing its overt link to PARU, which had become notorious and unpopular. Sawai was also the cousin of the Laotian prince Phetsarath Ratananavongsa, who became Sarit’s and Thailand’s principal client in Laos (Fineman, A Special Relationship, 186). Many of the actions taken by PARU between 1953 and 1961, which from an American perspective would constitute steps taken to fight “communism,” must also have been seen by those controlling the traffic as steps consolidating a new protected channel for opium out of Laos while the Burmese slowly moved to drive the KMT out of Burma.

62. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 244–47; cf. interview with Bill Lair, 79–81. We now know that CIA had been withdrawing millions of dollars from U.S. economic aid funds since the beginning of the Marshall Plan in the late 1940s (Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 28–29).

63. As late as 1972, after more than a year of major revelations about the CIA’s drug assets in Laos, there was only a single marginal and nonpolitical reference to this in Charles Stevenson’s The End of Nowhere: American Policy toward Laos since 1954 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972). Stevenson’s book was originally a Harvard dissertation for Professor Richard Neustadt.

64. FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, pt. 2, deals with Burma, the Philippines, and Thailand. The CIA was at the center of U.S. foreign policy in all three countries during this period. Yet in this 742-page volume, there are only two passing references to the Central Intelligence Agency (39, 681) and none at all to its operations. This is characteristic of the FRUS volumes for 1952–1954, in which the CIA’s overthrow of Mossadeq in Iran is not mentioned.

65. For decades academic books by Americans about Thailand were striking in their determination to mention neither opium nor the CIA. See, e.g., David Wyatt’s otherwise useful Thailand: A Short History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). It may be relevant that “over a thousand books were produced, subsidized or sponsored by the CIA before the end of 1967” and that some of these books were apparently area studies by academics (U.S. Congress, Senate, Select