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

in control of the opium trade, as it was conducted by Vang Pao and numerous Laotian political and military officials” (333). A more sympathetic account would acknowledge that the CIA was trying to foster a capitalist Laos with a capitalist ruling class, where the only obvious source of capital was, inevitably, opium.

46. Shackley, Spymaster, 208–9.

47. Prados, Lost Crusader, 168.

48. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 318, citing interviews with the president of Xieng Khouang Air Transport, a former USAID official, and high-ranking Hmong officials, 1971. Cf. Shackley, Spymaster, 182: “Lair also had visions of the Hmong having their own civil air transport. I supported that endeavor, and it resulted in our helping Vang Pao to set up Xieng Khouang Air Transport with an old DC-3.”

49. Curtis Peebles, Twilight Warriors: Covert Air Operations against the USSR (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2005), 255.

50. See, e.g., William J. Chambliss, On the Take: From Petty Crooks to Presidents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 186–89.

51. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 15.

52. Trento, Prelude to Terror, 38.

53. Trento, Prelude to Terror, 33.

54. Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 130; U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas, United States of America vs. Edwin Paul Wilson, Criminal Case H-82-139. Interestingly, Wilson, in 1968, while still a CIA staff agent under commercial cover, filed a report outlining his “limited” contacts with Edward K. Moss, a CIA–mob go-between to be discussed in chapter 7 (Memo of 14 May 1973 from Jerry G. Brown to Deputy Chief, Security Research Staff, CIA, NARA Record #104-10122-10376).

55. Scott Armstrong and Jeff Nason, Mother Jones, November–December 1991, quoted in Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 130.

56. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin (1991), 471–72, 477. Cf. Corn, Blond Ghost, 328, 356; Christopher Robbins, The Ravens: The Men Who Flew in the CIA’s Secret War in Laos (New York: Crown, 1987), 131. The complex Shackley–Wilson story lends credibility to the thesis of Joe Trento that, when Jimmy Carter was elected with the promise to rein in the CIA, Shackley took steps to “create a totally private intelligence network using CIA assets” (Trento, Prelude to Terror, 113–14).

57. Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots (New York: Norton, 1987), 291–92, 317, 385. In 1983 the Australian Joint Task Force on Drug Trafficking released a report on Nugan Hand’s activities to Parliament that said that Shackley, Secord, Clines, [Rafael] Quintero, and Wilson were people whose background “is relevant to a proper understanding of the activities of the Nugan Hand group and the people associated with that group” (Joel Bainerman, The Crimes of a President [New York: S.P.I. Books, 1992], 75).

58. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 476, citing Australia-New South Wales Joint Task Force, Report, Volume 4: Nugan Hand, 747–48.

59. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran/Contra Affair, 50, 74, 164. Cf. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 134, 139.

60. Thomas Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter’s Adventures in an Oil-Rich, War-Torn, Post-Soviet Republic (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 272–75. Richard Secord was allegedly attempting also to sell Israeli arms with the assistance of Israeli agent David Kimche, another associate of Oliver North. The mujahideen were recruited in Afghanistan by the drug trafficker Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leading recipient of CIA assistance in Afghanistan in the 1980s and most recently a leader of the al-Qaeda–Taliban resistance to the United States and its client there, Hamid Karzai. See Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 7, 8, 20.

61. John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism (London: Pluto, 1999), 180–81.

62. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 163–65.

63. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 305; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 363. Khun Sa died in 2007, but American tourists now flock to the hotel and casino run by his son near the Thai–Burmese–Laotian border (Bertil Lintner, Asia Times, November 1, 2007).

64. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 304. Lintner also reports that after the fierce battle, “soldiers from both sides were treated at hospitals in Chiang Rai [Thailand], where they often ended up in the same wards, chatting with each other and sharing cigarettes.”

65. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 382–83.

66. Lintner writes of a second Thai road built with USAID assistance that directly benefited Khun Sa (Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 179). Cf. William Stevenson, The Revolutionary King: The True-Life Sequel to The King and I (London: Constable and Robinson, 2001), 218–19.

Chapter 6: The War on Drugs in Asia

1. Alfred McCoy, Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organised Crime in Australia (Harper and Row, 1980), 30.

2. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), x–xi. Dayle made this statement during a videotaped teleconference in the presence of Marshall and myself.

3. Michael Levine, “Mainstream Media: The Drug War’s Shills,” in Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, ed. Christine Borjesson (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), 258.

4. In addition, the DEA spends millions each year on an education program, the first of whose priorities, according to its own Budget Summary, is “Anti-Legalization Education” (Office of National Drug Control Policy, http://www.ncjrs.gov/ond

cppubs/publications/policy/budget98/agency-09f.html).

5. Levine, “Mainstream Media,” 265.

6. Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Pack: The People, Politics and Espionage Intrigues That Shaped the DEA (Springfield, OR: TrineDay, 2009), xi–xii. Full disclosure: Both Levine and Valentine are friends, and I blurbed Valentine’s important book.

7. Richard Lawrence Miller, Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 158–59; Edward J. Epstein, Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1977), 165–66.

8. Valentine, Strength of the Pack,