University of Virginia Library

Bombing Hurts Supply

U.S. Aircraft Transport Opium

Photo By Howard Weinberg

Robert C. Canevari

Dean Defends D. Alan Williams

—Ed.

As this relationship (between the U.S.
and the Laos lite) 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 counter insurgents, uses
his U.S.-supplied helicopters and STOL
(short-take-off-and-landing) aircraft to
collect the opium from the surrounding
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
fishing 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
transport, since the RLG Air Force is not under
his control, is the CIA-created Xieng Khouang
Airline, which is still supervised by an
American, though it is scheduled soon to be
turned over completely to Vang Pao's men. The
airlines two C-47s, (which can carry a
maximum of 4000 pounds) are used only for
transport to Vietnam.

Blitzkrieg

Prior to Nixon's blitzkrieg 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 Thailand, passing through Laotian
territory.

But if the opium has been an El Dorado for
the Corsicans, the Lao lite, the CIA and
others, it has been a nemesis for the Meo
tribesmen. For in becoming a pawn in the larger
strategy of the U.S., the Mos have seen the
army virtually wiped out, with the average age
of recruits now 15 years, and their population
reduced from 400,000 to 200,000.

The Meos' reward for CIA service, in other
words, has been their destruction as a people.

Both the complexity and the finality of the
opium web which connects Burma, Thailand,
Laos and South Vietnam stretch the
imagination.

Pervasive Network

So bizarre is the opium network and so
pervasive the traffic that were it to appear in an
Ian Fleming plot we would pass it off as
torturing the credibility of thriller fiction. But
the trade is real and the net has entangled
governments 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 Primer
Minister Diefenbaker confirmed rumors that
nine Canadian members of the immaculate
United Nations International Control
Commission had been caught carrying opium
form Vientiane to the international markets in
Saigon on UN planes.

The route from Laos to Saigon has long
been one of the well-established routes 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.

Precious Cargo

The plane and its precious cargo, reportedly
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 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
GI 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, Mr. Schultz told RAMPARTS how he
fell into the heroin trap: "It was a regular day
last April (1970) and I just walked into this
bunker and there were these guys shooting up. I
said to them, "What are 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 company,
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.