 | The Cavalier daily Tuesday, May 11, 1971 |  |
CIA Protects Far East Opium Bases
The following is a continuation of an article
on the opium trade in Southeast Asia which
recently appeared in Ramparts magazine. The
rest of the article will appear later this week.
— Ed.
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
Kouprasith Abhay (head of the military
region around Vientiane, but also from
the powerful Abhay family of Khong
Island) at Phou Khao Khouai, just north
of Vietnam.
Other lords of the trade are Prince Boun
Oum 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 to 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 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 Vietniane, built by
the CIA during the 1962 Geneva Accords
period.
By 1964 Long Cheng's population was
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 Economic Review,
"Over the years eight journalists, including
myself, have slipped into Long Cheng and have
seen American crews loading T-28 bombers
while armed CIA agents chatted with
uniformed Thai soldiers and piles of raw opium
stood for sale in the market (a kilo for $52).
It's old hat by now, but the U.S. embassy press
attache and the director of USAID's training
center was denied clearance to visit the
mountain redoubt."
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
transportation is a major problem and where air
transport is a solution, the Corsicans were able
to party their vintage World War II airplanes
(called the "butterfly fleet" or, according to
"Pop" Buell, U.S. citizen-at-large in the area,
"Air Opium") into a position of control.
But as the Laotian civil war intensified in
the period following 1963, it became
increasingly 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 airstrips
pockmarking the Laotian hills. This
arrangement was politically more advantageous
than prior ones, for it consolidated the interests
of all the anti-communist parties.
The enfranchisement of the Lao elite gave it
more of an incentive to carry on the war Dulles
had committed the U.S. to 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 together much more closely than
anti-communism could.
| The Cavalier daily Tuesday, May 11, 1971 | |