Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani Page B

shipping, and tight security had blocked heroin smuggling into the United States. The CIA entered into two sets of alliances it considered key to waging the Cold War, both of which boosted the drug trade far beyond prewar levels. The first was with the Mafia in Italy and France, the second was with anti-Communist Chinese forces along the Burma-China border. From 1948 to 1950, the CIA allied “with the Corsican underworld in its struggle against the French Communist Party for control over the strategic Mediterranean port of Marseille.” The Corsicans triumphed and “used their control over the Marseille waterfront to dominate the export of heroin to the U.S. market” for “the next quarter century.” At the same time, “the CIA ran a series of covert operations along the China border that were instrumental in the creation of the Golden Triangle heroin complex.” Beginning in 1950, these operations were aimed at creating an anti-Communist Chinese force to mount an invasion of mainland China. The invasion never happened, but the anti-Communist Chinese (KMT) “succeeded in monopolizing and expanding the Shan states’ opium trade.” The CIA retained these forces along the Burma-China border, hoping they would function as an advance warning system against an anticipated Chinese invasion of Southeast Asia. Instead, this anti-Communist army “transformed Burma’s Shan states into the world’s largest opium producer” over the next decade.
    The CIA applied these very tactics to Laos from 1960 to 1975 when it created a secret army of thirty thousand Hmong peasants to battle Laotian Communists near the border with North Vietnam. The Hmong’s main cash crop was opium, and the CIA readily turned the other way as the Hmong commander, General Vang Pao, used a Corsican charter to export his crop to distant markets. In 1965, when the escalating air war and the political infighting in the Laotian elite “forced the small Corsican charter airlines out of the opium business,” General Pao was able “to use the CIA’s Air America to collect opium from his scattered highland villages” for delivery to Long Tieng and Vientiane. The Air America operation played a key role in expanding the opium market: “CIA and USAID funds went to the construction of more than 150 short, so-called LIMA landing strips in the mountains near the opium fields, thus opening these remote spots to the export trade.” In 1967, the CIA and USAID bought two C-47 planes for General Pao, who then opened his own air-transport company, which he called Xeng Khouang Air and everyone else called Air Opium. Interestingly, when General Pao decided in 1969 to bring in Chinese master chemists from Hong Kong and set up an enormous heroin plant to manufacture fine-grain, high-grade, 80 to 99 percent pure, number 4 heroin—instead of number 3 crude that had long been the stuff of local and regional consumption—and began to supply it to the growing concentration of U.S. troops in Vietnam, the CIA still looked the other way. That Pao was becoming a world-class player in the heroin market became evident on April 25, 1971, when French custom officials opened a suitcase belonging to the newly arrived Laotian ambassador in Paris, Prince Sopsaisana, and found it contained sixty kilos of high-grade Laotian heroin, worth $13.5 million on the streets. It was “one of the biggest heroin seizures in French history.” Later reports receivedby the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics showed that the Laotian ambassador’s venture “had been financed by Hmong General Vang Pao, and the heroin itself had been refined in a laboratory at Long Tieng, the CIA’s headquarters for clandestine operations in northern Laos.”
    The Long Tieng laboratory was reputed to be the world’s largest heroin-processing plant. When massive American bombing and the ensuing refugee-relocation program reduced the amount of Hmong opium available for the laboratory, Pao’s officers turned to northeastern Laos