The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 8 | Issue 14 | Number 5 | Article ID 3340 | Apr 05, 2010

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Can the US Triumph in the Drug-Addicted War inAfghanistan? Opium, the CIA and the Karzai Administration　米国はアフガニスタンにおける麻薬漬け戦争で勝利できるか—阿片、CIA、カルザイ政府

Peter Dale Scott

Can the US Triumph in the Drug-Addicted War in Afghanistan?Opium, the CIA and the KarzaiAdministration

Peter Dale Scott

Alfred McCoy’s important new article(https://apjjf.org/-Alfred_W_-McCoy/3339) forTomDispatch (March 30, 2010) deserves tomobilize Congress for a serious revaluation ofAmerica’s ill-considered military venture inAfghanistan. The answer to the question heposes in his title – “Can Anyone Pacify theWorld's Number One Narco-State? – is amplyshown by his impressive essay to be aresounding “No!” . . . not until there isfundamental change in the goals and strategiesboth of Washington and of Kabul.

He amply documents that

• the Afghan state of HamidKarzai is a corrupt narco-state,to which Afghans are forced to paybribes each year $2.5 billion, aquarter of the nation’s economy;

• the Afghan economy is anarco -economy: i n 2 0 0 7Afghanistan produced 8,200 tonsof opium, a remarkable 53% of thecountry's GDP and 93% of globalheroin supply.

Map of Afghanistan showing major poppyfields and intensity of conflict 2007-08

• military options for dealingwith the problem are at bestinef fect ive and at worstcounterproductive: McCoyargues that the best hope lies inreconstruct ing the Afghancountryside until food cropsbecome a viable alternative toopium, a process that could taketen or fifteen years, or longer. (Ishall argue later for an interimsolution: licensing Afghanistanwith the International NarcoticsBoard to sell its opium legally.)

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Perhaps McCoy’s most telling argument is thatin Colombia cocaine at its peak representedonly about 3 percent of the national economy,yet both the FARC guerillas and the right-wingdeath squads, both amply funded by drugs, stillcontinue to flourish in that country. To simplyeradicate drugs, without first preparing for asubstitute Afghan agriculture, would imposeintolerable strains on an already ravaged ruralsociety whose only significant income flow atthis time derives from opium. One has only tolook at the collapse of the Taliban in 2001, aftera draconian Taliban-led reduction in Afghandrug production (from 4600 tons to 185 tons)left the country a hollow shell.

On its face, McCoy’s arguments would appearto be incontrovertible, and should, in a rationalsociety, lead to a serious debate followed by amajor change in America’s current militarypolicy. McCoy has presented his case withconsiderable tact and diplomacy, to facilitatesuch a result.

The CIA’s Historic Responsibility forGlobal Drug Trafficking

Unfortunately, there are important reasons whysuch a positive outcome is unlikely any timesoon. There are many reasons for this, butamong them are some unpleasant realitieswhich McCoy has either avoided or downplayedin his otherwise brilliant essay, and which haveto be confronted if we will ever begin toimplement sensible strategies in Afghanistan.

The first reality is that the extent of CIAinvolvement in and responsibility for the globaldrug traffic is a topic off limits for seriousquestioning in policy circles, electoralcampaigns, and the mainstream media. Thosewho have challenged this taboo, like thejournalist Gary Webb, have often seen theircareers destroyed in consequence.

Since Alfred McCoy has done more thananyone else to heighten public awareness ofCIA responsibility for drug trafficking in

American war zones, I feel awkward aboutsuggesting that he downplays it in his recentessay. True, he acknowledges that “Opium firstemerged as a key force in Afghan politicsduring the CIA covert war against the Soviets,”and he adds that “the CIA's covert war servedas the catalyst that transformed the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands into the world's largestheroin producing region.”

But in a very strange sentence, McCoysuggests that the CIA was passively drawn intodrug alliances in the course of combatingSoviet forces in Afghanistan in the years1979-88, whereas in fact the CIA clearly helpedcreate them precisely to fight the Soviets:

In one of history's ironic accidents,the southern reach of communistChina and the Soviet Union hadcoincided with Asia's opium zonealong this same mountain rim,drawing the CIA into ambiguousal l iances with the region'shighland warlords.

There was no such “accident” in Afghanistan,where the f irst local drug lords on aninternational scale – Gulbuddin Hekmatyar andAbu Rasul Sayyaf – were in fact launchedinternationally as a result of massive and ill-advised assistance from the CIA, in conjunctionwith the governments of Pakistan and SaudiArabia. While other local resistance forces wereaccorded second-class status, these two clientsof Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, precisely becausethey lacked local support, pioneered the use ofopium and heroin to build up their fightingpower and financial resources.1 Both,moreover, became agents of salafist extremism,attacking the indigenous Sufi-influenced Islamof Afghanistan. And ultimately both becamesponsors of al Qaeda.2

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Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (top) and Abdul

Rasul Sayyaf

CIA involvement in the drug trade hardly beganwith its involvement in the Soviet-Afghan war.To a certain degree, the CIA’s responsibility forthe present dominant role of Afghanistan in theglobal heroin traffic merely replicated what hadhappened earlier in Burma, Thailand, and Laosbetween the late 1940s and the 1970s. Thesecountries also only became factors in theinternational drug traffic as a result of CIAassistance (after the French, in the case ofLaos) to what would otherwise have been onlylocal traffickers.

One cannot talk of “ironic accidents” hereeither. McCoy himself has shown how, in all ofthese countries, the CIA not only tolerated butassisted the growth of drug-financed anti-Communist assets, to offset the danger ofCommunist Chinese penetration into SoutheastAsia. As in Afghanistan today CIA assistancehelped turn the Golden Triangle, from the1940s to the 1970s, into a leading source forthe world’s opium.

In this same period the CIA recruited assetsalong the smuggling routes of the Asian opiumtraffic as well, in countries such as Turkey,Lebanon, Italy, France, Cuba, Honduras, andMexico. These assets have inc ludedgovernment officials like Manuel Noriega ofPanama or Vladimiro Montesinos of Peru, oftensenior figures in CIA-assisted police andintelligence services. But they have alsoincluded insurrectionary movements, rangingfrom the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s to(according to Robert Baer and Seymour Hersh)the al Qaeda-linked Jundallah, operating todayin Iran and Baluchistan.3

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CIA map tracing opium traffic fromAfghanistan to Europe, 1998. The CIA cite,updated in 2008 states “Most SouthwestAsian heroin flows overland through Iranand Turkey to Europe via the Balkans.”But in fact drugs also flow through thestates of the former Soviet Union, and

through Pakistan and Dubai.

The Karzai Government, not the Taliban,Dominate the Afghan Dope Economy

Perhaps the best example of such CIA influencevia drug traffickers today is in Afghanistanitself, where those accused of drug traffickinginclude President Karzai’s brother, Ahmed WaliKarzai (an active CIA asset), and Abdul RashidDostum (a former CIA asset).4 The drugcorruption of the Afghan government must beattributed at least in part to the U.S. and CIAdecision in 2001 to launch an invasion with thesupport of the Northern Alliance, a movementthat Washington knew to be drug-corrupted.5

In this way the U.S. consciously recreated inAfghanistan the situation it had created earlierin Vietnam. There too (like Ahmed Wali Karzaia half century later) the president’s brother,Ngo dinh Nhu, used drugs to finance a privatenetwork that was used to rig an election forNgo dinh Diem. 6 Thomas H. Johnson,coordinator of anthropological research studiesat the Naval Postgraduate School, has pointedout the unlikelihood of a counterinsurgencyprogram succeeding when that program is insupport of a local government that is flagrantly

dysfunctional and corrupt.7

Thus I take issue with McCoy when he, echoingthe mainstream U.S. media, depicts the Afghandrug economy as one dominated by the Taliban.(In McCoy’s words, “If the insurgents capturethat illicit economy, as the Taliban have done,then the task becomes l i t t le short ofinsurmountable.”) The Taliban’s share of theAfghan opium economy is variously estimatedfrom $90 to $400 million. But the U.N. Officeon Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates thatthe total Afghan annual earnings from opiumand heroin are in the order of from $2.8 to $3.4billion.8

Clearly the Taliban have not “captured” thiseconomy, of which the largest share by far iscontrolled by supporters of the Karzaigovernment. In 2006 a report to the WorldBank argued “that at the top level, around25-30 key traffickers, the majority of them insouthern Afghanistan, control majortransactions and transfers, working closelywith sponsors in top government and politicalpositions.”9 In 2007 the London Daily Mailreported that "the four largest players in theheroin business are all senior members of theAfghan government."10

The American media have confronted neitherthis basic fact nor the way in which it hasdistorted America’s opium and war policies inAfghanistan. The Obama administrationappears to have shifted away from the ill-advised eradication programs of the Bush era,which are certain to lose the hearts and mindsof the peasantry. It has moved instead towardsa policy of selective interdiction of the traffic,explicitly limited to attacks on drug traffickerswho are supporting the insurgents.11

This policy may or may not be effective inweakening the Taliban. But to target whatconstitutes about a tenth of the total traffic willclearly never end Afghanistan’s current statusas the world’s number one narco-state. Nor will

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it end the current world post-1980s heroinepidemic, which has created five millionaddicts in Pakistan, over two million addictsinside Russia, eight hundred thousand addictsin America, over fifteen million addicts in theworld, and one mil l ion addicts insideAfghanistan itself. Nor will it end the currentworld post-1980s heroin epidemic, which hascreated five million addicts in Pakistan, overtwo million addicts inside Russia, eighthundred thousand addicts in America, overfifteen million addicts in the world, and onemillion addicts inside Afghanistan itself.

The Obama government’s policy of selectiveinterdiction also helps explain its reluctance toconsider the most reasonable and humanesolution to the world’s Afghan heroin epidemic.This is the “poppy for medicine” initiative of theInternational Council on Security andDevelopment (ICOS, formerly known as TheSenlis Council): to establish a trial licensingscheme, allowing farmers to sell their opiumfor the production of much-needed essentialmedicines such as morphine and codeine.12

The proposal has received support from theEuropean Parliament and in Canada; but it hascome under heavy attack in the United States,chiefly on the grounds that it might well lead toan increase in opium production. It wouldhowever provide a short-term answer to theheroin epidemic that is devastating Europe andRussia – something not achieved by McCoy’slong-term alternative of crop substitution overten or fifteen years, still less by the currentObama administration’s program of selectiveelimination of opium supplies.

An unspoken consequence of the “poppy formedicine” initiative would be to shrink theillicit drug proceeds that are helping to supportthe Karzai government. Whether for thisreason, or simply because anything that smacksof legalizing drugs is a tabooed subject inWashington, the “poppy for medicine” initiativeis unlikely to be endorsed by the Obama

administration.

Afghan Heroin and the CIA’s Global DrugConnection

There is another important paragraph whereMcCoy, I think misleadingly, focuses attentionon Afghanistan, rather than America itself, asthe locus of the problem:

At a drug conference in Kabul thismonth, the head of Russia'sFederal Narcot ics Serv icee s t i m a t e d t h e v a l u e o fAfghanistan's current opium cropat $65 billion. Only $500 million ofthat vast sum goes to Afghanistan'sfarmers, $300 million to theTaliban guerrillas, and the $64billion balance "to the drug mafia,"leaving ample funds to corrupt theKarzai government (emphasisadded) in a nation whose total GDPis only $10 billion.

What this paragraph omits is the pertinent factthat, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs andCrime, only 5 or 6 percent of that $65 billion,or from $2.8 to $3.4 billion, stays insideAfghanistan itself.13 An estimated 80 percent ofthe earnings from the drug trade are derivedfrom the countries of consumption – in thiscase, Russia, Europe, and America. Thus weshould not think for a moment that the onlygovernment corrupted by the Afghan drugtrade is the country of origin. Everywhere thetraffic has become substantial, even if only intransit, it has survived through protection,which in other words means corruption.

There is no evidence to suggest that drugmoney from the CIA’s trafficker assets fattenedthe financial accounts of the CIA itself, or of itsofficers. But the CIA profited indirectly fromthe drug traffic, and developed over the years aclose relationship with it. The CIA’s off-the-

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books war in Laos was one extreme case whereit fought a war, using as its chief assets theRoyal Laotian Army of General OuaneRattikone and the Hmong Army of GeneralVang Pao, which were, in large part, drug-financed. The CIA’s massive Afghanistanoperation in the 1980s was another example ofa war that was in part drug-financed.

Video shows the CIA’s Hmong Army led byGen. Vang Pao in action in Laos

Protection for Drug Trafficking in America

Thus it is not surprising that the U.S.Government, following the lead of the CIA, hasover the years become a protector of drugtraffickers against criminal prosecution in thiscountry. For example both the FBI and CIAintervened in 1981 to block the indictment (onstolen car charges) of the drug-traffickingMexican intelligence czar Miguel Nazar Haro,claiming that Nazar was “an essential repeatessential contact for CIA station in MexicoCity,” on matters of “terrorism, intelligence,and counterintelligence.”14 When AssociateAttorney General Lowell Jensen refused toproceed with Nazar’s indictment, the SanDiego U.S. Attorney, William Kennedy, publiclyexposed his intervention. For this he waspromptly fired.15

A recent spectacular example of CIA druginvolvement was the case of the CIA’sVenezuelan asset General Ramon GuillénDavila. As I write in my forthcoming book,Fueling America's War Machine,16

General Ramon Guillén Davila,chief of a CIA-created anti-drugunit in Venezuela, was indicted inMiami for smuggling a ton ofcocaine into the United States.According to the New York Times,"The CIA, over the objections oft h e D r u g E n f o r c e m e n t

Administration, approved theshipment of at least one ton ofp u r e c o c a i n e t o M i a m iInternational Airport as a way ofgathering information about theColombian drug cartels." Timemagazine reported that a singleshipment amounted to 998 pounds,following earlier ones “totalingnearly 2,000 pounds.”17 MikeWallace confirmed that “the CIA-nat ional guard undercoveroperation quickly accumulated thiscocaine, over a ton and a half thatwas smuggled from Colombia intoVenezuela.”18 According to theWall Street Journal, the totalamount of drugs smuggled by Gen.Guillén may have been more than22 tons.19

But the United States never asked for Guillén’sextradition from Venezuela to stand trial; andin 2007, when he was arrested in Venezuela forplotting to assassinate President Hugo Chavez,h i s i n d i c t m e n t w a s s t i l l s e a l e d i nMiami.2 0 Meanwhile, CIA officer MarkMcFarlin, whom DEA Chief Bonner had alsowished to indict, was never indicted at all; hemerely resigned.21

Nothing in short happened to the principals inthis case, which probably only surfaced in themedia because of the social unrest generated inthe same period by Gary Webb’s stories in theSan Jose Mercury about the CIA, Contras, andcocaine.

Banks and Drug Money Laundering

Other institutions with a direct stake in theinternational drug traffic include major banks,which make loans to countries like Colombiaand Mexico knowing full well that drug flowswill help underwrite those loans’ repayment. Anumber of our biggest banks, includingCitibank, Bank of New York, and Bank of

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Boston, have been identified as moneylaundering conduits, yet never have facedpenalties serious enough to change theirbehavior.22 In short, United States involvementin the international drug traffic links the CIA,major financial interests, and criminal interestsin this country and abroad.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office onDrugs and Crime, has said that “Drugs moneyworth billions of dollars kept the financialsystem afloat at the height of the global crisis.”According to the London Observer, Costa

said he has seen evidence that theproceeds of organised crime were"the only liquid investment capital"available to some banks on thebrink of collapse last year. He saidthat a majority of the $352bn(£216bn) of drugs profits wasabsorbed into the economic systemas a result…. Costa said evidencethat illegal money was beingabsorbed into the financial systemwas first drawn to his attention byinte l l igence agenc ies andprosecutors around 18 months ago."In many instances, the moneyfrom drugs was the only liquidinvestment capital. In the secondhalf of 2008, liquidity was thebanking system's main problemand hence liquid capital became animportant factor," he said.23

A striking example of drug clout in Washingtonwas the influence exercised in the 1980s by thedrug money-laundering Bank of Credit andCommerce International (BCCI). As I report inmy book, among the

highly-placed recipients of largessefrom BCCI, its owners, and itsaffiliates, were Ronald Reagan’s

Treasury Secretary James Baker,who declined to investigateBCCI;24 and Democratic SenatorJoseph Biden and RepublicanSenator Orrin Hatch, the rankingmembers of the Senate JudiciaryCommittee, which declined toinvestigate BCCI.25

In the end it was not Washington that firstmoved to terminate the banking activities inAmerica of BCCI and i ts i l legal U.S.subsidiaries; it was the determined activity oftwo outsiders -- Washington lawyer Jack Blumand Manhattan District Attorney RobertMorgenthau.26

Conclusion: The Source of the Global Drugproblem is not Kabul, but Washington

I understand why McCoy, in his desire tochange an ill-fated policy, is more decorousthan I am in acknowledging the extent to whichpowerful American institutions—government,intelligence and finance—and not just theKarzai government, have been corrupted by thepervasive international drug traffic. But Ibelieve that his tactfulness will prove counter-productive. The biggest source of the globaldrug problem is not in Kabul , but inWashington. To change this scandal willrequire the airing of facts which McCoy, in thisessay, is reluctant to address.

In his magisterial work, The Politics of Heroin,McCoy tells the story of Carter’s White Housedrug advisor David Musto. In 1980 Musto toldthe White House Strategy Council on DrugAbuse that “we were going into Afghanistan tosupport the opium growers in their rebellionagainst the Soviets. Shouldn’t we try to avoidwhat we had done in Laos?”27 Denied access bythe CIA to data to which he was legally entitled,Musto took his concerns public in May 1980,noting in a New York Times op-ed that GoldenCrescent heroin was already (and for the firsttime) causing a medical crisis in New York. And

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he warned, presciently, that “this crisis isbound to worsen.”28

Musto hoped that he could achieve a change ofpolicy by going public with a sensible warningabout a disastrous drug-assisted adventure inAfghanistan. But his wise words werepowerless against the relentless determinationof what I have called the U.S. war machine inour government and political economy. I fearthat McCoy’s sensible message, by beingdecorous precisely where it is now necessary tobe outspoken, will suffer the same fate.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomatand English Professor at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oila n d W a r(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0742525228/?tag=t h e a s i p a c j o 0 b - 2 0 ) ,(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520258711/?tag=theas ipac jo0b-20)The Road to 9 /11(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520258711/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20), The War Conspiracy: JFK,9 /11 , and the Deep Po l i t i c s o f War(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0980121361/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20). His American War Machine:Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connectiona n d t h e R o a d t o A f g h a n i s t a n(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0742555941/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) is in press from Rowman &Littlefield.

His website, which contains a wealth of hisw r i t i n g s , i s h e r e(http://www.peterdalescott.net).

He wrote this article for The Asia-PacificJournal.

Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, "Canthe US Triumph in the Drug-Addicted War inAfghanistan? Opium, the CIA and the KarzaiAdministration" The Asia-Pacific Journal,14-5-10, April 5, 2010.

The government takes care of the policies thatgovern drug trafficking while rehab centersfocus on providing people who exhibit druga b u s e s i g n s a n d s y m p t o m s(http://www.drugabuse.net/drug-abuse/signs-and-symptoms-of-drug-abuse/) with much-neededhelp.

See the following articles on relatedsubjects:

Alfred W. McCoy, "Can Anyone Pacify theWorld's Number One Narco-State? The OpiumW a r s i n A f g h a n i s t a n . "(https://apjjf.org/-Alfred_W_-McCoy/3339)

Peter Dale Scott, America’s Afghanistan: TheNational Security and a Heroin-Ravaged State(https://apjjf.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3145)

Peter Dale Scott, Martial Law, the FinancialBailout, and the Afghan and Iraq Wars(https://apjjf.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3010)

Jeremy Kuzmarov, American Police Trainingand Political Violence: From the PhilippinesConquest to the Killing Fields of Afghanistana n d I r a q(https://apjjf.org/-Jeremy-Kuzmarov/3319)

MK Bhadrakumar, Afghanistan, Iran and US-R u s s i a n C o n f l i c t(https://apjjf.org/-M_K-Bhadrakumar/2996)

Peter Van Agtmael, All You Need is Heroin:U . S . T r o o p s i n T h e i r O w n H a n d(http://bagnewsnotes.typepad.com/bagnews/2007/11/all-you-need-is.html)

Notes

1 Eventually the United States and its alliesgave Hekmatyar, who for a time becamearguably the world’s leading drug trafficker,more than $1 billion in armaments. This was

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more than any other CIA client has everreceived, before or since.

2 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 74-75: “Khalid ShaikhMohammed, said by the 911 Commission tohave been the true author of the 9/11 plot, firstconceived of it when he was with Abdul Sayyaf,a leader with whom bin Laden was still at odds[9/11 Commission Report, 145-50]. Meanwhileseveral of the men convicted of blowing up theWorld Trade Center in 1993, and thesubsequent New York “day of terror” plot in1995, had trained, fought with, or raised moneyfor, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. [Tim Weiner,“Blowback from the Afghan Battlefield,” NewYork Times, March 13, 1994].

3 Seymour Hersh, New Yorker, July 7, 2008

4 New York Times, October 27, 2009.

5 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History ofthe CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from theSoviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (NewYork: Penguin Press, 2004), 536. At the start ofthe U.S. offensive in 2001, according to AhmedRashid, “The Pentagon had a list of twenty-fiveor more drug labs and warehouses inAfghanistan but refused to bomb them becausesome belonged to the CIA's new NA [NorthernAlliance] allies” (Ahmed Rashid, Descent intoChaos: The United States and the Failure ofNation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, andCentral Asia [New York: Viking, 2008], 320).

6 Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (NewYork: Penguin, 1997), 239. Cf. New York Times,October 28, 2009.

7 Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason,“Refighting the Last War: Afghanistan and theVietnam Template,” Military Review ,November-December 2009, 1.

8 The alert reader will notice that even $3.4billion is less than 53 percent of the $10 billionattributed in the previous paragraph to thetotal Afghan GDP. These estimates from diverse

sources are not precise, and cannot beexpected to jibe perfectly.

9 “Afghanistan: Drug Industry and Counter-N a r c o t i c s P o l i c y , ”(http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/SOUTHASIAEXT/0,,contentMDK:21133060~pagePK:146736~piPK:146830~theSitePK:223547,00.html) Report to the WorldBank, November 28, 2006, emphasis added.

1 0 London Daily Mail . July 21, 2007. InDecember 2009 Harper’s published a detailedessay on Colonel Abdul Razik, “the master ofSpin Boldak,” a drug trafficker and Karzai allywhose rise was “abetted by a ring of crookedofficials in Kabul and Kandahar as well as byoverstretched NATO commanders who foundhis control over a key border town useful intheir war against the Taliban” (Matthieu Aikins,“ T h e M a s t e r o f S p i n B o l d a k , ”(http://harpers.org/archive/2009/12/0082754)Harper’s Magazine, December 2009).

11 James Risen, “U.S. to Hunt Down AfghanLords Tied to Taliban,” New York Times,August 10, 2009: ”United States militarycommanders have told Congress that…onlythose [drug traffickers] providing support tothe insurgency would be made targets.”

12 Corey Flintoff, “Combating Afghanistan'sOpium Problem Through Legalization,”(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5065771) NPR, December 22, 2005.

1 3 C B S N e w s A p r i l 1 ,2010, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/01/world/main6353224.shtml.

14 Cables from Mexico City FBI Legal AttachéGordon McGinley to Justice Department, inScott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 36.

15 Scott, Deep Politics, 105; quoting from SanDiego Union, 3/26/82.

16 Fueling America's War Machine: Deep

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Po l i t i c s and the C IA ’ s G loba l DrugConnection (in press, due Fall 2010 fromRowman & Littlefield).

17 Time, November 29, 1993: “The shipmentscontinued, however, until Guillen tried to sendin 3,373 lbs. of cocaine at once. The DEA,watching closely, stopped it and pounced.”(http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,979669,00.html) Cf. New York Times,November 23, 1996 (“one ton”).

18 CBS News Transcripts, 60 MINUTES,November 21, 1993.

19 Wall Stree Journal, November 22, 1996. Isuspect that the CIA approved the import ofcoca ine less "as a way o f gather inginformation" than as a way of affecting marketshare of the cocaine trade in the country oforigin, Colombia. In the 1990s CIA and JSOCwere involved in the elimination of Colombiandrug pingpin Pablo Escobar, a feat achievedwith the assistance of Colombia's Cali Carteland the AUC terrorist death squad of CarlosCastaño. Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War,86-88.

20 Chris Carlson, “Is The CIA Trying to KillVenezuela's Hugo Chávez?” Global Research,April 19, 2007.

21 Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Pack:The People, Politics and Espionage Intriguesthat Shaped the DEA (Springfield, OR:TrineDay, 2009), 400; Time, November 23,1993. McFarlin had worked with anti-guerrillaforces in El Salvador in the 1980's. The CIAstation chief in Venezuela, Jim Campbell, alsoretired.

22 The Bank of Boston laundered as much as $2million from the trafficker Gennaro Angiulo,and eventually paid a fine of $500,000 (New

York Times, February 22, 1985; EduardoVarela-Cid, Hidden Fortunes: Drug Money,Cartels and the Elite Banks [Sunny Isles Beach,FL: El Cid Editor, 1999]). Cf. Asad Ismi, “TheCanadian Connection: Drugs, MoneyLaundering and Canadian Banks,” Asadismi.ws(http://www.asadismi.ws/cancon.html): “Ninety-one percent of the $197 billion spent oncocaine in the U.S. stays there, and Americanbanks launder $100 billion of drug money everyyear. Those identified as money launderingconduits include the Bank of Boston, RepublicNational Bank of New York, Landmark FirstNational Bank, Great American Bank, People'sLiberty Bank and Trust Co. of Kentucky, andRiggs National Bank of Washington. Citibankhelped Raul Salinas (the brother of formerMexican president Carlos Salinas) movemillions of dollars out of Mexico into secretSwiss bank accounts under false names.”

23 Rajeev Syal, “Drug money saved banks ing loba l c r i s i s , c l a ims UN adv i so r , ”(http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved-un-cfief-claims)Observer, December 13, 2009.

24 Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, The OutlawBank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart ofBCCI (New York: Random House, 1993), 357.

25 Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits:The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s MostCorrupt Financial Empire (Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1992), 373-77.

26 Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 449.

27 Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin(Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/ ChicagoReview Press, 2003), 461; citing interview withDr. David Musto.

28 David Musto, New York Times, May 22, 1980;quoted in McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 462.

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