i found this piece of McCoy's ***

My take on this is McCoy uses too much drug himself, and he is in a
trench.
-------------------------------------

Interview with Alfred McCoy, professor of Southeast Asian History at the
University of Wisconsin, Madison; author of
The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade

Barsamian: Was the anti-communist ideology so powerful and so strong that
the CIA would risk the worldwide opprobrium of being linked with drug
trafficking? Why would they take that risk?

McCoy: It's easy. Look, it's effective. I interviewed a guy named Lt. Col
Lucien Conein who, since I published my book now despises me, and I asked
Col Conein why they worked with the Corsicans in Saigon, for example. He
said that there aren't very many groups that know the clandestine arts.
When you think about the essential skills it takes to have an extra-legal
operation - to have somebody killed, to mobilize a crowd, to do what it
does when societies are in flux, when power is unclear and to be grabbed
and shaped and molded into a new state - you want to overthrow a
government and put a new one in - how do you do it? Who does this?
Accountants? - They go to the office every day. Students? They go to
classes - they're good for maybe one riot or something, but they've got to
get on to medical school or law or whatever they're doing. Where do you get
people who have this kind of skill? You have your own operatives and
they're limited.

Particularly if you're a foreigner, your capacity to move something in the
streets is very limited. You know, sometimes you can turn to a state
intelligence agency in a country you're working with, but most effectively
you can turn to the underworld. That's why the CIA always worked very
effectively with the warlords of the Golden Triangle. It's worked very
effectively with Corsican syndicates in Europe, worked very effectively
and continuously with American Mafia - because they have the same
clandestine arts. They operate with the same techniques.

And they have the same kind of amorality. They are natural allies. There
was a conversion of cultures between the milieu of the underworld and the
world of the clandestine operative.

You've got, then, a CIA secret war which in an essential way, in a
fundamental way is linked with the opium traffic. More than that, it
appears that a number of CIA operatives as individuals got involved. They
started smuggling, started wheeling, started dealing and started doing a
couple of bags here and there. We know, for example, there's a famous case
of a CIA global money-moving bank called the Nugan-Hand bank which was
established in Australia. The founder of that was a Michael John Hand. He
was a green beret who was a contract CIA operative in Laos. When he first
came to Australia in 1969-1970 Australian federal police got intelligence
on him - I've seen the files - saying that what he's basically doing is
he's bringing down light aircraft that are flying from Thailand to
northern Australia into those abandoned air strips that were left over
from World War II and he's dealing heroin. That's what Michael John Hand,
according to Australian federal police intelligence, was doing. So, as
individuals CIA operatives were getting involved and more or less what
you've got then as a result of Laos is that the policy of integrating
intelligence and cover operations with narcotics gets established.

You get, then, an entire generation of covert action warriors used to
dealing with narcotics as a matter of policy. In short, you get a policy
and personnel which integrates covert action with narcotics. This
manifests itself in a number of ways. First of all the Nugan-Hand bank.
Not only was it moving money globally for the CIA, but it was the major
money laundering conduit that was trimming funds up to Southeast Asia from
Australia and linking the Golden Triangle heroin trade of Southeast Asia
with the urban markets of Australia. In Afghanistan as well, this same
distributing pattern that we saw in Laos emerges.

This is one case that hasn't been well studied. I've spoken to one
correspondent for the Far East Economic Review which is a Dow-Jones
Publication, Mr. Lawrence Lifschultz(?), a friend of mine, and what he
found was something of a similar pattern that I found in Laos. He was a
correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the Mujahadeen campaign
and he wrote articles in the Nation and elsewhere describing this similar
pattern. You've got Pakistani government officials very heavily involved
in narcotics, you've got the Mujahadeen manufacturing heroin, they're
exporting it to Europe and the United States. They're using it to support
their guerrilla campaign. the Pakistanis and the CIA are complicitous on
the level of (1) not doing anything or (2) actually getting involved in
the case of some of the Pakistani elite. So, it's a case where the
Mujahadee operation becomes ultimately integrated with the narcotics trade
and the CIA is fully informed of the integration and doesn't do anything
about it.

Moving on to our fourth instance, one close to home, is the whole
Iran-contra operation.

First of all, I think the Laos parallel is very strong in the Iran-contra
operation. Just in the formal outlines of the policy - you know, you've
got the contras on the border of Nicaragua, they're a mercenary army,
they're supported through a humanitarian operation, they're given U.S.
logistic support, they're given U.S. equipment and they're given U.S. air
power backup to deliver the equipment and the logistic support. All the
personnel that are involved in that operation are Laos veterans. Ted
Shackley, Thomas Clines, Oliver North, Richard Secord - they all served in
Laos during thirteen-year war. They are all part of that policy of
integrating narcotics and being complicitous in the narcotics trade in the
furtherance of covert action.

In this case, what I think we can see is it's not just the same. It's not
just simply that the CIA was complicitous in allowing the contras to deal
in cocaine, to serve as a link between the Andes and across the Caribbean
into the United States. I think we can see the situation has gotten worse.
In Laos, as I said, the CIA was hands-off. Once it got beyond their secret
base, they wouldn't touch it. They gave Vang Pao the aircraft and once it
got any further they didn't really know about it and didn't want to know
about it. They remained ignorant about it. And ultimately what you're
looking at was a traffic that was in a remote region which, in a way I
don't think the CIA saw was going to happen, wound up serving Americans.
An estimate of 50% of U.S. combat forces in Vietnam taking drugs, that was
common at that time. But it's still remote and it's still not going
directly into the United States.

The level of cynicism in Central America is even worse. We're not talking
about original traffic or moving the raw product - we're talking about
taking finished cocaine, providing aircraft, moreover providing protection
for these traffickers as they fly across the Caribbean with these massive
loads of cocaine. Now, I don't know. Can one estimate what percentage of
the cocaine was politically protected by these intelligence operations.
Until there's a formal investigation, which there's not likely to be, it's
difficult to say.

I think that one can say that as you look at the drugs flowing into the
United States during the 1960s when this Lao operation was going, there
was probably a much smaller percentage of narcotics entering the United
States from politically protected brokers than there is today. In other
words, this CIA policy of integrating covert action operations with
narcotics, both at a level of individuals being involved and also just
turning a blind eye to the fact that our allies are drug brokers, this
complicity in the narcotics trade has gotten worse. It's closer to home.
It's not moving the raw material out in the jungles, it's actually
bringing the finished narcotics, cocaine, into the United States. So it's
gotten that much closer to home and that much more cynical.


Barsamian: In your view, there will be a marked increase and expansion of
drug addiction and drug use in the United States, Europe and Australia -
Incidentally, earlier you mentioned that the drug flow went into Europe
and Australia, but not into Japan, is that correct?

McCoy: Yes.

Barsamian: Why not?

McCoy: The relationship between the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (the
conservatives) and the big organized crime syndicates, which are enormous
in Japan, is a very tight one and has been historically since the end of
World War II. There's been a very close integration with the organized
crime operations and the ruling conservative party. The conservatives have
been in power now in Japan since 1948. It's one of the longest reigns of
any party anywhere in the world. There's a kind of entente, an
understanding between the syndicates and the government - it's not rigid -
but the basic understanding is no drugs. That's the basic thing. Don't move
drugs. And the Japanese police are ruthlessly efficient. If any of the
syndicates, any of the big families - some of them have 10,000 members in
them - broke this rule, the police have sufficient mechanisms of control
to punish them for it. So in this complex politics of organized crime in
Japan, they can do prostitution, they can do all kinds of fraud, they can
do many things - but not drugs. So Japan's never opened up.

DeGaulle had a very similar relationship with the Corsican syndicates
during his reign in the 1960s and early 1970s. The understanding was that
the Corsican syndicates in Marseilles would manufacture in Marseilles
under protection. But they would not sell in France. They would only
export to the United States. That began to break down. DeGaulle died,
Pompidoux replaced him and the Gaullists lost power, there was pressure on
the syndicates, some new groups came in and started breaking the rule, and
France wound up with a drug problem. But for practically a decade that
rule held.

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