The CIA And The Drug Trade

• The CIA And The Drug Trade
  by James Corbett, BoilingFrogsPost.com, https://www.corbettreport.com/, 14 October, 2011
  The cultivation of what we know today as the opium poppy goes back to the beginnings of recorded history, when the Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia cultivated what they referred to as Hul Gil, or the “joy plant.” The practice was passed down through the Assyrians to the Babylonians and from there to the Egyptians, by which time the opium trade had begun to to fluorish and was fast becoming the lynchpin of international trade across the Mediterranean into Europe.
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  Indeed, as far back as one cares to go, control of the international opium trade has been a key factor in the rise and fall of empires. During the 18th century, the British monopolized the opium trade in India and shipped thousands of chests of opium per year to China as a way of financing their huge trade deficit with that nation. When the Chinese cracked down on opium trafficking in the mid-19th century, the British fought two wars to ensure their Chinese opium market.
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  By the 1830s, American traders were already getting in on the act, with Samuel Russell’s “Russell & Company” becoming the largest American trading house in China. Russell’s cousin, William Huntington Russell, founded Skull & Bones, a secret society at Yale that has formed the core of the American intelligence establishment, a set of documentable facts that the establishment media seems eager to avoid.
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  The association between Skull and Bones and the American intelligence establishment from the OSS to the CIA is well-established by now, with a litany of agents, directors, and of course Director of Central Intelligence, George “Poppy” Bush himself, having been Bonesmen before being recruited for the agency. But the connection between the CIA and the international drug trade is not simply a historical one about 19th century opium traders.
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  Just as the British empire was in part financed by their control of the opium trade through the British East India Company, so too has the CIA been found time after time to be at the heart of the modern international drug trade. From its very inception, the CIA has been embroiled in the murky underworld of drug trafficking.
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  In the late 1940s, the CIA funneled arms and funds to the Corsican Mafia in return for their assistance in breaking up widespread labour strikes in France that were threatening to establish communist control over the Old Port of Marseille. The Corsican crime syndicate, in turn, used the CIA support to set up the trafficking network known as “The French Connection” which saw heroin smuggled from Turkey to France, and shipped to the US, feeding an American heroin epidemic.
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  In Burma in 1950, the CIA regrouped the remnants of the defeated Nationalist Chinese Army, or KMT, to start an invasion of Southern China and draw Chinese troops away from the Korean front. Easily beaten back by Mao’s forces, the KMT instead turned their attention to occupying Burma, imposing an opium tax on all farmers in the opium-rich Shan highlands. Members of the Burmese military claimed that the KMT opium was flown out to Thailand and Taiwan on the same unmarked C-47s that the CIA had used to supply the group in the first place.
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  In the 1960s and early 1970s, the CIA recruited the Laotian Hmong tribe to fight communist forces in the region. The CIA encouraged the Hmong to grow opium instead of rice to make them dependent on CIA air drops of food. The agency could then force their compliance by threatening to withdraw the food aid. To make the deal even sweeter, they even located a heroin refinery at CIA headquarters in northern Loas and used Air America, a passenger and cargo airline that was covertly owned and operated by the CIA, to export the Laotian opium and heroin. Much of it ended up in Vietnam, causing an epidemic of heroin addiction in US soldiers.
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