Intercepted Podcast: Veni, Vidi, Tweeti
AM:And in 1970 and ’71, there were rumors that started coming back from Vietnam, particularly in 1971, that heroin was spreading rapidly in the ranks of the U.S. forces fighting in South Vietnam. And in later research done by the White House, determined that in 1971, 34 percent, one-third of all the American combat troops fighting in South Vietnam, were heavy heroin users. There were more addicts in the ranks of the U.S. Army in South Vietnam than there were in the United States.
Vietnam Veteran: That was the whole thing about. To keep myself going through the day, to combat, I would get high. I would be under the influence of some type of drugs. And I would — I would feel fear. But after coming down from the drugs, I would stop feeling fear, and that’s when I would go back to get high again.
AM: And so what I did was I set out to investigate. Where was the opium coming from? Where was the heroin coming from? Who was trafficking it? How is it getting to the troops in their barracks and bunkers across the length and breadth of South Vietnam? Nobody was asking this question. Everyone was reporting on the high level of abuse, but nobody was figuring out where and who.
So, I started interviewing. I went to Paris. I interviewed the head of the French equivalent of the CIA in Indochina. And he explained to me how during the French Indochina war from 1946 to 1954, they were short of money for covert operations. So, the hill tribes in Laos produced the opium, the aircraft picked it up, they turned it over to the netherworld — the gangsters that controlled Saigon and secured it for the French and that paid for their covert operations. And I said, “What about now?” And he said, “Well I don’t think the pattern’s changed. I think it’s still there. You should go and look.”
So I did. I went to Saigon. I got some top sources in the Vietnamese military. I went into Laos. I hiked into the mountains. I was ambushed by CIA mercenaries and what I discovered was that the CIA’s contract airline, Air America, was flying into the villages of the Hmong people in Northern Laos — whose main cash crop was opium — and they were picking up the opium and flying it out of the hills. And there were heroin labs. One of the heroin labs, the biggest heroin lab in the world, was run by the commander-in-chief of the Royal Laotian Army, a man whose military budget came entirely from the United States. And they were transforming in those labs the opium into heroin. It was being smuggled into South Vietnam by three cliques controlled by the president, the vice president, and the premier of South Vietnam, and their military allies and distributed to U.S. forces in South Vietnam.
And the CIA wasn’t directly involved, but they turned a blind eye to the role of their allies’ involvement in the traffic. What I discovered was the complexities, the complicity, of the CIA in this traffic. And that was a pattern that was repeated in Central America, when the Contras became involved the traffic. The CIA looked the other way as their aircraft and their allies were smuggling cocaine from Colombia through Central America to the United States. Same thing in the one 1980s, during the secret war in Afghanistan, the mujahideen turned to opium. Afghanistan went from supplying zero percent of U.S. heroin supply — soared to 65 percent of the illicit heroin supply for the United States came out of Afghanistan. The CIA sent arms across the border through caravans to the mujahideen fighters and those same caravans came out carrying opium. So a clear pattern.
The other thing was when I began to do that investigation and write up the book, I faced enormous pressures. My phone was tapped by the FBI. The IRS — I had an audit as a poverty-stricken graduate student. The Department of Education investigated my graduate fellowship. Friends of mine who had been serving in military intelligence were recruited to spy on me. In other words, what I found was the CIA penetrated every aspect of my life. They, the head of CIA covert operations, a very famous operative name Cord Meyer Jr., visited the offices of Harper and Row, my publisher, and tried to persuade the publisher to suppress the book — hold the contract, just don’t release the book — claiming that it was a threat to national security.
So what I discovered was not only CIA complicity — complex, compromise relationships with covert allies far away in remote places like Southeast Asia — but also the incredible depth of the penetration of the CIA within US society under the conditions of the Cold War. Every aspect of my life was manipulated by the CIA.