War on Drugs, part 1:
1773 – 1961 - From Britain's India to Castro's Cuba
War on Drugs 1 -1773 1961 text file
First published by Znet on 8th September 2017.
Growing up in London in the 1980s and 1990s I had easy access to narcotics. I started on alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and psilocybin mushrooms and in my twenties added amphetamine, LSD, cocaine, opium and MDMA to that list. In making the choice to take those drugs, I lost over a decade of my life, family and friends in a chemical haze as I desperately chased the next high. Other than the mushrooms, I didn’t know anyone who grew or manufactured them, so I got hold of them through dealers. Luckily I made it through that period of my life alive. And as I struggled to build a life after drugs, I became increasingly aware of a contradiction. At festivals I had smoked marijuana openly in front of uniformed police, I had worked for companies where MDMA and cocaine was widely recognised as greasing the wheels of sales and I watched the national media celebrate convicted drug traffickers as counter-culture heroes, while presenters made poorly-coded references to their own drugs binges. Between the official position, and the unofficial narrative there was a clear contradiction. And as I began to look into it, the true nature of the situation terrified me. Since it’s inception seventy years ago, groups within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have consistently been complicit in the global trade of illegal narcotics.
In their defence, the men at the CIA had taken an old idea and made it their own. In 1773 the British East India Company (BEIC) took control of the opium trade between Bengal and China, and by 1797 was controlling the output of over 1 million farmers across five hundred miles of the Ganges valley, flooding China with opium. In fifty three years, what was a 75 ton per year export industry grew into a 3,200 ton per year weapon of mass destruction and profit. China didn’t just roll over, they attempted to ban opium in 1839 and 1856. But, on both occasions Britain responded by declaring and winning wars to defend the trade. Britain had proved that empire could be sustained on, amongst other things, the international trafficking of and mass-addiction to opium. So as the 19th Century drew to a close, the French, British and Dutch imperial powers began issuing franchises for opium dens through state controlled opium marketing monopolies in their Asian colonies. The costs and benefits were there for all to see. When the Chinese government issued a report in 1906 warning that over a quarter of the adult male population were smoking opium, the imperial powers were too busy counting their profits to care. The percentage of total tax revenues being generated by just the tax on opium sales was 16% in French Indochina, 16% in Netherlands Indies, 20% in Siam and 53% in British Malaya[i].
At the same time as the colonies were being flooded with opium, cravings closer to home were beginning to take hold. Between the 1840s and 1890s opium consumption in the U.S. quadrupled. Never ones to miss an opportunity, the Industrialists moved in. Bayer began mass-producing diacetylmorphine and marketing it as heroin, while across the States cocaine was being sold over the counter in cordials, cigarettes, hypodermic capsules, ointments and sprays. By 1900 the patent medicine industry in the U.S. was estimated to be worth around $250 million per year, which is probably somewhere in the region of $7 billion in today’s money. And of course, with rising levels of addiction, the human costs were becoming increasingly visible. To protect their incomes, the drug companies wrote clauses in to the advertising deals with the Newspapers to make sure everyone lost out if legislation turned against them. The ploy worked and within a few years the patent medicine industry had become the largest newspaper advertiser in the U.S.. But as the epidemic of mass drug addiction grew, the U.S. Government (USG) came under increasing pressure to act. And in 1920 they introduced prohibition[ii].
One of the key problems with prohibition was that by criminalising alcohol and drugs, the USG effectively moved a major part of the U.S. economy into the hands of criminals. In the first ten years of prohibition the running of alcohol and narcotics into the U.S. grew what were previously disparate gangs of local thugs into a nationwide criminal conspiracy[iii]. In 1930 the Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) was set-up to work with state and local law enforcement to go after the major drug smuggling rings, disrupt their businesses and stop their associated corruption. The newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst lobbied the USG to make Harry Jacob Anslinger the Commissioner of Narcotics. But by that time, under the stewardship of the likes of Lucky Luciano, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, Louis Buchalter and the rest of Murder Inc., Organised Crime (OC) in the U.S., in partnership with narcotics trafficking gangs in China and France had already started building an empire[iv]. By ’32 Lansky was having to launder the enormous revenues through Swiss bank accounts to hide it[v].. By ’35 Lucky had used heroin to help him secure a near-total monopoly over New York prostitution with an estimated annual income of $10million[vi]. By ’37 Lansky was laundering millions of dollars offshore through networks of gambling, racetracks and drugs in Cuba[vii].
One of the key problems facing the FBN, even at that time, was the size of the drugs trade. It was so large, it had infected the political and economic structure of the U.S. . In case after case, FBN agents investigating criminal conspiracies in the U.S., found themselves tied up in issues of national security. In China, the Nationalist Kuomintang army (KMT) of Chiang Kai-Shek, working with the Green Gang of Shanghai was controlling large sections of the opium trade. KMT officials, working with their trade missions and Chinese-American Tongs, were in partnership with the American Mafia to supply opium and heroin to the U.S. market, which Anslinger knew about from as early as 1932. It has been argued that he turned a blind eye to this in order to elevate his role in the U.S. intelligence hierarchy and to ensure that the reason for his Bureau’s existence, namely addicts on U.S. streets, continued. And again, this wasn’t a new thing. Allegations of government officials protecting drug-smugglers in the name of national security had been floating around from as early as 1927[viii].
Meanwhile the gangs were going from strength to strength. By 1934 the Green Gang was estimated to be shipping 18,000 tons of Szechuan and 10,000 tons of Yunnanese opium out of the country each year[ix]. A year later, in 1935 the U.S. military attaché to China reported that it had been estimated that within China alone, there was in the region of eight million heroin and morphine addicts, and 72 million opium addicts. Things were getting out of control. By 1939 Anslinger was already coming under fire for running the FBN like his own private army, amidst allegations of corruption, favours, patronage and abuses of power[x]. And then war broke out.
During World War II the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was established as a paramilitary Intelligence Agency. It was developed by Anslinger, William Donovan, Allen Dulles and David Bruce. Several key FBN agents were seconded across to the OSS, such as George Hunter White. And just as the FBN had taken a pragmatic approach towards allowing OC to further foreign policy objectives, so the OSS would repeat the same approach[xi]. In Sicily before the war, the fascists had mimicked the behaviour of the Sicilian Mafia preceding them, in terms of oppressing the peasants, trade unions and left-wing politicians, in order to secure the support of the major land-owners[xii]. So when the allied forces prepared to invade Sicily in 1943, the OSS working with the Office of Naval Intelligence made a deal with the American Mafia to help them do the same thing again. Both the Commander of British Occupation forces and the American Commander of the Allied Military Government reported how they appointed Mafia bosses to replace the fascists in the towns and villages across Sicily[xiii]. The relationship was becoming closer.
After Japan and Germany surrendered the allied governments found themselves facing power vacuums in large areas of the world. So while some people went back to their day jobs, others started manoeuvring for the post-war world. George (Hunter) White, back on home territory, proceeded to meet with senior Mafia figures like Santo Trafficante in the summer of ’45 in Chicago, Nevada, New Orleans, New York and Tampa. Shortly after his meeting with White, Trafficante in partnership with Lansky, went on to wage and win a war against his competition to secure total control of the Cuba-Florida drug network[xiv]. This was going on at the same time as The Rockefeller Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations, had begun working closely “with the U.S. government to ensure American hegemony … [and] to develop a plan for U.S. domination after World War II”[xv].
In 1946, the U.S. Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) recruited Allen Dulles, previously a lawyer on Wall Street, to develop a successor to the OSS. Dulles promptly formed an advisory group of six people, five of whom were ex- Wall Street bankers and lawyers. In May 1947, the USG put together a multi-billion dollar recovery plan called the Marshall Plan to create a U.S.-led ideological umbrella across postwar Europe[xvi]. In the September of that same year the CIA was born[xvii] in a national security act that effectively positioned the Agency above the law in pursuit of any and all objectives moving forward[xviii]. The systems were in place, and it wouldn’t be long before the ‘fun and games’ began.
In 1947 dockers in Marseilles went on strike, and were quickly followed by sympathetic strikes spreading across France. The newly formed CIA started building alliances with local proxies in Marseilles. The Socialist Party was co-opted for the political and propaganda work, while the Corsican drug-traffickers were engaged for the paramilitary work. The CIA sent out a Psychological Warfare team who supplied arms and funds to the Corsican gangs, who in turn assaulted and murdered striking workers, attacked picket lines and harassed Union leaders. The USG threatened to withhold 65,000 sacks of flour destined for the starving city, while helping the Socialist party with pamphlets, radio broadcasts and posters. The city buckled, the dockers went back to work and other unions around the country quickly followed suit. Just as French fascists in the thirties and the Nazi Gestapo in WWII had both successfully co-opted the Corsican drugs gangs against the communists, so when faced with an organised working class resistance, the CIA partnered with the Corsican drug gangs, first in ’47 and then again in 1950[xix].
Closer to home, Mexico in 1947 was finding itself in a similar situation. As the working class was increasingly organising politically, the country was also being used by OC, specifically Lansky and associates, as one of the primary transit points for getting opium and heroin into Canada and the U.S.. It was at this time that the CIA began working with the Mexican government to develop the Federal Security Directorate (DFS). One of the key advisers on the setting up of it was alleged to have ties to Mexican drug traffickers. It has since been argued that the primary role of the DFS, and it’s value to the CIA, was never to stop drug trafficking and drug-related violence, but rather to redirect it against the Communists and Pro-Communists[xx]. Further to which, it has also been argued that one of the CIA’s principal objectives was to weaken the Mexican government in the capital, by putting them in direct conflict with the drug trafficking Warlords in the North of the country[xxi].
In 1948 George Kennan, a State Department Planner, outlined what could be expected from U.S. foreign policy moving forward. “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population … Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality”[xxii]. In that same year, the CIA tried to decide the outcome of the Italian general election by sending arms and propaganda to certain counter-revolutionary sections of the armed forces. It has also been suggested that with the support of the American Mafia that they had positioned in power across Italy in 1943, they armed and funded ex-fascist and Mafiosi paramilitary groups to help with the plan[xxiii]. The Communist party did not win the 1948 general election in Italy. And apparently, the 33rd President of the United States (POTUS) was so happy about it, that he expanded the national security directive authorising the CIA to carry out covert actions in Italy to encompass the whole world[xxiv]. It was also in 1948 that what is thought to be one of the first covert CIA actions in Colombia, the assassination of the liberal presidential candidate Jorge Gaitan, took place[xxv].
Sentimentality was fast wearing thin in Washington. In 1948 Kennan and Dulles began campaigning to have a secret codicil written in to the Marshall Plan, that would allow the CIA to conduct political warfare as part of their European recovery plan.[xxvi] In 1949 Deputy Under Secretary of State, Dean Rusk argued that the U.S. should use whatever the situation required of it, “arms here, opium there, bribery and propaganda in the third place”[xxvii]. Consequently, as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) came into existence, the CIA responded by locating and rearming groups of the disbanded Nationalist Chinese KMT army in Burma (Myanmar). And as the 1940s drew to a close, the CIA was supporting the American Mafia’s infiltration of Italian politics; the Corsican Syndicate’s control of Marseilles as the heroin gateway to Europe; and the KMT along the Chinese border[xxviii]. Then, in 1950, the secret codicil long campaigned for was written in to the Marshall plan[xxix].
As the new decade began, Mexico was fast becoming a pivotal location in the Agency’s international plans. Between 1950 and 1951 E. Howard Hunt was the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) Mexico station chief. Hunt had worked during the war with Paul Helliwell in the OSS detachment based in Kunming that was implicated in the KMT opium relationship. The OPC had been set-up by the National Security Council (NSC) in 1948 specifically to carry out “subversion against hostile states”, and had by 1951 been subsumed into the CIA[xxx]. That same year, several key Marseilles based Corsican drug traffickers were using Mexico City as a transit point for their heroin before shipping it on to Montreal and New York. One of their key contacts in the city was Jorge Chauvet, who was widely thought to have had Captain Chavarri of the DFS on his payroll. In that same year the Mexico CIA station filed a secret report stating that it preferred the DFS above the other Mexican Intelligence services, in the full knowledge that it some of its staff were implicated in the trafficking of drugs[xxxi]. At that time, Mexico was also a key transit point for KMT opium travelling from Asia to the Tongs in America. This was all going on while, under the auspices of Operation PAPER, the CIA was supplying arms to the KMT in Burma[xxxii], with air support from Civil Air Transport (CAT), the airline Paul Helliwell had purchased on behalf of the CIA[xxxiii].
Although this is beginning to sound very complicated, it is worth remembering that between 1950-53, all seven of the known deputy directors of the CIA, were ex-Wall Street lawyers or bankers. Which is why, not surprisingly, that when tasked with formulating the Agency’s processes and systems for future operations they immediately started creating dummy corporations, front companies and funding cut-outs. Many of which, like Western Enterprises Inc., Sea Supply Inc., and CAT were operating in Asia, but incorporated in tax havens closer to home[xxxiv]. From almost the very beginning, Wall Street bankers and lawyers working with organised crime, used financial sleight of hand to use the proceeds of narcotics trafficking to fund paramilitary operations which extended the power of the USG across the world. However, as the men from Langley were about to find out, that was a lot more complicated than it sounds.
CAT, was to all intents and purposes, the CIA’s air force for covert operations across Southeast Asia for the next quarter of a century, including taking part in several KMT invasions of China. However, almost as soon as CAT started flying out of Saigon in 1951, the New York Times had pieced the story together and had run it on the front page. And to make matters worse, the makeshift KMT army were pushed back by the local militias and no Chinese regulars were drawn away from the Korean front. So, when it was reported that the operation included a fleet of aircraft and over 15,000 troops, the Director of the CIA (DCIA) publicly denied having anything to do with it. However, away from the glare of the media, the Agency’s actual response was to merge the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) with the Office of Special Operations which, according to a Congressional review, resulted in “the maximum development of covert action over clandestine collection”[xxxv]. In non-government speak, when the CIA’s first major hot-contact in to Southeast Asia was an abject failure, it restructured so that it could do more of the same.
Things were getting even more complicated. The CIA had relocated the KMT to the North-east of Burma, which was one of the most fertile opium growing regions in the world. At the same time the CIA were supplying General Phao in Bangkok through Sea Supply Inc. the boats, aircraft, vehicles and arms he needed to turn his underfunded police force into a fully function military, which by 1951 was in the process of seizing control of the Thai opium trade. So when the CIA supported KMT needed to fund their secret war with China, they quite logically started selling their most abundant crop to their neighbour, the CIA asset General Phao who with the support of the CIA was already trafficking opium through Bangkok. It has been estimated that by 1953 the CIA was supporting General Phao’s opium empire to the tune of $35 million and with 275 agents. With all this support, it only took two years for General Phao’s ‘police force’ to take control of the Thai section of the Southeast Asian opium trade[xxxvi].
Internationally, the Agency’s work was largely ticking along nicely. However, it was during that same period that their domestic operations began to take a very surreal turn. Since Dr Albert Hofmann at Sandoz had discovered and synthesised LSD and psilocybin between the ’30s and ’40s, researchers the world over where beside themselves with the possibilities[xxxvii]. The scientific staff at the Agency were no different. In July ’51 a CIA memo outlined a research program on mind control, called Project BLUEBIRD, “involving both domestic and overseas activities, and taking into consideration the programs and objectives of other departments, principally the military services.” In August ’51 BLUEBIRD evolved into Operation ARTICHOKE, which among other things, was researching altering personalities in “potential agents, defectors, refugees, POWs [and] others”[xxxviii]. By this stage, Anslinger and the FBN were already supplying the CIA with any drugs they could get their hands on to help with their experiments[xxxix]. Yet again, the main Government body tasked with policing narcotics, had allowed itself to be co-opted and subordinated to the CIA’s interpretation of ‘national security’.
As well as doing there own research, the Agency also wanted to keep an eye on everyone else’s work. They made deals with Sandoz, the manufacturer of LSD, and the FDA so that they would be told when anyone received a shipment. At the same time in Europe, Alfred M. Hubbard, an OSS officer in the war was running a one man crusade evangelising the benefits of the new drugs. By the time he reached Canada in ’52 he had a network of disciples. Among them was the British Psychiatrist Dr Humphrey Osmond who was working on mental illness in Saskatchewan. It wasn’t long before the CIA had involved themselves in Osmond’s work. It was around that time that Osmond turned Aldous Huxley on to the new drugs. In Brave New World, Huxley had warned of a totalitarian state managing it’s population with narcotics. Two decades after writing it, he was being given narcotics by the researchers working on drug based mind control for a government Agency tasked with achieving global dominance[xl].
The Agency’s work on hallucinogens didn’t reach top gear until a new DCIA was appointed in April ’53. It was Allen Dulles. One of his earliest actions was to support a new project called MKULTRA[xli]. Proposed by Richard Helms, the head of clandestine services[xlii], MKULTRA was tasked with researching the “covert use of biological and chemical materials”. In keeping with much of the CIA’s work in the ’50s, MKULTRA was made exempt from the Agency’s normal oversight and sign-off procedures. The Technical Services Staff (TSS) were able to start research projects without any of the usual contracts or written agreements, and the finance department would have to pay the costs without any more details other than the signature of either the Head of MKULTRA or of the TSS. It wasn’t long before the Agency was out-sourcing research contracts to drug companies to help develop behavioural products and poisons[xliii].
It has more recently become apparent that this new direction had been some years in development. Nine days after the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, an OSS officer called Gregory Bateson wrote a memo to William Donovan explaining how he believed that in the future, propaganda and subversion would be more important than missiles. MKULTRA was very much part of this thinking. In 1952 George White, the ex- FBN and OSS officer, had already been hired by the CIA to begin testing LSD on unwitting Americans in New York. White’s first MKULTRA briefing in June 1953 was attended by James Angleton and Dr James Hamilton. Gregory Bateson was also there to explain how LSD and narcotics could be used against the American people. One researcher who has written extensively on this subject described this meeting as an example of the CIA’s developing twin strategies for global domination at the time; to develop LSD as a weapon of psychological warfare, and to use the trafficking of narcotics as a fifth column to stop foreign nations and undesirable minorities in America from organising themselves “economically, politically or militarily”[xliv].
Unsurprisingly, by shrouding large sections of the Agency’s work under multiple layers of secrecy and little if any oversight, it wasn’t long before the work began spiralling out of control. Researchers were working on “smart shots, memory erasers, antivitamins, knock-out drops, aphrodisiacs, and [methods for] inducing cancer, a stroke or a heart attack without leaving a trace”. In 1953 a tennis pro died a few hours after being administered an injection of MDA in an Army contracted study supplied. In the same year the Head of MKULTRA dosed a works outing of CIA and Army technicians with LSD without telling them. Over the weeks that followed, one of his victims became depressed, paranoid, deluded and eventually had to be taken into custody. On the way to the hospital, with an Agent assigned to watch him, they stopped off at a Hotel. In the middle of the night he went head first out of the ten story window into the side-walk below. In California, a psychiatrist was allegedly asked by the CIA to find out how much LSD would be needed to dose the water supply of a city the size of L.A.. Apparently, when the Doctor reported that chlorine in the water supply neutralised the LSD, the Agency promptly started researching a new version of LSD that could go in to chlorinated water[xlv].
With more and more of the staff involved in the research themselves taking the hallucinogens, much of the original focus seemed to be getting blurred. In 1955, an internal document explained how a high priority had been placed on developing a drug that would “produce ‘pure euphoria’ with no subsequent let-down”. At the same time, reports were surfacing that soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal were stealing LSD for personal use. The term ‘trip’, was actually coined by the army scientists who had been dosing unwitting soldiers at mess parties[xlvi]. At the same time, the CIA scientists were officially “testing” on mental patients, prostitutes, foreigners, drug addicts, prisoners, and the terminally ill[xlvii]. Horrifically, one Doctor, conducting experiments on mostly black inmates, gave prisoners LSD for seventy-five days in a row.[xlviii]
All the while Anslinger’s FBN continued to subordinate the policing of narcotics to U.S. foreign policy. As early as 1953, the FBN agent liaising with the CIA was already reporting that the Corsican morphine and heroin reaching the U.S. was coming from Indochina. However, that didn’t stop Anslinger telling first the Foreign Relations subcommittee, then the Senate Internal Security committee that the PRC was the principle source of global opium trafficking, including close to 95 per cent of the heroin coming into San Francisco. This was at a time when he was fully aware that narcotics trafficking out of Southeast Asia was being managed by a complex network reaching across the Golden Triangle involving the CIA, the KMT, Corsican gangs, high-ranking Vietnamese politicians and military, drugs gangs, various key figures in Bangkok, Hong Kong and Saigon, and the American Mafia. We also now know that the CIA front Sea Supply Inc., was at that time ‘advising’ the Thai traffickers as well as supplying arms to the KMT on the Thai-Burma border. Anslinger’s response in 1955 was to direct his Agency to find a communist drug-trafficking conspiracy, where one clearly didn’t exist[xlix].
Similarly the FBN’s domestic role was also being subordinated to the CIA’s plans. Funded with the bottomless Agency research budget, FBN’s George White had rented an apartment in Greenwich Village and renovated it with two-way mirrors, surveillance equipment and hidden rooms. He lured people back to the apartment, dosed them with LSD and then watched what transpired. The project was a success, and in 1955 he moved to San Francisco where he set-up two more apartments which he would work from for the next ten years under the auspices of Operation MIDNIGHT CLIMAX. White hired drug-addicted prostitutes to pick up men in bars, bring them back to the apartment and give them LSD laced drinks. The Agency paid the FNB’s top man to sit on a toilet in a hidden room behind a two-way mirror drinking Martinis and watching unwitting members of the public having sex with prostitutes while on acid. Many years later he wrote a letter to the Head of MKULTRA describing his time with the Agency. “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”[l]
One of the first things the Agency had done when it was set up, was to build a network of legal and financial ‘sleight of hands’ that had allowed it to conceal it’s role in certain overseas operations. MKULTRA used a similar network to develop an entirely new field of academic research. It issued grants through the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, the U.S. Navy and the National Institute of Mental Health[li]. These grants found their way to hospitals, universities and addiction research centres[lii]. Many of the patients being tested on at these facilities did not know that they were guinea pigs in the CIA’s top secret drug experiments[liii]. This wave of academic research culminated in the 1959 International Conference on LSD Therapy, sponsored by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation[liv]. It was arguably one of the most important gatherings of scientific minds in the field of LSD research. The Chair, the Recording Secretary and a number of the speakers had all worked directly for, or contracted into either the CIA or the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, and in certain cases, had worked on MKULTRA specifically[lv].
As well as inveigling themselves into the global narcotics trade, the Agency had also been very busy in more traditional forms of imperialism, having overthrown the governments of Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954[lvi]. In fact, they were getting so good at it, in 1959 the Rand Corporation sponsored ‘The Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries’ conference, where CIA friendly academics discussed the benefits of senior Military Officers taking a more hands-on role in the running of their countries with delegates from Brazil, Burma and Indonesia, among others[lvii]. That same year, CAT changed it’s name to the more-Hollywood friendly Air America.[lviii]
In South-east Asia, postwar France was continuing to struggle to reconquer Indochina from the Vietnamese nationalists of Ho Chi Minh. Seeing their opportunity, the CIA extended its Southeast Asian strategy into Vietnam. They quickly found themselves caught up in a covert proxy war with the French foreign intelligence services. And just as in Thailand, Burma, Marseilles and Sicily before it, the CIA once again found itself in the middle of a criminal narcotics trafficking network[lix]. Building the American hegemony was proving to be just as difficult closer to home. In 1958 Colombia descended into the civil war that would last for another half a century; between a ruling class that had been historically exploiting the resources and oppressing the people, and two different revolutionary guerilla forces, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolutionarios de Colombia (FARC) and the Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN)[lx]. Then in 1959, Fidel Castro successfully led a revolution in Cuba, toppling Fulgencio Batista, and forcing the American Mafia to leave the country. First Lansky moved to Miami, which was already one of the key focal points for KMT and French Connection drugs, before relocating again to the tax haven of the Bahamas, a British colony that was “dominated by an oligarchy of corrupt white merchants”, and was soon to become one of the “top secrecy jurisdiction[s] for north and south American dirty money.”[lxi] The 1960s were shaping up to be a defining period in the CIA’s addiction to drugs.
word count: 5,063
Nicolas Lalaguna, author of Seven May Days
i The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p4, 5, 6, 77, 81, 88, 89, 90, 93
ii The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p5, 6, 8, 9, 10
iii The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p10
iv Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p10, 15, 16
v Treasure Islands, Shaxson, Nicholas, 2011 – p104
vi The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p29
vii Treasure Islands, Shaxson, Nicholas, 2011 – p104
viii Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p28, 29, 36, 37, 38
ix The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p266
x Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p37, 64
xi Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p26, 43
xii Hess, H. in Wilson, E., Government of the Shadows, 2009 p155
xiii The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p25, 33, 34, 35
xiv Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p56
xv The Wikileaks Files; the world according to U.S. empire, Wikileaks contributors, 2015 – p217
xvi The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p57
xvii The American Deep State, Dale Scott, Peter, 2015 – p9, 14
xviii The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p492
xix The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p25, 34, 46, 52, 57, 60, 269
xx Dale Scott, P. in Wilson, E., Government of the Shadows, 2009 p177, 178
xxi Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p73
xxii Iraq Under Siege, Arnove, Anthony, 2000 – p10
xxiii Ganser, D. in Wilson, E., Government of the Shadows, 2009 p259, and Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p98
xxiv Ganser, D. in Wilson, E., Government of the Shadows, 2009 p259
xxv Cottle, D. & Villar, O., Cocaine Death Squads and the War on Terror., 2011 p23
xxvi The American Deep State, Dale Scott, Peter, 2015 – p15
xxvii Dale Scott, P., Drugs, Oil and War. 2003 p64
xxviii The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p43, 46, 339, and Drugs, Oil and War, Dale Scott, Peter, 2003 – pxiii
xxix The American Deep State, Dale Scott, Peter, 2015 – p15
xxx Dale Scott, P., American War Machine, 2010 p51
xxxi Dale Scott, P. in Wilson, E., Government of the Shadows, 2009 p179, 181
xxxii Dale Scott, P., American War Machine, 2010 p26, 51
xxxiii https://www.utdallas.edu/library/specialcollections/hac/cataam/ and Dale Scott, P., American War Machine, 2010 p51
xxxiv Drugs, Oil and War, Dale Scott, Peter, 2003 – p187
xxxv The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p167, 177
xxxvi The Politics of Heroin, McCoy, Alfred W., 1991 – p178, 179, 184, 186
xxxvii http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v06n3/06346hof.html
xxxviii Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p10
xxxix Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p127
xl Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p44, 45, 46, 47, 53
xli Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p10
xlii Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p131
xliii The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’, Marks, John, 1991 – p60, 117
xliv Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p128, 131, 132
xlv Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p18, 21, 30, 38
xlvi Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p19, 40
xlvii The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’, Marks, John, 1991 – p10
xlviii Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p24, 25
xlix Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p150, 154, 194
l Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p32, 34 and Valentine, D., The Strength of the Wolf, 2004 p146
li Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p24, 69
lii The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’, Marks, John, 1991 – p63
liii Acid Dreams, Bruce Shlain, Martin A. Lee, 1985 – p24