Journalist's death dredges up dark legacy of CIA's drug-fueled wars

[struggle4progress]

2005-01-20
By Bill Weinberg

On Jan. 6, a soldier from Afghanistan's nascent national army was killed, along with two assailants, when troops were sent in to eradicate an opium field in Uruzgan province. The central government of President Hamid Karzai recognizes that these could prove the opening shots of a new opium war. A month earlier, on Dec. 11, Karzai's finance minister, Ashraf Ghani, published an op-ed piece in The New York Times, "Where Democracy's Greatest Enemy Is a Flower," pleading for international support for crop-substitution programs. Opium is the key to power for Afghanistan's warlords, who still control much of the country.

It would be impolitic for Karzai's government to remind his U.S. underwriters of Washington's own complicity in creating this reality. The apparent December suicide of Gary Webb, the journalist responsible for the "Dark Alliance" sensation in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996, sparked at least a brief media recollection of the contra-cocaine claims of the Reagan era. That a CIA-backed rebel army was also turning to the drug trade at that same time in Afghanistan seems almost entirely forgotten.

Webb's controversial series documented the links between the CIA-spawned "contra" guerrilla army in Nicaragua and a top California cocaine ring. The series provoked a campaign to discredit it by major media, which relentlessly trumpeted its real flaws. But whatever Webb's failings, the Nicaraguan counter-revolution was a major player in the 1980s coke boom. In 1989, the congress of Nicaragua's neighbor, Costa Rica, permanently barred Lt. Col. Oliver North, ex-National Security Adviser John Poindexter, the U.S. ambassador and CIA station chief, from the country's territory, finding that their contra re-supply operation had doubled as a cocaine ring. Such disturbing realities were forgotten as Webb's work was dismissed as "conspiracy theory."

Even more forgotten is that the contra-coke connection was mirrored in an Afghan mujahedeen-heroin connection. Just as the CIA groomed an army of right-wing exiles to destabilize revolutionary Nicaragua, the agency turned to Islamic insurgents to drive Soviet troops from Afghanistan. Once again, the CIA proxy army turned to the drug trade to boost its war chest. And while Nicaragua has seen some reconciliation since the 1980s, Afghanistan is still violently divided -- and under U.S. occupation. <snip>

http://www.athensnews.com/issue/article.php3?story_id=19450

[peacetalksforall]

1. Makes you wonder if we'll see poppies in Iraq.

Or is too arid?

Are all the Afghani war lords secular?

[starroute]

2. The drug trade winds through the last 60 years of US history

It began with the OSS in China during World War II using the opium traffic to support their Chinese allies. It picked up pace in 1949, when the Communists took over China and kicked out both the Nationalists and the drug dealers, and the US adopted both of them, setting up a nice little cycle of drug-selling, money-laundering, and arms-dealing. When the French lost at Dienbienphu in 1954, the US inherited the Indo-China drug trade as well.

At the same time, the mechanisms of distribution were being put in place, involving the Mafia, the "French connection" in Marseilles, transshipment through Cuba, and money-laundering through the Castle Bank in the Bahamas. Most of this was the work of Paul Helliwell, an alumnus of that original OSS opium operation in China who'd moved over to the CIA after the war.

When Castro kicked the drug trade out of Cuba, Helliwell's people in Miami turned their attention to trying to overthrow Castro. That started a trail thaty leads through the Bay of Pigs, possibly the Kennedy assassination, the explosion of the heroin trade during the Vietnam War (going hand in hand with the assassinations of Operation Phoenix, apparently under the oversight of Helliwell's old OSS buddy, General Singlaub), and Watergate (which involved both Bay of Pigs veterans and yet another of the OSS China gang, E. Howard Hunt.)

The Cuba/Vietnam group -- including people like Ted Shackley and Thomas Clines -- was then at the center of the cocaine/arms operation in Latin America in the 80's. And the same forces were responsible for the explosion of poppy growing in Afghanistan starting in 1979 when the Russians entered the country and the CIA got involved in trying to drive them out.

That isn't even the whole story -- but the rest is just elaborations. It quite enough to make clear that most of the really bad things which this country has been involved with since World War II twine around the drug trade and CIA use of it as a source of money and power.