CIA, THAI POLICE, And The Kuomintang

[Bruce551]

an excerpt from:

Drugs, the U.S., and Khun Sa

Francis W. Belanger © 1989

Editions Duang Kamol

Siam Square,  Bangkok, Thailand

ISBN 974-210-4808

THE ROLE OF THE CIA 
THE CIA AND THE DRUG INDUSTRY

http://www.angelfire.com/id/ciadrugs/cia-golden-triangle.html

At first glance the history of the KMT's involvement in the Burmese opium trade seems to be just another case of a CIA client unilaterally taking advantage of the agency's political protection to enrich itself from the narcotics trade. But upon closer examination, the CIA appears to be much more seriously compromised in the affair. The CIA fostered the growth of the Yunnan Province Anti-Communist National Salvation Army in the borderlands of northeastern Burma—a potentially rich opium-growing region. There can be no question of CIA ignorance or naivete since as early as 1952 The New York Times and other major American newspapers published detailed accounts of the KMT's role in the narcotics trade. But most disturbing of all is the coincidence that the KMT's Bangkok connection was the commander of the Thai Police—and General Phao was the CIA's man in Thailand.

THE THAI ELITE

Government corruption is not just a problem in Thailand, it is a way of life. Like every bureaucracy, the Thai government has elaborate organizational charts marking out neatly delineated areas of authority. To the uninformed observer it seems to function much like any other meritocracy, with university graduates occupying government posts, careers advancing step by step, and proposals moving up and down the hierarchy in a more or less orderly fashion. But all of these these charts and procedures were (and are) a facade, behind which operate powerful military cliques whose driving ambition is to expropriate enough money, power, and patronage to become a government within the government. These cliques are not ideological factions, coteries of plotters united by greed and ambition.

A clique usually has its beginning in some branch of the military service, where a hardcore of friends and relatives begin to recruit supporters from the ranks of their brother officers. Since official salaries have always been notoriously inadequate for the basic needs—not to mention the dreams—of many officers, each rising faction must find itself a source of supplementary income. While graft within the military itself provides a certain amount of money, all cliques are eventually forced to extend their tentacles into the civilian sector. A clique usually concentrates on taking over a single government ministry or monopolizing a certain realm of business, such as the rice trade or the lumber industry. By the time a clique matures it has a highly disciplined pyramid of corruption.

At the bottom, minor functionaries engage in extortion or graft, passing the money up the ladder, where leaders skim off vast sums for themselves divide the remainder among their loyal followers. Clique members may steal from the official government, but they usually do not dare steal from the clique itself; and the amount of money they receive from the clique is rigidly controlled.

When such a clique grows strong enough to make a bid for national power, it is inevitably forced to confront another in military faction. Such confrontations account for nearly all the coups and counter-coups that have determined the course of Thai politics ever since senior civil servants and army officers ended the absolute monarchy in 1932.

From 1947 to 1957, Thai politics was dominated by an intense rivalry between two powerful cliques: one led by General Phao Sriyanonda and the other by Marshal Sarit Thanarat. Both men were catapulted upward by the November 1947 coup which restored to power Thailand's wartime leader, Marshal Phibun Songkhram. Too weak to execute the coup himself, Marshal Phibun had recruited these two powerful army cliques. The clique led by Sarit was composed mainly of ambitious young army officers; the other was led by the commander in chief of the army, General Phin, and sparked by his aggressive son-in-law, Colonel Phao Sriyanonda.

Soon after the triumvirate took power, the two army cliques began to squabble over the division of the spoils. Military power was divided without too much rancor when Phao became deputy director-general of the National Police. (When Phao took over in 1951, his forty thousand police officers were an adequate counterbalance to Sarit's forty-five thousand-man army.) And many of the bureaucratic and commercial spoils were divided with equal harmony. An exceptionally bitter struggle developed, however, over control of the opium traffic.

The illicit opium trade had only recently emerged as one of the country's richest economic assets. Its sudden, massive economic significance may have served to upset the delicate balance of power between the Phao and Sarit cliques. Although the official government Opium Monopoly had thrived for almost a hundred years, by the time of the 1947 coup the high cost of imported opium and the reasonably strict government controls made it an unexceptional source of graft. However, the rapid decline in imports of foreign opium and the growth of local production in the late 1940s and the 1950s suddenly made the opium trade worth fighting over.

At the first United Nations narcotics conference in 1946. Thailand was criticized for being the only country in Southeast Asia still operating a legal government monopoly. Far more, threatening than the criticism, however, was the general agreement that all non-medical opium exports should be ended as soon as possible. Iran had already imposed a temporary ban on opium production in April 1946, and smuggled supplies from China were trickling to an end as the People's Republic initiated its successful opium eradication campaign. Although the Thai monopoly was still able to import sufficient quantities, the future of foreign imports was not too promising. To meet their projected needs for raw opium, in in[sic] 1947 the Thai government authorized poppy cultivation in the northern hills for the first time. The edict attracted an increasing number of Meo tribespeople into Thailand opium-growing regions, stimulating a dramatic increase in opium production.

But these gains in local production were soon dwarfed by the even more substantial increases in the Burmese Shan States. As Iranian and Chinese opium gradually disappeared in the early 1950s, the KMT filled the void by forcing an expansion of production in the Shan States, which they occupied. The KMT were at war with the Burmese and since their U.S. supplies were sent through Thailand, Bangkok became a natural entrepot for KMT opium. By 1949 most of the Thai monopoly's opium was from Southeast Asia, and in 1954 British customs in Singapore stated that Bangkok had become the major center for international opium trafficking in the region. The traffic had become so lucrative that Thailand quietly abandoned the anti-opium campaign announced in 1948 (all opium smoking was to have ended by 1953).

The 'opium war' between Phao and Sarit was a hidden one, with almost all the battles concealed by a clock of official secrecy. The most comical exception occurred in 1950 as one of General Sarit's army convoys approached the railhead at Lampang in northern Thailand with a shipment of opium. Phao's police surrounded the convoy and demanded that the soldiers surrender the opium since anti-narcotics work was the exclusive responsibility of the police. When the army men, threatening to shoot its way through to the railway, the police brought up heavy machine guns and dug in for a fire-fight. A nervous standoff continued for two days until Phao and Sarit themselves arrived in Lampang, took possession of the opium, and jointly escorted it to Bangkok, where it quietly disappeared.

In the underground struggle for the opium trade, General Phao slowly gained the upper hand. While the clandestine nature of this 'opium war' makes it difficult to reconstruct the precise ingredients in Phao's victory, the critical importance of CIA support cannot be underestimated. In 1951, a CIA front organization, the Sea Supply Corporation, began delivering lavish quantities of naval vessels, arms, armored vehicles, and aircraft to General Phao's police force. With this materiel, Phao was able to establish a police air force, a maritime police, a police armored division, and a police paratroop unit. General Sarit's American military advisors repeatedly refused to grant to his army the large amounts of modem equipment that Sea Supply Corporation gave Phao's police.

Since Sea Supply shipments to KMT (Nationalist Chinese or Kuomintang) troops in Burma were protected by the Thai police, Phao's alliance with the CIA also gave him extensive KMT contacts, through which he was able to build a virtual monopoly on Burmese opium exports. Phao's new financial and military power quickly tipped the balance of political power in his favor and in a December 1951 cabinet reshuffle his clique captured five cabinet slots, while Sarit's fraction got only one. Within a year, Sarit's rival had taken control of the, government and Phao was widely recognized as the most powerful man in Thailand.

Phao used his new political power to further strengthen his financial base. He took over the vice rackets, expropriated the profitable Bangkok slaughterhouse, rigged the gold exchange, collected protection money from Bangkok's wealthiest Chinese businessmen, and forced them to appoint him to the boards of over twenty corporations.

The man who C. L. Sulzberger of the The New York Times called a "superlative crook" (and whom a respected Thai diplomat hailed as the "worst man in the whole history of Thailand') became the CIA's most important Thai client.

Phao became Thailand's most ardent anti-Communist, and it appears that his, major obligation was to further KMT political aims in Thailand and to support its guerrilla units in Burma.

Phao protected supply, shipments to the KMT, marketed their opium, and performed such miscellaneous services as preventing Burmese observers from going to the staging areas during the November-December, 1953 airlifts of supposed KMT soldiers to Taiwan.

By 1955, Phao's National Police Force had become the largest opium-trafficking syndicate in Thailand and was ultimately involved in every phase of the narcotics traffic; the level' of corruption was remarkable even by Thai standards. If the smuggled opium was destined for export, police border guards escorted the KMT caravans from the Thailand-Burma border to police warehouses in Chiang Mai. From there police guards brought it to Bangkok by train or police aircraft. It was then loaded onto civilian coastal vessels and straightforwardly escorted by maritime police to a mid-ocean rendezvous with freighters bound for Singapore or Hong Kong.

However, if the opium was needed for the government Opium Monopoly, political considerations necessitated bizarre theatrics, with police border guards staging elaborate shoot-outs with the KMT smugglers near the Thai-Burma frontier. Invariably, the KMT guerrillas would drop the opium and flee, while the police heroes brought the 'captured' opium to Bangkok and collected a reward worth one-eighth of the retail value. The opium would subsequently disappear. Phao himself delighted in posing as the leader in the crusade against opium smuggling, and he often made hurried, dramatic departures to the northern frontier, where he personally led his men in these desperate gun battles with the ruthless smugglers of slow death.

There can be little doubt that CIA support was an invaluable asset to General Phao in managing the opium traffic. The agency supplied the aircraft, motor vehicles, and naval vessels that gave Phao the logistic capability to move opium from the poppy fields to the sea lanes. And his role in protecting Sea Supply's shipments to the KMT no doubt gave Phao a considerable advantage in establishing himself as the exclusive exporter of KMT opium.

Given its even greater involvement in the KMT's Shan States opium commerce, how do we evaluate the CIA's role in the evolution of large-scale opium trafficking in the Burma-Thailand region? Under the Kennedy administration, Presidential adviser Walt W. Rostow popularized a doctrine of economic development which preached that a stagnant, underdeveloped economy could be jolted into a period of rapid growth, an economic "takeoff," by a massive injection of foreign aid and capital, capital which could subsequently be withdrawn as the economy coasted into a period of self-sustaining growth. CIA support for Phao and the KMT seems to have sparked such a "takeoff' in the Burma-Thailand opium trade during the 1950s: modem aircraft replaced mules, naval vessels replaced sampans, and well-trained military organizations expropriated the traffic from bands of illiterate mountain traders.

Never before had the Shan States encountered smugglers with the discipline, technology, and ruthlessness of the KMT. Under General Phao's leadership, Thailand had changed from an opium-consuming nation to emerge as the world's most important opium distribution center. The Golden Triangle's opium output approached its present level; Burma's total harvest had increased from less than forty tons just before World War II to reach three hundred to four hundred tons in 1962—and then to nearly 2,000 tons today. Thailand's growth was even more remarkable, from seven tons to over 100 tons.

But was this increase in opium production the result of a conscious decision by the CIA to support its allies, Phao and the KMT, through the narcotics traffic? Of one thing there can be no doubt: the CIA knew its allies were heavily involved in the traffic. Headlines made it known to the whole world. Phao, clearly a protege of the CIA, was obviously responsible for the censure that Thailand received from the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs. And certainly the CIA did nothing to halt the trade or to prevent its aid from being abused. But whether the CIA actively organized the traffic is something that only the Agency itself can answer. In any case, by the early 1960s the Golden Triangle had become the largest single opium-growing region in the world—a vast reservoir able to supply America's lucrative markets. Today, the Golden Triangle has surplus opium; it still has well-protected, disciplined syndicates; and it has become America's major heroin supplier.

In Thailand, a hundred years of foreign advisers and twenty-five years of American advisers have given the government a certain veneer of technical sophistication but have also inhibited the growth of any internal revolutions that might have broken with the traditional patterns of corrupted, autocratic government.

At the base of Thailand's contemporary pyramids of corruption, legions of functionaries systematically plunder the nation and pass money up the chain of command to the top, where authoritarian leaders enjoy an opulent lifestyle reminiscent of the old god-kings. Marshal Sarit, for example, had over a hundred mistresses, arbitrarily executed criminals at public spectacles, and died with an estate of over $150 million. Such potentates, able to control every corrupt functionary in the most remote province, are rarely betrayed during struggles with other factions. As a result, a single political faction has usually been able to centralize and monopolize all of Thailand's narcotics traffic. In contrast, the opium trade in Laos and the Shan States of Burma reflects a more fragmented and feudal political tradition: each regional warlord controls the traffic in his own territory.

[eagle]

I don't think the CIA were being naive or ignorant but concerned with their needs only.

[Bruce551]

an excerpt from:

Drugs, the U.S., and Khun Sa

Francis W. Belanger © 1989

Editions Duang Kamol

Siam Square,  Bangkok, Thailand

ISBN 974-210-4808

THE ROLE OF THE CIA 
THE CIA AND THE DRUG INDUSTRY

http://www.angelfire.com/id/ciadrugs/cia-golden-triangle.html

At first glance the history of the KMT's involvement in the Burmese opium trade seems to be just another case of a CIA client unilaterally taking advantage of the agency's political protection to enrich itself from the narcotics trade. But upon closer examination, the CIA appears to be much more seriously compromised in the affair. The CIA fostered the growth of the Yunnan Province Anti-Communist National Salvation Army in the borderlands of northeastern Burma—a potentially rich opium-growing region. There can be no question of CIA ignorance or naivete since as early as 1952 The New York Times and other major American newspapers published detailed accounts of the KMT's role in the narcotics trade. But most disturbing of all is the coincidence that the KMT's Bangkok connection was the commander of the Thai Police—and General Phao was the CIA's man in Thailand.

THE THAI ELITE

Government corruption is not just a problem in Thailand, it is a way of life. /b]

Like every bureaucracy, the Thai government has elaborate organizational charts marking out neatly delineated areas of authority. To the uninformed observer it seems to function much like any other meritocracy, with university graduates occupying government posts, careers advancing step by step, and proposals moving up and down the hierarchy in a more or less orderly fashion.

But all of these these charts and procedures were (and are) a facade, behind which operate powerful military cliques whose driving ambition is to expropriate enough money, power, and patronage to become a government within the government. These cliques are not ideological factions, coteries of plotters united by greed and ambition.

A clique usually has its beginning in some branch of the military service, where a hardcore of friends and relatives begin to recruit supporters from the ranks of their brother officers. Since official salaries have always been notoriously inadequate for the basic needs—not to mention the dreams—of many officers, each rising faction must find itself a source of supplementary income. While graft within the military itself provides a certain amount of money, all cliques are eventually forced to extend their tentacles into the civilian sector. A clique usually concentrates on taking over a single government ministry or monopolizing a certain realm of business, such as the rice trade or the lumber industry. By the time a clique matures it has a highly disciplined pyramid of corruption.

At the bottom, minor functionaries engage in extortion or graft, passing the money up the ladder, where leaders skim off vast sums for themselves divide the remainder among their loyal followers. Clique members may steal from the official government, but they usually do not dare steal from the clique itself; and the amount of money they receive from the clique is rigidly controlled.

When such a clique grows strong enough to make a bid for national power, it is inevitably forced to confront another in military faction. Such confrontations account for nearly all the coups and counter-coups that have determined the course of Thai politics ever since senior civil servants and army officers ended the absolute monarchy in 1932.

From 1947 to 1957, Thai politics was dominated by an intense rivalry between two powerful cliques: one led by General Phao Sriyanonda and the other by Marshal Sarit Thanarat. Both men were catapulted upward by the November 1947 coup which restored to power Thailand's wartime leader, Marshal Phibun Songkhram. Too weak to execute the coup himself, Marshal Phibun had recruited these two powerful army cliques. The clique led by Sarit was composed mainly of ambitious young army officers; the other was led by the commander in chief of the army, General Phin, and sparked by his aggressive son-in-law, Colonel Phao Sriyanonda.

Soon after the triumvirate took power, the two army cliques began to squabble over the division of the spoils. Military power was divided without too much rancor when Phao became deputy director-general of the National Police. (When Phao took over in 1951, his forty thousand police officers were an adequate counterbalance to Sarit's forty-five thousand-man army.) And many of the bureaucratic and commercial spoils were divided with equal harmony. An exceptionally bitter struggle developed, however, over control of the opium traffic.

The illicit opium trade had only recently emerged as one of the country's richest economic assets. Its sudden, massive economic significance may have served to upset the delicate balance of power between the Phao and Sarit cliques. Although the official government Opium Monopoly had thrived for almost a hundred years, by the time of the 1947 coup the high cost of imported opium and the reasonably strict government controls made it an unexceptional source of graft. However, the rapid decline in imports of foreign opium and the growth of local production in the late 1940s and the 1950s suddenly made the opium trade worth fighting over.

At the first United Nations narcotics conference in 1946. Thailand was criticized for being the only country in Southeast Asia still operating a legal government monopoly. Far more, threatening than the criticism, however, was the general agreement that all non-medical opium exports should be ended as soon as possible. Iran had already imposed a temporary ban on opium production in April 1946, and smuggled supplies from China were trickling to an end as the People's Republic initiated its successful opium eradication campaign. Although the Thai monopoly was still able to import sufficient quantities, the future of foreign imports was not too promising. To meet their projected needs for raw opium, in in[sic] 1947 the Thai government authorized poppy cultivation in the northern hills for the first time. The edict attracted an increasing number of Meo tribespeople into Thailand opium-growing regions, stimulating a dramatic increase in opium production.

But these gains in local production were soon dwarfed by the even more substantial increases in the Burmese Shan States. As Iranian and Chinese opium gradually disappeared in the early 1950s, the KMT filled the void by forcing an expansion of production in the Shan States, which they occupied. The KMT were at war with the Burmese and since their U.S. supplies were sent through Thailand, Bangkok became a natural entrepot for KMT opium. By 1949 most of the Thai monopoly's opium was from Southeast Asia, and in 1954 British customs in Singapore stated that Bangkok had become the major center for international opium trafficking in the region. The traffic had become so lucrative that Thailand quietly abandoned the anti-opium campaign announced in 1948 (all opium smoking was to have ended by 1953).

The 'opium war' between Phao and Sarit was a hidden one, with almost all the battles concealed by a clock of official secrecy. The most comical exception occurred in 1950 as one of General Sarit's army convoys approached the railhead at Lampang in northern Thailand with a shipment of opium. Phao's police surrounded the convoy and demanded that the soldiers surrender the opium since anti-narcotics work was the exclusive responsibility of the police. When the army men, threatening to shoot its way through to the railway, the police brought up heavy machine guns and dug in for a fire-fight. A nervous standoff continued for two days until Phao and Sarit themselves arrived in Lampang, took possession of the opium, and jointly escorted it to Bangkok, where it quietly disappeared.

In the underground struggle for the opium trade, General Phao slowly gained the upper hand. While the clandestine nature of this 'opium war' makes it difficult to reconstruct the precise ingredients in Phao's victory, the critical importance of CIA support cannot be underestimated. In 1951, a CIA front organization, the Sea Supply Corporation, began delivering lavish quantities of naval vessels, arms, armored vehicles, and aircraft to General Phao's police force. With this materiel, Phao was able to establish a police air force, a maritime police, a police armored division, and a police paratroop unit. General Sarit's American military advisors repeatedly refused to grant to his army the large amounts of modem equipment that Sea Supply Corporation gave Phao's police.

Since Sea Supply shipments to KMT (Nationalist Chinese or Kuomintang) troops in Burma were protected by the Thai police, Phao's alliance with the CIA also gave him extensive KMT contacts, through which he was able to build a virtual monopoly on Burmese opium exports. Phao's new financial and military power quickly tipped the balance of political power in his favor and in a December 1951 cabinet reshuffle his clique captured five cabinet slots, while Sarit's fraction got only one. Within a year, Sarit's rival had taken control of the, government and Phao was widely recognized as the most powerful man in Thailand.

Phao used his new political power to further strengthen his financial base. He took over the vice rackets, expropriated the profitable Bangkok slaughterhouse, rigged the gold exchange, collected protection money from Bangkok's wealthiest Chinese businessmen, and forced them to appoint him to the boards of over twenty corporations.

The man who C. L. Sulzberger of the The New York Times called a "superlative crook" (and whom a respected Thai diplomat hailed as the "worst man in the whole history of Thailand') became the CIA's most important Thai client.

Phao became Thailand's most ardent anti-Communist, and it appears that his, major obligation was to further KMT political aims in Thailand and to support its guerrilla units in Burma.

Phao protected supply, shipments to the KMT, marketed their opium, and performed such miscellaneous services as preventing Burmese observers from going to the staging areas during the November-December, 1953 airlifts of supposed KMT soldiers to Taiwan.

By 1955, Phao's National Police Force had become the largest opium-trafficking syndicate in Thailand and was ultimately involved in every phase of the narcotics traffic; the level' of corruption was remarkable even by Thai standards. If the smuggled opium was destined for export, police border guards escorted the KMT caravans from the Thailand-Burma border to police warehouses in Chiang Mai. From there police guards brought it to Bangkok by train or police aircraft. It was then loaded onto civilian coastal vessels and straightforwardly escorted by maritime police to a mid-ocean rendezvous with freighters bound for Singapore or Hong Kong.

However, if the opium was needed for the government Opium Monopoly, political considerations necessitated bizarre theatrics, with police border guards staging elaborate shoot-outs with the KMT smugglers near the Thai-Burma frontier. Invariably, the KMT guerrillas would drop the opium and flee, while the police heroes brought the 'captured' opium to Bangkok and collected a reward worth one-eighth of the retail value. The opium would subsequently disappear. Phao himself delighted in posing as the leader in the crusade against opium smuggling, and he often made hurried, dramatic departures to the northern frontier, where he personally led his men in these desperate gun battles with the ruthless smugglers of slow death.

There can be little doubt that CIA support was an invaluable asset to General Phao in managing the opium traffic. The agency supplied the aircraft, motor vehicles, and naval vessels that gave Phao the logistic capability to move opium from the poppy fields to the sea lanes. And his role in protecting Sea Supply's shipments to the KMT no doubt gave Phao a considerable advantage in establishing himself as the exclusive exporter of KMT opium.

Given its even greater involvement in the KMT's Shan States opium commerce, how do we evaluate the CIA's role in the evolution of large-scale opium trafficking in the Burma-Thailand region? Under the Kennedy administration, Presidential adviser Walt W. Rostow popularized a doctrine of economic development which preached that a stagnant, underdeveloped economy could be jolted into a period of rapid growth, an economic "takeoff," by a massive injection of foreign aid and capital, capital which could subsequently be withdrawn as the economy coasted into a period of self-sustaining growth. CIA support for Phao and the KMT seems to have sparked such a "takeoff' in the Burma-Thailand opium trade during the 1950s: modem aircraft replaced mules, naval vessels replaced sampans, and well-trained military organizations expropriated the traffic from bands of illiterate mountain traders.

Never before had the Shan States encountered smugglers with the discipline, technology, and ruthlessness of the KMT. Under General Phao's leadership, Thailand had changed from an opium-consuming nation to emerge as the world's most important opium distribution center. The Golden Triangle's opium output approached its present level; Burma's total harvest had increased from less than forty tons just before World War II to reach three hundred to four hundred tons in 1962—and then to nearly 2,000 tons today. Thailand's growth was even more remarkable, from seven tons to over 100 tons.

But was this increase in opium production the result of a conscious decision by the CIA to support its allies, Phao and the KMT, through the narcotics traffic? Of one thing there can be no doubt: the CIA knew its allies were heavily involved in the traffic. Headlines made it known to the whole world. Phao, clearly a protege of the CIA, was obviously responsible for the censure that Thailand received from the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs. And certainly the CIA did nothing to halt the trade or to prevent its aid from being abused. But whether the CIA actively organized the traffic is something that only the Agency itself can answer. In any case, by the early 1960s the Golden Triangle had become the largest single opium-growing region in the world—a vast reservoir able to supply America's lucrative markets. Today, the Golden Triangle has surplus opium; it still has well-protected, disciplined syndicates; and it has become America's major heroin supplier.

In Thailand, a hundred years of foreign advisers and twenty-five years of American advisers have given the government a certain veneer of technical sophistication but have also inhibited the growth of any internal revolutions that might have broken with the traditional patterns of corrupted, autocratic government.

At the base of Thailand's contemporary pyramids of corruption, legions of functionaries systematically plunder the nation and pass money up the chain of command to the top, where authoritarian leaders enjoy an opulent lifestyle reminiscent of the old god-kings. Marshal Sarit, for example, had over a hundred mistresses, arbitrarily executed criminals at public spectacles, and died with an estate of over $150 million. Such potentates, able to control every corrupt functionary in the most remote province, are rarely betrayed during struggles with other factions. As a result, a single political faction has usually been able to centralize and monopolize all of Thailand's narcotics traffic. In contrast, the opium trade in Laos and the Shan States of Burma reflects a more fragmented and feudal political tradition: each regional warlord controls the traffic in his own territory.

More than one game in town. Enter the US Army.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/investigation/195851/sgt-smack-and-the-heroin-trade-revealed

Sgt Smack and the heroin trade revealed

During the war in Vietnam, the almost pure white powder from the Golden Triangle was a lucrative business for some in the military

Published: 12/09/2010 at 12:00 AM

Newspaper section: Spectrum

Sergeant Smack is the fitting title of a book that centres on Ike Atkinson, a successful US Army Master Sergeant who parlayed street smarts into a brief career as one of the world's leading heroin peddlers, followed by a lifetime behind bars.

Atkinson was the brains and operator of the Thailand end of a heroin epidemic that swept across North America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, even infecting and crippling US troops in the Vietnam war.

More importantly, this book - breathlessly subtitled The Legendary Lives and Times of Ike Atkinson, Kingpin, and His Band of Brothers - is the gold standard describing this important niche of history of both the US and Thailand.

Seasoned crime reporter and author Ron Chepesiuk has done what no predecessor bothered.

He has put the solid facts of an important era down in black and white. He has wiped out a dozen myths, uncovered important information and made it impossible for future historians to gild the lily, and let a good story overwrite the facts.

Most spectacularly, Sergeant Smack lays to rest once and for all the insidious Rumour That Would Not Die about heroin trafficking at the time of the Vietnam conflict - the cadaver connection.

Chepesiuk eviscerates the ridiculous rumour of smuggling heroin inside the bodies of US servicemen killed in the Vietnam War. Over the years, but particularly in the very early 1970s, dozens of officials and newsmen spent thousands of hours trying to track down this sensational allegation. Sergeant Smack even details its origin, in a careless remark by a panicked assistant district attorney in Maryland.

The myth of the cadaver connection has survived, and is still seen. The 2007 movie American Gangster about the fictional life of the real criminal Frank Lucas revived it.

In the movie, Denzel Washington plays Lucas, who very fictionally flies to Thailand for a few days, travels to the heart of the Golden Triangle to arrange some heroin shipments in the bodies of dead GIs, and flies back home.

In real life, Lucas is now a legend in his own mind. His real part in the heroin epidemic was as a dealer in the US, supplied by the Ike Atkinson gang.

When Lucas dies, his epitaph should read: "He fooled the world into believing the cadaver connection."

To a reader at this end of the heroin connection, Sergeant Smack's most interesting sections deal with the opaque Thai involvement in the trade.

Much work remains, but Chepesiuk is the first important writer to reveal the main supplier to the US smuggling gang, Luchai "Chai" Ruviwat.

A Thai-Chinese businessman who invested with Atkinson in the GI hangout Jack's American Star Bar, Luchai remains a shadowy figure. Lured to the US where he was arrested and imprisoned for years, Luchai is still something of a ghost, who no doubt could shed much light on the men in green and in high places who made the heroin trade possible between the Golden Triangle and Bangkok.

Corruption "was just a part of doing business", reports this book, and foreign embassies routinely reported involvement in the heroin trade by senior military, police, government and "the most respected Thai families".

Example: A prominent hotel in central Sukhumvit Road was built on piles of peddled heroin.

But the US military had no moral high ground. Atkinson's team bought, sold and transported heroin from the green cocoon provided by the US military uniforms they wore. Ostensibly employed by the US government and taxpayers, Atkinson's organised group included chiefs, workers, spotters and drug mules.

In fact, the best you could say is that the US military tried to police itself.

In June 1975, after years as a kingpin, Atkinson received his first sentence for drug smuggling - but continued to run his gang from inside prison.

Chepesiuk details the long, tortured task of law enforcement to bust the Atkinson ring. A key event came in mid-1975 when a hapless military customs agent in Bangkok accidentally discovered a huge heroin stash in a teak-furniture shipment by US Army Sgt Jasper Myrick - a front-page story in the Bangkok Post, but a milestone in busting the kingpin and his band of brothers.

Atkinson's operation ended in a combination of arrests and the 1976 US troop withdrawal from Thailand, but the Thai connection merely evolved. The US busted and jailed the chief supplier to the military ring, Luchai. He was only a cog in the supply chain controlled by senior Thai officials - although described apocryphally by US anti-drug agents as Mr Big.

With this book, author Chepesiuk has turned the corner from crime writer to historian. Sergeant Smack is not a "good read" or "worth having in your reference library". It is a vital and necessary source for anyone seeking to understand the intertwining of cross-border crime, recent Thai history, and the mixed emotions of the US military involvement in Thailand during the Vietnam War.

About the author

Writer: Alan Dawson