Drug War on the West
By Joseph D. Douglass, Jr.
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Source: The New American, April 10, 2000
An
undeclared war is being waged against the United States in the form of
a long-range, sustained drug offensive by Red China and Russia. Why do
U.S. officials suppress this information? |
After
decades of political sloganeering, hand-wringing, legislating, and
throwing tens of billions of dollars into the “War on Drugs,” are we
any closer to victory over this insidious scourge? The question would
be laughable, if it were not so deadly serious. Illicit narcotics of
every type are more widely available than ever before, prices are
lower, and drug potency has increased. Heroin, for example, is now
available that is 90 percent pure. Teen usage dipped temporarily from
1988 to 1992, but then resumed its upward climb.
The U.S. annual
body count in this war surpasses the total casualties we suffered
during the entire ten-year Vietnam War. Violence and mayhem follow in
the wake of the drug plague, as night follows day, and have been
visited upon every corner of our land. Far too many of our schools,
playgrounds, and streets have become battlefields. A three-year study
released in 1998 by the National Center on Addiction and Substance
Abuse at Columbia University in New York found:
- Forty-one percent of first-time offenders in state prisons were regular drug users.
- Eighty-one percent of prisoners with five or more convictions were habitual drug users.
- 1.4
of the 1.7 million people serving time in the nation’s jails and
prisons committed crimes while they were high, stole property to buy
drugs, have a history of substance abuse, or are in jail for violating
drug or alcohol laws.
With annual profits, just in the
U.S., now in the $100 billion to $200 billion range, the narcotics
“industry” has been able to effect widespread corruption of our
political, judicial, law enforcement, legal, accounting, banking, and
business communities. Police corruption has been a feature on the front
pages of the newspapers in most major U.S. cities: New York,
Philadelphia, Miami, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, New
Orleans, and Washington, D.C. Federal agencies, such as the Drug
Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Customs Service, the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, the Justice Department, and the Border
Patrol, have also been affected. The drug profits are now so enormous
and confer such immense corruptive power that we are in very real
danger of rapidly devolving into an abyss of utter chaos and
corruption. Think Mexico, Colombia, Panama — only much worse.
Prescriptions for Disaster What
can we do? First of all, what we must not do is fall for the false
alternatives that are being offered by the same failed experts who have
put us in our current dilemma. Those “alternatives” usually run along
one of the following lines :
- “Stay the course.” Keep muddling along, but muddle harder.
- “Get tough.” Federalize all law enforcement and implement full-bore military-police state action.
- “Legalize, decriminalize.” Remove the huge profit margins of drugs as contraband and tax them as we do liquor and tobacco.
Each
of those nostrums is a prescription for utter disaster. We do not have
the luxury of time to waste on more foolish social experimentation.
What, then, can we do? What must we do?
First of all, we must
face the truth. That is often the hardest part of any difficult task,
and there truly are some very hard truths for us to face in dealing
with the drug monster that has us in its deadly grip. Such as, what —
or who — is the cause of the drug epidemic. To begin our search for the
answer to that all-important question, let us refer you to the 1988
ABC-TV special entitled “Drugs: A Plague Upon the Land,” narrated by
Peter Jennings. Mr. Jennings concluded that program with this
unexpected observation:
If this is a war on drugs — and everyone from the President on down calls it that — shouldn’t it be fought like one?
If
we could prove that the drug problem in the United States was directed
by a Communist power, what do you think would happen then? Wouldn’t the
government be mobilized? Wouldn’t the best minds in the country be
enlisted to plan strategy? There’d certainly be no limit to the amount
of money available to fight the war. Every institution in the country
would be involved. No one would say, “It doesn’t affect me.” Now,
Jennings was not suggesting that there was a Communist power behind the
drug trade. To the contrary, he was offering that scenario in such a
way as to suggest that it had not the slightest resemblance to reality.
He was merely using it as an example to raise an important question:
Namely, why was the United States not fighting a serious war on drugs?
Nevertheless, in using this example, he indirectly raised what might be
an even more serious question: Namely, if there were a Communist power
behind the drug trade — the Soviet Union, Red China, or Cuba, for
example — who would believe it?
But the awful truth is that the
scenario Jennings painted is strikingly accurate. Even more awful is
the fact that the superabundant evidence supporting this scenario has
been pointedly ignored and frequently suppressed by many of America’s
top leaders — in both Democratic and Republican administrations — for
the past several decades.
Target: USA Our
government’s role in abetting international organized crime is
illustrated by the State Department’s dogmatic refusal to recognize the
fact that the global narcotics trade has been a state-run business of
Communist Cuba since 1961, Russia since 1956, and Red China since 1949.
The consensus-forming elites in our government, media, and academia
have steadfastly refused to acknowledge what overwhelming proof has
made patently obvious: The United States has been targeted as an act of
war and is the victim of a long-range, sustained, vicious drug
offensive.
What kind of “overwhelming” evidence are we talking
about? The type of credible and desirable evidence that every military
strategist and every organized crime investigator would covet when
engaged in a conflict with a cunning and ruthless adversary:
Confessions and detailed eyewitness testimony from multiple high-level
defectors; enemy documents, physical evidence, and inside intelligence
obtained by one’s own undercover agents; intelligence obtained by
technical means (wiretaps, aerial and satellite reconnaissance, etc.);
money trails and networks tied to the adversary’s operatives; and a
strategy, methodology, and pattern of behavior that is consistent with
the opponent’s past strategy, methodology, and behavior.
We
should state clearly at this point what we are not claiming. We are not
saying that the entire global drug problem is a Communist plot, or that
all (or even most) of the producers and traffickers of narcotics are
motivated by Marxist-Leninist ideology and directed by Party
discipline. Nor is anyone else we are aware of suggesting that kind of
simplistic analysis. Nevertheless, the inescapable truth, as we shall
show, is that decades ago the Leninist strategists in China and the
Soviet Union devised elaborate long-range plans to use drugs as a
“softening up” weapon in the World Revolution. They penetrated and took
over many existing criminal syndicates and drug operations and started
many of their own. They vastly increased the world output of narcotics
and expanded enormously drug trafficking and marketing operations
worldwide. They are operating them still.
China’s Drug Connection As
early as 1928, Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-tung initiated opium
cultivation at his first major guerrilla base constructed in Kiangsi.
His orders to his cadres at the time were to use the opium to “trade
for supplies and poison [drug] the white areas.” In this instance, the
term “white” was used in the classical Bolshevik sense, to refer to the
areas controlled by the non-Reds. So, very early on, the Red Chinese
developed the drug weapon for a dual purpose: to raise funds or use as
barter; and to morally undermine the opposition. After capturing a
region, Mao would outlaw use of all narcotics and bring all opium
production under Communist control, making it exclusively an instrument
of the state for use against its enemies.
After gaining control
of all of mainland China in 1949, Mao rapidly expanded his export of
heroin to Japan, all of Asia, and the United States. The supervision of
China’s narcotics operation throughout the 1950s and 1960s was
entrusted to Mao’s henchman Chou En-lai. During the Korean War, both
the Soviets and the Red Chinese assisted the North Korean Communists
and utilized drugs as a weapon in that conflict. The Reds used drugs in
a two-fold capacity: to undermine the effectiveness and morale of the
GIs at targeted bases; and to experiment on captured prisoners of war.
Following
the Korean War, the Red Chinese fine-tuned their drug strategy against
French soldiers — with devastating effect — during the French Indochina
War. And that was the warm-up for their major drug offensive against
the U.S. during the Vietnam War. In 1958, as U.S. military personnel
began to increase in South Vietnam, Comrade Chou En-lai told the Party
faithful in Wuhan:
Every one of you must awake to the
fact that the war in Vietnam is likely to escalate and US imperialism
has determined to fight against our revolutionary camp by increasing
its military force in Vietnam.... From the revolutionary point of view,
the poppy is a great force to assist the course of our revolution and
it should be used.... By exporting large quantities of morphine and
heroin, we are able to weaken the U.S. combat force and to defeat it
without fighting at all. Harry Anslinger, the U.S.
Commissioner of Narcotics, worked tirelessly throughout the 1950s to
expose the danger. The mafia, he repeatedly pointed out, was not the
biggest drug pusher. By far the biggest drug dealer was Red China. But
after Anslinger retired in 1962, the pro-China forces at the State
Department spiked most information concerning China’s drug operations.
In
1971, Mohammed Heikal, a publisher and confidant of Egyptian President
Gamal Abdel Nasser, published The Cairo Documents, a book in which he
reported a conversation that had taken place between Chou En-lai and
Nasser in 1965. Chou told his fellow revolutionary:
The
more troops they [the U.S.] send to Vietnam, the happier we shall be,
for we feel we shall have them in our power, we can have their
blood.... Some of the American soldiers are trying opium, and we are
helping them. We are planting the best kinds of opium especially for
American soldiers in Vietnam. We want them to have a big army in
Vietnam which will be hostage to us and we want to demoralize them. The
effect which this demoralization is going to have on the United States
will be far greater than anyone realizes. In March
1970, John E. Ingersoll, director of the Bureau of Narcotics and
Dangerous Drugs, told a House subcommittee on appropriations that
China’s Yunan Province was one of the principal sources of the flood of
heroin that was entering the West Coast of the United States. Drawing
on massive intelligence from a wide spectrum of sources, the CIA drew a
map of the “Golden Triangle” area of Asia, the main heroin-producing
region in the world (see map on preceding page). However, the map was
sent to the White House’s Ad Hoc Committee on Narcotics, chaired by
Henry Kissinger, and when it emerged it had been altered to exculpate
Kissinger’s friends in Peking. Moreover, Kissinger stopped
reconnaissance overflights of Chou’s opium operations in Burma to avoid
endangering détente with Red China. Selling the fiction of a friendly
and changing China, the Nixon administration turned a blind eye to the
PRC’s escalating drug business.
Marine General Lewis Walt was
one of many U.S. officials who tried to sound the alarm but were
ultimately muzzled. In testimony before the Senate Internal Security
Subcommittee in 1972, Walt stated:
In June of 1970,
immediately after our Cambodian incursion, South Vietnam was flooded
with heroin of remarkable purity — 94 to 97 percent — which sold at the
ridiculously low price of first $1 and then $2 a vial. If
profit-motivated criminals were in charge of the operation, the price
made no sense at all — because no GI who wanted to get high on heroin
would have batted an eyelash at paying $5, or even $10. The same amount
of heroin in New York would have cost $250. The only explanation that
makes sense is that the epidemic was political rather than economic in
inspiration — that whoever was behind the epidemic wanted to hook as
many GIs as possible, as fast as possible, and as hard as possible. Then
as now, it was not so much a problem of demand (as so many “experts”
insist), but an increase in consumption driven by supply. General Walt
made no bones about the fact that the “whoever” behind the epidemic was
China. Walt was appointed to a presidential commission on drug
trafficking in Vietnam, but the commission’s report was classified and
suppressed. The general later confided that the order to keep silent
about China’s role was the most damnable order he had ever received.
Soviet Connection Meanwhile,
the Soviets were also well into a major expansion of their global
narcotics operation. Although there are other sources of information on
this topic, we are especially beholden to one man, the late General
Major Jan Sejna, for the most detailed and invaluable knowledge about
this strategic threat. General Sejna remains, to my knowledge, the
highest positioned Soviet Bloc official ever to seek political asylum
in the West. Besides being Secretary of Czechoslovakia’s powerful
Defense Council, Gen. Sejna was also Military Chief of Staff and a
member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the National
Assembly, the Presidium, the Kolegium, and the Administrative Organs
Department. He was a top-level, decision-making Party official who met
regularly with the highest officials of the Soviet Union and other
Communist countries. He participated in many of the most important
decisions of the Cold War and was present during the inception,
planning, and implementation of Soviet narcotics trafficking
operations. Over the course of nearly 30 years, from his defection in
1968 to his death in 1997, his information proved to be of
extraordinary quality. Lieutenant General James Clapper, former
director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, stated that Sejna had
“provided reliable information to the U.S. intelligence community for
many years.”
Sejna provided detailed data on how Soviet
intelligence services — not only the KGB but the GRU (military
intelligence) — went into the drug business in 1956. They then helped
Cuba get into the trade in 1960. The Cuban and East European
intelligence services, operating as subsidiaries of Soviet
intelligence, had established massive narcotics production and
distribution organizations throughout Latin America by 1965. The
massive cocaine flow into the United States is mainly the result of
Soviet intelligence surrogate operations.
In 1960 the Soviets
tested various drugs on prisoners and concluded that cocaine was the
wave of the future — a “Pink Epidemic,” as they termed it, combining
the white plague (cocaine) with the red plague (Communism). The Soviets
set about to build dedicated cocaine trafficking networks, centered in
Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia. They gave the Cubans the task of learning
existing production techniques. Tasked to help the Cubans modernize
production techniques, the East Germans developed methods so efficient
that one factory could produce more than three times what was then the
total cocaine output of Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia. The surrogate
Soviet narcotics operation came on line in 1967, which is almost
precisely when the United States experienced a massive explosion of
cocaine use.
Integral to the Soviet global drug strategy was a
plan to infiltrate all indigenous organized crime syndicates and to
establish new Soviet Bloc-sponsored and -controlled crime organizations
throughout the world. The benefits are obvious. Existing criminal
syndicates have what the revolutionists can put to good use:
information on corrupt politicians, judges, military officers, police
officials, bankers, and businessmen; established channels and
experience in smuggling; and entree to a ready-made underworld that can
facilitate the spread of their drug products. Another integral part of
this effort was the sponsoring of terrorist groups to destabilize the
targeted countries and prepare a revolutionary environment.
The
Czechs and Cubans collaborated closely, under Soviet tutelage, to
penetrate Latin America and establish an organized crime network. In
this regard, Sejna worked directly, on a number of occasions, with Raul
Castro, Fidel’s brother and Minister of Defense, to develop the
drug/organized crime/terrorist operations. Their efforts were wildly
successful, especially in Colombia, Mexico, and Panama.
General
Sejna’s information has been validated by many means, including
corroborative testimony from defectors from Cuban intelligence (DGI),
the Nicaraguan Sandinista regime, and the drug cartels in Colombia,
Panama, and Mexico. DGI defector Mario Estevez Gonzalez, for instance,
told a congressional committee in 1983 that he had been ordered “to
load up the United States with drugs.” DGI officer Rene Rodriguez-Cruz
has stated that, according to Fidel Castro, “drugs are the best way to
destroy American society without troops or guns.” DGI Major Florentino
Aspillaga Lombard has confirmed the long-term, personal involvement of
the Castro brothers in the drug trade and has noted that it would be
impossible for these operations to have been carried out without the
personal approval of Fidel.
Nicaraguan intelligence officials
Alvaro Jose Baldizon and Roger Miranda Bengoechea have provided insider
information connecting the top levels of Castro’s narco-terrorist
operation to top Sandinista leaders Tomas Borge and Umberto Ortega.
Cuban intelligence official Gerardo Peraza has confirmed Gen. Sejna’s
information that the Cuban DGI is completely subservient to the Soviet
KGB (now Russian FSB). Additional defectors and mountains of evidence
have proven beyond reasonable doubt that Castro and his Soviet/Russian
masters are neck deep in the global drug offensive. Fidel attempted to
dodge the damning evidence over a decade ago by arresting and executing
a few subordinates and claiming that their drug activities were rogue
operations. None but the willfully blind or hopelessly gullible (and,
unfortunately, there is an abundance of each) bought that story then.
And since that time, more evidence has continued to pile up proving
that the Moscow-Havana drug cartel is as active as ever.
Evidence Ignored All
of the aforementioned information — and much more besides — has been
available to American government officials for many years. They have
pointedly ignored and suppressed it, and successfully prevented others
from making it more well known. Some of them feign ignorance, asking:
“Although the Russians, Cubans, and Chinese and their surrogates may
have been involved in the past, is there evidence they are still
involved today?”
Yes, there is abundant evidence of the
continuity of the Red drug strategy. Mao’s Communist heirs in China
have vastly expanded their drug trade. The KGB/GRU and their
subsidiaries are alive and well as ever, though they have undergone
some cosmetic reshuffling and name changes. Their drug trafficking
operations have escalated dramatically and are more open now since they
are carried out by front organizations which our government obligingly
refers to as the “Russian mafia,” the “Dominican mafia,” the “Haitian
mafia,” etc. Thanks to the protected sanctuary that our government’s
“Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” policies have given them,
the Red mafia dons can “hide in plain sight,” as the saying goes.
How
else does one explain the astounding fact that notorious drug lords,
such as Jorge Cabrera (Cuba), Grigori Loutchansky (Russia), and Ted
Sioeng (China) have not only had unparalleled personal access to the
White House during the current Clinton-Gore dominion, but their
associations with, and contributions to, the President have caused
barely a temporary ripple of concern about the potential national
security implications? Certainly there have been no serious attempts by
the media sleuths to search out and expose the connections of these
criminals to the strategic Red drug trade.
Cabrera, you may
recall, got caught in 1996 bringing three tons of cocaine into the
United States. Cabrera, reportedly, supplied federal prosecutors with
evidence of “large scale drug-dealing by the Cuban government.” He was
certainly in a position to have that evidence, having been one of
Castro’s privileged drug merchants. But the Clinton Justice Department
locked up Cabrera’s evidence as well as Cabrera. Russian mobster
Loutchansky, another Clinton financial angel, headed Nordex, a KGB
front corporation infamous for international drug trafficking and arms
smuggling operations. San Won “Ted” Sioeng, one of the largest illegal
donors to Clinton’s DNC political slush fund, is an agent for Red China
and a “business partner” of Cambodian drug kingpin Theng Bunma.
The
Clinton administration pretends to have a serious effort underway to
interdict drug shipments from Colombia. A major part of this effort is
the Joint Interagency Task Force (JITF) headquartered at Bone Key,
Florida. A report by the JITF in early 1998 offers the typical Clinton
viewpoint on “Colombian” narcotics traffic in Cuban airspace and Cuban
territorial waters. The report declared that, during the previous six
months of 1997, 39 drug flights had passed through — or “near” — Cuban
airspace, while Cuban territorial waters were used for many drug
shipments. Nevertheless, the Clintonites accepted Castro’s absurd
assertions that he was doing everything possible to stop these
“unauthorized” incursions by drug smugglers.
Representative
Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL) was decidedly more credible. He charged:
“The participation of the [Castro] tyranny in narco-trafficking has not
diminished, but has increased. And the Clinton Administration continues
systematically covering up that participation in spite of the fact that
the North American intel community knows the details of said
participation very well.”
Strategic Deception Space
does not permit us to deal here with the larger issue of Soviet
long-range strategic deception, of which the drug offensive is a key
part. Over the past ten years, the Soviet strategists have succeeded in
pulling off the most spectacular deception in history. They have
convinced virtually the entire world that the once-feared Evil Empire
is no more, that Communism has collapsed, that, having won the Cold
War, we can now rejoice and relax. But it is a lie, an elaborate,
deadly delusion — as has been very ably demonstrated in the
terrifyingly accurate analyses and forecasts provided by KGB defector
Anatoliy Golitsyn. In his book New Lies for Old (which was completed in
1980 and published in 1984), Golitsyn uncannily predicted, among other
things, the emergence of a Gorbachev-style “reformer” who would preside
over the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the “liberalization” of the
Soviet empire.
Having carefully studied Soviet long-range
deception strategy for many years — from both the inside and the
outside — Golitsyn is uniquely qualified to assess developments in the
“former” Soviet Union. No other observer has come remotely close to
matching the accuracy of his analyses. Golitsyn has repeatedly warned
that the Soviet “collapse,” with its attendant upheaval and apparent
changes, is a stupendous deception designed to lure the West to its
destruction. His 1995 book, The Perestroika Deception, by far the most
reliable assessment of developments in “post-Soviet” Russia, leaves
little doubt that beneath the surface mask of turmoil and “reform,”
there runs a continuity of leadership and control. The Party, the
bureaucracy, the military, the police and intelligence services — the
essential instruments of Communist power — all remain intact, though
labels have been changed and chairs have been shuffled.
The
indisputable continuity of the drug offensive, in all of its Soviet,
Marxist-Leninist features, adds powerful support to Golitsyn’s thesis.
The recent elevation of Vladimir Putin to Prime Minister and President
should dislodge all illusions about any “break with the past” in
Russia. A career “Chekist” in the KGB, Putin headed Russia’s Federal
Security Service (FSB), the domestic successor organ to the KGB, before
becoming Prime Minister. Clearly, we are still facing the same old
enemy.
But America’s leaders refuse to acknowledge that fact.
They insist, instead, that we must continue to send billions of
American tax dollars to the “reformers” in Moscow, even as those
“reformers” return our favors with ever larger shipments of drugs.
Worse still, our policymakers continue to insist that our law
enforcement and intelligence agencies must share information and
expertise with their “former” Communist counterparts, in order to help
them “fight” their organized crime syndicates. Thus, we are helping our
enemies always to keep several steps ahead of our own law enforcement
and intelligence efforts.
What We Must Do The hard
truth is this: The war on drugs has not failed; it has never really
existed. Like the Korean War and Vietnam War, it has been a “no-win
war,” with “rules of engagement” treacherously crafted to cripple our
own forces and protect the enemy. As a consequence, what measures our
government has taken have been irrelevant and ineffective — or even
counterproductive. The United States has been targeted as an act of
war, and is the victim of a sustained offensive. The first order of
business of any credible response is to recognize and name the enemy,
and to sever all relations with, and stop all aid to, that enemy. If we
are unwilling to make that first step, it is pointless to continue the
pretense that we take this deadly war seriously.
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