Excerpt from the book titled “The History of a Miracle Drug” of Journalist Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P. Adams II.
Heroin, a relatively recent arrival on the drug scene, was regarded, like morphine before it, and opium before morphine, as a "miracle drug" that had the ability to "kill all pain and anger and bring relief to every sorrow." A single dose sends the average user into a deep, euphoric reverie. Repeated use, however, creates an intense physical craving in the human body chemistry and changes the average person into a slavish addict whose entire existence revolves around his daily dosage. Sudden withdrawal can produce vomiting, violent convulsions, or fatal respiratory failure. An overdose cripples the body's central nervous system, plunges the victim into a, deep coma, and usually produces death within a matter of minutes. Heroin addiction destroys man's normal social instincts, including sexual desire, and turns the addict into a lone predator who willingly resorts to any crime-burglary, armed robbery, armed assault, prostitution, or shoplifting-for money to maintain his habit. The average addict spends $8,000 a year on heroin, and experts believe that New York State's addicts alone steal at least half a billion dollars annually to maintain their habits.
Heroin, a relatively recent arrival on the drug scene, was regarded, like morphine before it, and opium before morphine, as a "miracle drug" that had the ability to "kill all pain and anger and bring relief to every sorrow." A single dose sends the average user into a deep, euphoric reverie. Repeated use, however, creates an intense physical craving in the human body chemistry and changes the average person into a slavish addict whose entire existence revolves around his daily dosage. Sudden withdrawal can produce vomiting, violent convulsions, or fatal respiratory failure. An overdose cripples the body's central nervous system, plunges the victim into a, deep coma, and usually produces death within a matter of minutes. Heroin addiction destroys man's normal social instincts, including sexual desire, and turns the addict into a lone predator who willingly resorts to any crime-burglary, armed robbery, armed assault, prostitution, or shoplifting-for money to maintain his habit. The average addict spends $8,000 a year on heroin, and experts believe that New York State's addicts alone steal at least half a billion dollars annually to maintain their habits.
Although physicians had used various forms of opium for three or four thousand years, it was not until 1805 that medical science finally extracted pure morphine from raw opium. Orally taken, morphine soon became an important medical anesthetic, but it was not until 1858 that two American doctors first experimented with the use of the hypodermic needle to inject morphine directly into the bloodstream. These discoveries were important medical breakthroughs, and they greatly improved the quality of medical treatment in the nineteenth century.
However, widespread use of morphine and opium-based medicines such as codeine soon produced a serious drug addiction problem. In 1821 the English writer Thomas De Quincey first drew attention to the problem of post-treatment addiction when he published an essay entitled, Confessions of an English OpiumEater. De Quincey had become addicted during his student days at Oxford University, and remained an addict for the rest of his life. Finally recognizing the seriousness of the addiction problem, medical science devoted considerable pharmacological research to finding a nonaddicting pain killer-a search that eventually led to the discovery and popularization of heroin.
Hailed as a "miracle drug" by medical experts around the globe, heroin was widely prescribed as a nonaddicting cure-all for whatever ails you, and soon became one of the most popular patent medicines on the market. The drug's popularity encouraged imitators, and a Saint Louis pharmaceutical company offered a "Sample Box Free to Physicians" of its "Dissolve on the Tongue Antikamnia & Heroin Tablets." And in 1906 the American Medical Association (AMA) approved heroin for general use and advised that it be used "in place of morphine in various painful infections."
However, the sharp decline in legal pharmaceutical output by no means put an end to widespread heroin addiction. Aggressive criminal syndicates shifted the center of world heroin production from legitimate pharmaceutical factories in Europe to clandestine laboratories in Shanghai and Tientsin, China. Owned and operated by a powerful Chinese secret society, these laboratories started to supply vast quantities of illicit heroin to corrupt Chinese warlords, European criminal syndicates, and American mafiosi like Lucky Luciano. In Marseille, France, fledgling Corsican criminal syndicates opened up smaller laboratories and began producing for European markets and export to the United States.
While law enforcement efforts failed to stem the flow of illicit heroin into the United States during the 1930s, the outbreak of World War II seriously disrupted international drug traffic. Wartime border security measures and a shortage of ordinary commercial shipping made it nearly impossible for traffickers to smuggle heroin into the United States. Distributors augmented dwindling supplies by "cutting" (adulterating) heroin with increasingly greater proportions of sugar or quinine; while most packets of heroin sold in the United States were 28 percent pure in 1938, only three years later they were less than 3 percent pure. As a result of all this, many American addicts were forced to undergo involuntary withdrawal from their habits, and by the end of World War 11 the American addict population had dropped to less than twenty thousand." In fact, as the war drew to a close, there was every reason to believe that the scourge of heroin had finally been purged from the United States. Heroin supplies were nonexistent, international criminal syndicates were in disarray, and the addict population was reduced to manageable proportions for the first time in half a century.
But the disappearance of heroin addiction from the American scene was not to be. Within several years, in large part thanks to the nature of U.S. foreign policy after World War II, the drug syndicates were back in business, the poppy fields in Southeast Asia started to expand and heroin refineries multiplied both in Marseille and Hong Kong. How did we come to inflict this heroin plague on ourselves?
However, the mid-1960s marked the peak of the European heroin industry, and shortly thereafter it went into a sudden decline. In the early 1960s the Italian government launched a crackdown on the Sicilian Mafia, and in 1967 the Turkish government announced that it would begin phasing out cultivation of opium poppies on the Anatolian plateau in order to deprive Marseille's illicit heroin laboratories of their most important source of raw material. Unwilling to abandon their profitable narcotics racket, the American Mafia and Corsican syndicates shifted their sources of supply to Southeast Asia, where surplus opium production and systematic government corruption created an ideal climate for large-scale heroin production.
And once again American foreign policy played a role in creating these favorable conditions. During the early 1950s the CIA had backed the formation of a Nationalist Chinese guerrilla army in Burma, which still controls almost a third of the world's illicit opium supply, and in Laos the CIA created a Meo mercenary army whose commander manufactured heroin for sale to Americans GIs in South Vietnam. The State Department provided unconditional support for corrupt governments openly engaged in the drug traffic. In late 1969 new heroin laboratories sprang up in the tri-border area where Burma, Thailand, and Laos converge, and unprecedented quantities of heroin started flooding into the United States. Fueled by these seemingly limitless supplies of heroin, America's total number of addicts skyrocketed.
The Logistics of Heroin
America's heroin addicts are victims of the most profitable criminal enterprise known to man-an enterprise that involves millions of peasant farmers in the mountains of Asia, thousands of corrupt government officials, disciplined criminal syndicates, and agencies of the United States government. America's heroin addicts are the final link in a chain of secret criminal transactions that begin in the opium fields of Asia, pass through clandestine heroin laboratories in Europe and Asia, and enter the United States through a maze of international smuggling routes.
Almost all of the world's illicit opium is grown in a narrow band of mountains that stretches along the southern rim of the great Asian land mass, from Turkey's and Anatolian plateau, through the northern reaches of the Indian subcontinent, all the way to the rugged mountains of northern Laos. Within this 4,500-mile stretch of mountain landscape, peasants and tribesmen of eight different nations harvest some fourteen hundred tons a year of raw opium, which eventually reaches the world's heroin and opium addicts." A small percentage of this fourteen hundred tons is diverted from legitimate pharmaceutical production in Turkey, Iran, and India, but most of it is grown expressly for the international narcotics traffic in South and Southeast Asia. Although Turkey was the major source of American narcotics through the 1960s, the hundred tons of raw opium its licensed peasant farmers diverted from legitimate production never accounted for more than 7 percent of the world's illicit supply. About 24 percent is harvested by poppy farmers in South Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India). However, most of this is consumed by local opium addicts, and only insignificant quantities find their way to Europe or the United States. It is Southeast Asia that has become the world's most important source of illicit opium. Every year the hill tribe farmers of Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle region-northeastern Burma, northern Thailand, and northern Laos-harvest approximately one thousand tons of raw opium, or about 70 percent of the world's illicit supply.
Despite countless minor variations, all of Asia's poppy farmers use the same basic techniques when they cultivate the opium poppy. The annual crop cycle begins in late summer or early fall as the farmers scatter handfuls of tiny poppy seeds across the surface of their hoed fields. At maturity the greenish-colored poppy plant has one main tubular stem, which stands about three or four feet high, and perhaps half a dozen to a dozen smaller stems. About three months after planting, each stem produces a brightly colored flower; gradually the petals drop to the ground, exposing a green seed pod about the size and shape of a bird's egg. For reasons still unexplained by botanists, the seed pod synthesizes a milky white sap soon after the petals have fallen away. This sap is opium, and the farmers harvest it by cutting a series of shallow parallel incisions across the bulb's surface with a special curved knife. As the white sap seeps out of the incisions and congeals on the bulb's surface, it changes to a brownish-black color. The farmer collects the opium by scraping off the bulb with a flat, dull knife. Even in this age of jumbo jets and supersonic transports, raw opium still moves from the poppy fields to the morphine refineries on horseback. There are few roads in these underdeveloped mountain regions, and even where there are, smugglers generally prefer to stick to the mountain trails where there are fewer police. Most traffickers prefer to do their morphine refining close to the poppy fields, since compact morphine bricks are much easier to smuggle than bundles of pungent, jellylike opium. Although they are separated by over four thousand miles, criminal "chemists" of the Middle East and Southeast Asia use roughly the same technique to extract pure morphine from opium. The chemist begins the process by heating water in an oil drum over a wood fire until his experienced index finger tells him that the temperature is just right. Next, raw opium is dumped into the drum and stirred with a heavy stick until it dissolves. At the propitious moment the chemist adds ordinary lime fertilizer to the steaming solution, precipitating out organic waste and leaving the morphine suspended in the chalky white water near the surface. While filtering the water through an ordinary piece of flannel cloth to remove any residual waste matter, the chemist pours the solution into another oil drum. As the solution is heated and stirred a second time, concentrated ammonia is added, causing the morphine to solidify and drop to the bottom. Once more the solution is filtered through flannel, leaving chunky white kernels of morphine on the cloth. Once dried and packaged for shipment, the morphine usually weighs about 10 percent of what the raw opium from which it was extracted weighed.
STAGE ONE. To produce ten kilos of pure heroin (the normal daily output of many labs), the chemist heats ten kilos of morphine and ten kilos of acetic anhydride in an enamel bin or glass flask. After being heated six hours at exactly 185' F., the morphine and acid become chemically bonded, creating an impure form of diacetylmorphine (heroin).
STAGE TWO . To remove impurities from the compound, the solution is treated with water and chloroform until the impurities precipitate out, leaving a somewhat higher grade of diacetylmorphine.
STAGE THREE. The solution is drained off into another container, and sodium carbonate is added until the crude heroin particles begin to solidify and drop to the bottom.
STAGE FOUR. After the heroin particles are filtered out of the sodium carbonate solution under pressure by a small suction pump, they are purified in a solution of alcohol and activated charcoal. The new mixture is heated until the alcohol begins to evaporate, leaving relatively pure granules of heroin at the bottom of the flask.
STAGE FIVE. This final stage produces the fine white powder prized by American addicts, and requires considerable skill on the part of an underworld chemist. The heroin is placed in a large flask and dissolved in alcohol. As ether and hydrochloric acid are added to the solution, tiny white flakes begin to form. After the flakes are filtered out under pressure and dried through a special process, the end result is a white powder, 80 to 99 percent pure, known as "no. 4 heroin." In the hands of a careless chemist the volatile ether gas may ignite and produce a violent explosion that could level the clandestine laboratory. Once it is packaged in plastic envelopes, heroin is ready for its trip to the United States. An infinite variety of couriers and schemes are used to smuggle stewardesses, Filipino diplomats, businessmen, Marseille pimps, and even Playboy playmates. But regardless of the means used to smuggle, almost all of these shipments are financed and organized by one of the American Mafia's twenty-four regional groups, or "families." Although the top bosses of organized crime never even see, much less touch, the heroin, their vast financial resources and their connections with Chinese syndicates in Hong Kong and Corsican gangs in Marseille and Indochina play a key role in the importation of America's heroin supply. The top bosses usually deal in bulk shipments of twenty to a hundred kilos of no. 4 heroin, for which they have to advance up to $27,000 per kilo in cash. After a shipment arrives, the bosses divide it into wholesale lots of one to ten kilos for sale to their underlings in the organized crime families. A lower-ranking mafia so, known as a "kilo connection" in the trade, dilutes the heroin by 50 percent and breaks it into smaller lots, which he turns over to two or three distributors. From there the process of dilution and profit making continues downward through another three levels in the distribution network until it finally reaches the street 25 By this time the heroin's value has increased tenfold to $225,000 a kilo, and it is so heavily diluted that the average street packet sold to an addict is less than 5 percent pure.
To an average American who witnesses the daily horror of the narcotics traffic at the street level, it must seem inconceivable that his government could be in any way implicated in the international narcotics traffic. The media have tended to reinforce this outlook by depicting the international heroin traffic as a medieval morality play: the traffickers are portrayed as the basest criminals, continually on the run from the minions of law and order; and American diplomats and law enforcement personnel are depicted as modern-day knight serrant staunchly committed to the total, immediate eradication of heroin trafficking. Unfortunately, the characters in this drama cannot be so easily stereotyped. American diplomats and secret agents have been involved in the narcotics traffic at three levels: (1) coincidental complicity by allying with groups actively engaged in the drug traffic; (2) abetting the traffic by covering up for known heroin traffickers and condoning their involvement; (3) and active engagement in the transport of opium and heroin. It is ironic, to say the least, that America's heroin plague is of its own making.
America's addicts could easily be won back to their heroin persuasion. For America itself had long had a drug problem, one that dated back to the nineteen century.
Addiction in America: The Root of the Problem
Long before opium and heroin addiction became a law enforcement problem, it was a major cause for social concern in the United States. By the late 1800s Americans were taking opium-based drugs with the same alarming frequency as they now consume tranquilizers, pain killers, and diet pills. Even popular children's medicines were frequently opium based. When heroin was introduced into the United States by the German pharmaceutical company, Bayer, in 1898, it was, as has already been mentioned, declared non addictive, and was widely prescribed in hospitals and by private practitioners as a safe substitute for morphine. After opium smoking was outlawed in the United States ten years later, many opium addicts turned to heroin as a legal substitute, and America's heroin problem was born,
The Royal Thai Opium Monopoly Chinese immigrants arriving in Bangkok during the early nineteenth century found unparalleled employment opportunities as merchants, artisans, and craftsmen. They soon dominated Thailand's expanding commerce and became a majority in her major cities. In 1821 one Western observer calculated that there were 440,000 Chinese in Thailand; as early as 1880 other observers stated that more than half of Bangkok's population was Chinese. And with the Chinese came the opium problem. In 1811 King Rama 11 promulgated Thailand's first formal ban on the sale and consumption of opium. In 1839 another Thai king reiterated the prohibition and ordered the death penalty for major traffickers. But despite the good intentions of royal courts, legislative efforts were doomed to failure. Although Chinese distributors could be arrested and punished, the British merchant captains who smuggled the illicit narcotic were virtually immune to prosecution. Whenever a British captain was arrested, ominous rumblings issued from the British Embassy, and the captain was soon freed to smuggle in another cargo. Finally, in 1852 King Mongkut (played by Yul Brynner in The King and 1) bowed to British pressures and established a royal opium franchise that was leased to a wealthy Chinese merchant.
In 1907 the government eliminated the Chinese middleman and assumed direct responsibility for the management of the opium trade. Royal administration did not impede progress, however; an all time high of 147 tons of opium was imported from India in 1913; the number of dens and retail shops jumped from twelve hundred in 1880 to three thousand in 1917;28 the number of opium addicts reached two hundred thousand by 1929 and the opium profits continued to provide between 15 and 20 percent of all government tax revenues. Responding to mounting international opposition to legalized opium trafficking, the Thai government reduced the volume of the opium monopoly's business in the 1920s. By 1930 almost 2,000 shops and dens were closed, but the remaining 837 were still handling 89,000 customers a day. The monopoly continued to reduce its services, so that by 1938 it only imported thirty-two tons of opium and generated 8 percent of government revenues.
Unfortunately, these rather halfhearted measures had a minimal impact on the addict population, and did little more than give the smugglers more business and make their work more profitable. Because the royal monopoly had always sold only expensive Indian and Middle Eastern opium, cheaper opium had been smuggled overland from southern China since the mid nineteenth century. There was so much smuggling that the royal monopoly's prices throughout the country were determined by the availability of smuggled opium. The further an addict got from the northern frontier, the more he had to pay for his opium.
The Politics of Heroin in South Vietnam
Geography and politics have dictated the fundamental "laws" that have governed South Vietnam's narcotics traffic for the last twenty years. Since opium is not grown inside South Vietnam, all of her drugs have to be imported from the Golden Triangle region to the north. Stretching across 150,000 square miles of northeastern Burma, northern Thailand, and northern Laos, the mountainous Golden Triangle is the source of all the opium and heroin sold in South Vietnam. Although it is the world's most important source of illicit opium, morphine, and heroin, the Golden Triangle is landlocked, cut off from local and international markets by long distances and rugged terrain. Thus, once processed and packaged in the region's refineries, the Golden Triangle's narcotics follow one of two "corridors" to reach the world's markets. The first and most important route is the overland corridor that begins as a maze of mule trails in the Shan hills of northeastern Burma and ends as a four-lane highway in downtown Bangkok. Most of Burma's and Thailand's opium follows the overland route to Bangkok and from there finds its way into international markets, the most important of which is Hong Kong. The second route is the air corridor that begins among the scattered dirt airstrips of northern Laos and ends at Saigon's international airport. The opium reaching Saigon from Burma or Thailand is usually packed into northwestern Laos on muleback before being flown into South Vietnam. While very little opium, morphine, or heroin travels from Saigon to Hong Kong, the South Vietnamese capital appears to be the major transshipment point for Golden Triangle narcotics heading for Europe and the United States.
Since Vietnam's major source of opium lies on the other side of the rugged Annamite Mountains, every Vietnamese civilian or military group that wants to finance its political activities by selling narcotics has to have (1) a connection in Laos and (2) access to air transport. When the Binh Xuyen controlled Saigon's opium dens during the First Indochina War, the French MACG provided these services through its officers fighting with Laotian guerrillas and its air transport links between Saigon and the mountain marquis. Later Vietnamese politico-military groups have used family connections, intelligence agents serving abroad, and Indochina's Corsican underworld as their Laotian connection. While almost any high-ranking Vietnamese can establish such contacts without too much difficulty, the problem of securing reliable air transport between Laos and the Saigon area has always limited narcotics smuggling to only the most powerful of the Vietnamese elite.
When Ngo Dinh Nhu, brother and chief adviser of South Vietnam's late president, Ngo Dinh Diem, decided to revive the opium traffic to finance his repression of mounting armed insurgency and political dissent, he used Vietnamese intelligence agents operating in Laos and Indochina's Corsican underworld as his contacts. From 1958 to 1960 Nhu relied mainly on small Corsican charter airlines for transport, but in 1961-1962 he also used the First Transport Group (which was then flying intelligence missions into Laos for the CIA and was under the control of Nguyen Cao Ky) to ship raw opium to Saigon. During this period and the following years, 1965-1967, when Ky was premier, most of the opium seems to have been finding its way to South Vietnam through the Vietnamese air force. By mid 1970 there was evidence that high-ranking officials in the Vietnamese navy, customs, army, port authority, National Police, and National Assembly's lower house were competing with the air force for the dominant position in the traffic. To a casual observer, it must have appeared that the strong central control exercised during the Ky and the Diem administrations had given way to a laissez-faire free-for-all under the Thieu government.
What seems like chaotic competition among poorly organized smuggling rings actually appears to be, on closer examination, a fairly disciplined power struggle between the leaders of Saigon's three most powerful political factions: the air force, which remains under Vice-president Ky's control; the army, navy, and lower house, which are loyal to President Thieu; and the customs, port authority, and National Police, where the factions loyal to Premier Khiem have considerable influence. However, to see through the confusion to the lines of authority that bound each of these groups to a higher power requires some appreciation of the structure of Vietnamese political factions and the traditions of corruption.
First Republic of VietNam - Diem's Dynasty and the Nhu Bandits
Shortly after the Binh Xuyen gangsters were driven out of Saigon in May 1955, President Diem, a rigidly pious Catholic, kicked off a determined antiopium campaign by burning opium-smoking paraphernalia in a dramatic public ceremony. Opium dens were shut down, addicts found it difficult to buy opium, and Saigon was no longer even a minor transit point in international narcotics traffic. However, only three years later the government suddenly abandoned its moralistic crusade and took steps to revive the illicit opium traffic, The beginnings of armed insurgency in the countryside and political dissent in the cities had shown Ngo Dinh Nhu, President Diem's brother and head of the secret police, that he needed more money to expand the scope of his intelligence work and political repression. Although the CIA and the foreign aid division of the State Department had provided generous funding for those activities over the previous three years, personnel problems and internal difficulties forced the U.S. Embassy to deny his request for increased aid. But Nhu was determined to go ahead, and decided to revive the opium traffic to provide the necessary funding. Although most of Saigon's opium dens had been shut for three years, the city's thousands of Chinese and Vietnamese addicts were only too willing to resume or expand their habits. Nhu used his contacts with powerful Cholon Chinese syndicate leaders to reopen the dens and set up a distribution network for smuggled opium. Within a matter of months hundreds of opium dens had been reopened, and five years later one Time-Life correspondent estimated that there were twenty-five hundred dens operating openly in Saigon's sister city Cholon. To keep these outlets supplied, Nhu established two pipelines from the Laotian poppy fields to South Vietnam. The major pipeline was a small charter airline, Air Laos Commercial, managed by Indochina's most flamboyant Corsican gangster, Bonaventure "Rock" Francisci. Although there were at least four small Corsican airlines smuggling between Laos and South Vietnam, only Francisci's dealt directly with Nhu. According to Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, a former high-ranking CIA officer in Saigon, their relationship began in 1958 when Francisci made a deal with Ngo Dinh Nhu to smuggle Laotian opium into South Vietnam. After Nhu guaranteed his opium shipment safe conduct, Francisci's fleet of twin-engine Beechcrafts began making clandestine airdrops inside South Vietnam on a daily basis.
Nhu supplemented these shipments by dispatching intelligence agents to Laos with orders to send back raw opium on the Vietnamese air force transports that shuttled back and forth carrying agents and supplies. While Nhu seems to have dealt with the Corsicans personally, the intelligence missions to Laos were managed by the head of his secret police apparatus, Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen. Although most accounts have portrayed Nhu as the Diem regime's Machiavelli, many insiders feel that it was the diminutive ex-seminary student, Dr. Tuyen, who had the real lust and capacity for intrigue. As head of the secret police, euphemistically titled Office of Social and Political Study, Dr. Tuyen commanded a vast intelligence network that included the CIA-financed special forces, the Military Security Service, and most importantly, the clandestine Can Lao party. Through the Can Lao party, Tuyen recruited spies and political cadres in every branch of the military and civil bureaucracy. Promotions were strictly controlled by the central government, and those who cooperated with Dr. Tuyen were rewarded with rapid advancement. With profits from the opium trade and other officially sanctioned corruption, the Office of Social and Political Study was able to hire thousands of cyclo-drivers, dance hall girls ("taxi dancers"), and street vendors as part-time spies for an intelligence network that soon covered every block of Saigon-Cholon. Instead of maintaining surveillance on a suspect by having him followed, Tuyen simply passed the word to his "door-to-door" intelligence net and got back precise, detailed reports on the subject's movements, meetings, and conversations. Some observers think that Tuyen may have had as many as a hundred thousand full- and part-time agents operating in South Vietnam. Through this remarkable system Tuyen kept detailed dossiers on every important figure in the country, including particularly complete files on Diem, Madame Nhu, and Nhu himself which he sent out of the country as a form of personal "life insurance.
Since Tuyen was responsible for much of the Diem regime's foreign intelligence work, he was able to disguise his narcotics dealings in Laos under the cover of ordinary intelligence work. Vietnamese undercover operations in Laos were primarily directed at North Vietnam and were related to a CIA program started in 1954. Under the direction of Col. Edward Lansdale and his team of CIA men, two small groups of North Vietnamese had been recruited as agents, smuggled out of Haiphong, trained in Saigon, and then sent back to North Vietnam in 1954-1955. During this same period Civil Air Transport (now Air America) smuggled over eight tons of arms and equipment into Haiphong in the regular refugee shipments authorized by the Geneva Accords for the eventual use of these teams. As the refugee exchanges came to an end in May 1955 and the North Vietnamese tightened up their coastal defenses, CIA and Vietnamese intelligence turned to Laos as an alternate infiltration route and listening post. According to Bernard Yoh, then an intelligence adviser to President Diem, Tuyen sent ten to twelve agents into Laos in 1958 after they had completed an extensive training course under the supervision of Col. Le Quang Tung's Special Forces. When Yoh sent one of his own intelligence teams into Laos to work with Tuyen's agents during the Laotian crisis of 1961, he was amazed at their incompetence. Yoh could not understand why agents without radio training or knowledge of even the most basic undercover procedures would have been kept in the field for so long, until he discovered that their major responsibility was smuggling gold and opium into South Vietnam. After purchasing opium and gold, Tuyen's agents had it delivered to airports in southern Laos near Savannakhet or Pakse. There it was picked up and flown to Saigon by Vietnamese air force transports which were then under the command of Nguyen Cao Ky, whose official assignment was shuttling Tuyen's espionage agents back and forth from Laos. Dr. Tuyen also used diplomatic personnel to smuggle Laotian opium into South Vietnam. In 1958 the director of Vietnam's psychological warfare department transferred one of his undercover agents to the Foreign Ministry and sent him to Pakse, Laos, as a consular official to direct clandestine operations against North Vietnam. Within three months Tuyen, using a little psychological warfare himself, had recruited the agent for his smuggling apparatus and had him sending regular opium shipments to Saigon in his diplomatic pouch.
Despite the considerable efforts Dr. Tuyen had devoted to organizing these "intelligence activities" they remained a rather meager supplement to the Corsican opium shipments until May 1961 when newly elected President John F. Kennedy authorized the implementation of an interdepartmental task force report which suggested:
In North Vietnam, using the foundation established by intelligence operations, form networks of resistance, covert bases and teams for sabotage and light harassment. A capability should be created by MAAG in the South Vietnamese Army to conduct Ranger raids and similar military actions in North Vietnam as might prove necessary or appropriate. Such actions should try to avoid the outbreak of extensive resistance or insurrection which could not be supported to the extent necessary to stave off repression.
Conduct overflights for dropping of leaflets to harass the Communists and to maintain the morale of North Vietnamese population . . . . The CIA was assigned to carry out this mission and incorporated a fictitious parent company in Washington, D.C., Aviation Investors, to provide a cover for its operational company, Vietnam Air Transport. The agency dubbed the project "Operation Haylift." Vietnam Air Transport, or VIAT, hired Col. Nguyen Cao Ky and selected members of his First Transport Group to fly CIA commandos into North Vietnam via Laos or the Gulf of Tonkin.
However, Colonel Ky was dismissed from Operation Haylift less than two years after it began, One of VIAT's technical employees, Mr. S. M. Mustard, reported to a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1968 that "Col. Ky took advantage of this situation to fly opium from Laos to Saigon. Since some of the commandos hired by the CIA were Dr. Tuyen's intelligence agents, it was certainly credible that Ky was involved with the opium and gold traffic. Mustard implied that the CIA had fired Ky for his direct involvement in this traffic; Col. Do Khac Mai, then deputy commander of the air force, says that Ky was fired for another reason. Sometime after one of its two-engine C-47s crashed off the North Vietnamese coast, VIAT brought in four-engine C-54 aircraft from Taiwan. Since Colonel Ky had only been trained in two-engine aircraft he had to make a number of training flights to upgrade his skills; on one of these occasions he took some Cholon dance hall girls for a spin over the city. This romantic hayride was in violation of Operation Haylift's strict security, and the CIA speedily replaced Ky and his transport pilots with Nationalist Chinese ground crews and pilots. This change probably reduced the effectiveness of Dr. Tuyen's Laotian "intelligence activities," and forced Nhu to rely more heavily on the Corsican charter airlines for regular opium shipments.
Even though the opium traffic and other forms of corruption generated enormous amounts of money for Nhu's police state, nothing could keep the regime in power once the Americans had turned against it. For several years they had been frustrated with Diem's failure to fight corruption, In March 1961 a national intelligence estimate done for President Kennedy complained of President Diem:
"Many feel that he is unable to rally the people in the fight against the Communists because of his reliance on one-man rule, his toleration of corruption even to his immediate entourage, and his refusal to relax a rigid system of controls."
The outgoing ambassador, Elbridge Durbrow, had made many of the same complaints, and in a cable to the secretary of state, he urged the Dr. Tuyen and Nhu be sent out of the country and their secret police be disbanded. He also suggested that Diem make a public announcement of disbandment of Can Lao party or at least its surfacing, with names and positions of all members made known publicly. Purpose of this step would be to eliminate atmosphere of fear and suspicion and reduce public belief in favoritism and corruption, all of which the party's semi-covert status has given rise to.
In essence, Nhu had reverted to the Binh Xuyen's formula for combating urban guerrilla warfare by using systematic corruption to finance intelligence and counterinsurgency operations. However, the Americans could not understand what Nhu was trying to do and kept urging him to initiate "reforms." When Nhu flatly refused, the Americans tried to persuade President Diem to send his brother out of the country. And when Diem agreed, but then backed away from his promise, the U.S. Embassy decided to overthrow Diem.
On November 1, 1963, with the full support of the U.S. Embassy, a group of Vietnamese generals launched a coup, and within a matter of hours captured the capital and executed Diem and Nhu. But the coup not only toppled the Diem regime, it destroyed Nhu's police state apparatus and its supporting system of corruption, which, if it had failed to stop the National Liberation Front (NLF) in the countryside, at least guaranteed a high degree of "security" in Saigon and the surrounding area.
Shortly after the coup the chairman of the NLF, Nguyen Huu Tho, told an Australian journalist that the dismantling of the police state had been "gifts from heaven" for the revolutionary movement:
"... the police apparatus set up over the years with great care by Diem is utterly shattered, especially at the base. The principal chiefs of security and the secret police on which mainly depended the protection of the regime and the repression of the revolutionary Communist Viet Cong movement, have been eliminated, purged."
Within three months after the anti-Diem coup, General Nguyen Khanh emerged as Saigon's new "strong man" and dominated South Vietnam's political life from January 1964 until he, too, fell from grace, and went into exile twelve months later. Although a skillful coup plotter, General Khanh was incapable of using power once he got into office. Under his leadership, Saigon politics became an endless quadrille of coups, countercoups, and demicoups, Khanh failed to build up any sort of intelligence structure to replace Nhu's secret police, and during this critical period none of Saigon's rival factions managed to centralize the opium traffic or other forms of corruption. The political chaos was so severe that serious pacification work ground to a halt in the countryside, and Saigon became an open city. By mid 1964 NLF-controlled territory encircled the city, and NLF cadres entered Saigon almost at will.
To combat growing security problems in the capital district, American pacification experts dreamed up the Hop Tac ("cooperation") program. As originally conceived, South Vietnamese troops would sweep the areas surrounding Saigon and build a "giant oil spot" of pacified territory that would spread outward from the capital region to cover the Mekong Delta and eventually all of South Vietnam. The program was launched with a good deal of fanfare on September 12, 1964, as South Vietnamese infantry plunged into some NLF controlled pineapple fields southwest of Saigon. Everything ran like clockwork for two days until infantry units suddenly broke off contact with the NLF and charged into Saigon to take part in one of the many unsuccessful coups that took place with distressing frequency during General Khanh's twelve-month interregnum.
These grave economic and social conditions [the influx of refugees, etc.] have furnished the Vietcong with an opportunity to cause trouble, and squads of Communist propagandists, saboteurs, and terrorists are infiltrating the city in growing numbers; it is even said that the equivalent of a Vietcong battalion of Saigon youth has been taken out, trained, and then sent back here to lie low, with hidden arms, awaiting orders. . . . The National Liberation Front radio is still calling for acts of terror ("One American killed for every city block"), citing the continued use by the Americans of tear gas and crop destroying chemical sprays, together with the bombing of civilians, as justification for reprisals . . . .
Soon after Henry Cabot Lodge took office as ambassador to South Vietnam for the second time in August 1965, an Embassy briefer told him that the Hop Tac program was a total failure. Massive sweeps around the capital's perimeter did little to improve Saigon's internal security because
The threat-which is substantial-comes from the enemy within, and the solution does not lie within the responsibility of the Hop Tac Council: it is a problem for the Saigon police and intelligence communities. In other words, modern counterinsurgency planning with its computers and game theories had failed to do the job, and it was time to go back to the tried-and-true methods of Ngo Dinh Nhu and the Binh Xuyen bandits. When the French government faced Viet Minh terrorist assaults and bombings in 1947, they allied themselves with the bull-necked Bay Vien, giving this notorious river pirate a free hand to organize the city's corruption on an unprecedented scale. Confronted with similar problems in 1965-1966 and realizing the nature of their mistake with Diem and Nhu, Ambassador Lodge and the U.S. mission decided to give their full support to Premier Nguyen Cao Ky and his power broker, Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The fuzzy-cheeked Ky had a dubious reputation in some circles, and President Diem referred to him as "that cowboy," a term Vietnamese then reserved for only the most flamboyant of Cholon gangsters.
These realignments in the balance of political power had an impact on the opium traffic. Despite his precipitous political decline, Air Vice-Marshal Ky retained control over the air force, particularly the transport wing. Recently, the air force's transport wing has been identified as one of the most active participants in South Vietnam's heroin smuggling (see pages 187-188). Gen. Tran Thien Khiem, minister of the interior (who was to emerge as a major faction leader himself when he became prime minister in September 1969) and a nominal Thieu supporter, inherited control of Saigon's police apparatus, Tan Son Nhut customs, and the Saigon port authority. However, these noteworthy internal adjustments were soon dwarfed in importance by two dramatic developments in South Vietnam's narcotics traffic the increase in heroin and morphine base exports destined for the American market and the heroin epidemic among American GIs serving in South Vietnam.
South Vietnam: Heroin Achieves Full Market Potential
The quantum leap in the size and profitability of South Vietnam's narcotics trade, due both to the new and burgeoning GI market as well as the increased demand on the part of the international narcotics syndicates, resulted in a number of new mini-cliques coming into the traffic.
But by 1970 the traffic appeared to be divided among three major factions: (1) elements in the South Vietnamese air force, particularly the air transport wing; (2) the civil bureaucracy (i.e. police, customs and port authority), increasingly under the control of Prime Minister Khiem's family; and (3) the army, navy and National Assembly's lower house, who answer to President Thieu. In spite, or perhaps because, of the enormous amounts of money involved, there was considerable animosity among these three major factions.
"Involvement" in the nation's narcotics traffic took a number of different forms. Usually it meant that influential Vietnamese political and military leaders worked as consultants and protectors for Trieu chau Chinese syndicates, which actually managed wholesale distribution, packaging, refining, and some of the smuggling. (Trieu chau are Chinese from the Swatow region of southern China, and Trieu chau syndicates have controlled much of Asia's illicit drug traffic since the mid 1800s and have played a role in China's organized crime rather similar to the Sicilian Mafia in Italy and the Corsican syndicates in France. See Chapter 6 for more details.) The importance of this protection, however, should not be underestimated, for without it the heroin traffic could not continue. Also, powerful Vietnamese military and civil officials are directly involved in much of the actual smuggling of narcotics into South Vietnam. The Vietnamese military has access to aircraft, trucks, and ships that the Chinese do not, and most of the Vietnamese elite have a much easier time bringing narcotics through customs and border checkpoints than their Chinese clients
The Opium Airlift Command
Of South Vietnam's three major narcotics rings, the air transport wing loyal to Air Vice-Marshal Ky must still be considered the most professional. Although Ky's apparatus lost control over the internal distribution network following his post-Tet political decline in 1968, his faction continues to manage much of the narcotics smuggling between Vietnam and Laos through the air force and its relations with Laotian traffickers. With over ten years of experience, it has connections with the Lao elite that the other two factions cannot even hope to equal. Rather than buying heroin through a maze of middlemen, Ky's apparatus deals directly with a heroin laboratory operating somewhere in the Vientiane region. According to a U.S. police adviser stationed in Vientiane, this laboratory is supposed to be one of the most active in Laos, and is managed by a Chinese entrepreneur named Huu Tim Heng. Heng is the link between one of Laos's major opium merchants, Gen. Ouane Rattikone (former commander in chief of the Laotian army), and the air transport wing heroin ring. From the viewpoint of the narcotics traffic, Huu Tim Heng's most important legitimate commercial venture is the Pepsi-Cola bottling factory on the outskirts of Vientiane. With Prime Minister Souvanna Phourna's son, Panya, as the official president, Heng and two other Chinese financiers began construction in 1965-1966. Although the presence of the prime minister's son at the head of the company qualified the venture for generous financial support from USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development), the plant has still not bottled a single Pepsi after five years of stop-start construction. The completed factory building has a forlorn, abandoned look about it. While Pepsi's competitors are mystified at the company's lac adaisical attitude, the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics has an answer to the riddle. Bureau sources report that Heng has been using his Pepsi operation as a cover for purchases of chemicals vital to the processing of heroin, such as ether and acetic anhydride, and for large financial transactions.
Once the heroin is processed and packaged in large, plastic envelopes, other experienced members of the Ky apparatus take charge of arranging shipment to South Vietnam. Mrs. Nguyen Thi Ly, Ky's elder sister, had directed much of the traffic from the Sedone Palace Hotel in Pakse when her brother was premier, but in 1967 she gave up her position as manager and moved back to Saigon. However, sources in Vientiane's Vietnamese community report that she and her husband have traveled between Saigon, Pakse, and Vientiane at least once a month since they returned to Vietnam. Mrs, Ly purchases heroin produced in Huu Tim Heng's clandestine laboratory and has it shipped to Pakse or Phnom Penh where it is picked up by Vietnamese air force transports.
In addition, the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics believes that General Loan's old assistant, Mai Den, may also be involved in this operation. After General Loan was wounded in May 1968, Mai Den was forced out of his position as director of the CIO's Foreign Intelligence Bureau, and he exiled himself to Bangkok. For two years this wily chameleon had used his CIO agents to weave a net of drug contacts across the Golden Triangle, and the Bureau of Narcotics has reason to believe he may still he using them.
Normally, those air force officers responsible for directing the flow of narcotics to South Vietnam purchase the drugs and have them delivered, often by the Laotian air force, to points in Laos, particularly Pakse, or else across the border in Pleiku Province, South Vietnam, or in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Most observers feel that the Cambodian capital has prempted Pleiku's importance as a drop point since the Vietnamese air force began daily sorties to Phnom Penh during the 1970 Cambodia invasion. In August 1971 The New York Times reported that the director of Vietnam customs "said he believed that planes of the South Vietnamese Air Force were the principal carriers" of heroin coming into South Vietnam." While the director is a Thieu appointee and his remark may be politically motivated, U.S. customs advisers, more objective observers, have stated that the air force regularly unloads large quantities of smuggled narcotics at Tan Son Nhut Air Base." Here Air Vice-Marshal Ky reigns like a feudal baron in his air-conditioned palace, surrounded by only his most loyal officers. As one U.S. air force adviser put it, "In order to get a job within shooting distance of the Vice Presidential palace a VNAF officer has to be intensely loyal to Ky.
The current commander of Tan Son Nhut and the air force's transport wing (renamed the Fifth Air Division in January 1971) is Col. Phan Phung Tien. Brother-in-law of one of Ky's close political advisers who died in the 1968 "accidents," Col. Tien served under Ky as a squadron commander in the First Transport Group from 1956 to 1960. He has remained one of Ky's most loyal followers, and one U.S. air force adviser recently described him as Ky's "revolutionary plotter" inside the air force.
Ever since the Cambodia invasion of May 1970, Fifth Air Division C-47, C-119, and C123 transports have been shuttling back and fo th between Phnom Penh and Tan Son Nhut with equipment and supplies for the Cambodian army, while two AC-47 gunships have flown nightly missions to Phnom Penh to provide perimeter defense for the Cambodian capital. All of these flights are supposed to return empty, but the director-general of Vietnam customs believes they are often filled with dutiable goods, gold, and narcotics. The director-general has singled out Colonel Tien for criticism in an interview with The New York Times in August 1971, labeling him "the least cooperative in his efforts to narrow the channels through which heroin reached Vietnam. Moreover, Vietnamese police officials report that Colonel Tien is extremely close to some of the powerful Corsican underworld figures who manage hotels and restaurants in Saigon. The accumulation of this kind of evidence has led many informed Vietnamese observers to conclude that Colonel Tien has become a central figure in Vietnam's narcotics traffic.
Second Republic of VietNam - Thieu Takes Command
In the wake of Air Vice-Marshal Ky's precipitous political decline, ranking military officers responsible to President Thieu appear to have emerged as the dominant narcotics traffickers in South Vietnam. Like his predecessors, President Diem and Premier Ky, President Thieu has studiously avoided involving himself personally in political corruption. However, his power broker, presidential intelligence adviser Gen. Dang Van Quang, is heavily involved in these unsavory activities. Working through high-ranking army and navy officers personally loyal to himself or President Thieu, General Quang has built up a formidable power base.
Although General Quang's international network appears to be weaker than Ky's, General Quang does control the Vietnamese navy, which houses an elaborate smuggling organization that imports large quantities of narcotics either by protecting Chinese maritime smugglers or by actually using Vietnamese naval vessels. Ky's influence among high ranking army officers has weakened considerably, and control over the army has now shifted to General Quang. The army now manages most of the distribution and sale of heroin to American GIs. In addition, a bloc of pro-Thieu deputies in the lower house of the National Assembly have been publicly exposed as being actively engaged in heroin smuggling, but they appear to operate somewhat more independently of General Quang than the army and navy.
On the July 15, 1971, edition of the NBC Nightly News, the network's Saigon correspondent, Phil Brady, told a nationwide viewing audience that both President Thieu and Vice-President Ky were financing their election campaigns from the narcotics traffic. Brady quoted "extremely reliable sources" as saying that President Thieu's chief intelligence adviser, Gen. Dang Van Quang, was "the biggest pusher" in South Vietnam. Although Thieu's press secretary issued a flat denial and accused Brady of "spreading falsehoods and slanders against leaders in the government, thereby providing help and comfort to the Communist enemy, he did not try to defend General Quang, renowned as one of the most dishonest generals in South Vietnam when he was commander of IV Corps in the Mekong Delta.
In July 1969 Time magazine's Saigon correspondent cabled the New York office this report on Gen. Quang's activities in IV Corps:
While there he reportedly made millions by selling offices and taking a rake off on rice production. There was the famous incident, described in past corruption files, when Col. Nguyen Van Minh was being invested as a 21st Division commander. He had been Quang's deputy corps commander. 'General Quang was transferred to Saigon in early 1967 and became minister of planning and development, a face-saving sinecure. Soon after President Thieu's election in September 1967, he was appointed special assistant for military and security affairs. General Quang quickly emerged as President Thieu's power broker, and now does the same kind of illicit fund raising for Thieu's political machine that the heavy-handed General Loan did for Ky's. President Thieu, however, is much less sure of Quang than Premier Ky had been of General Loan. Loan had enjoyed Ky's absolute confidence and was entrusted with almost unlimited personal power. Thieu, on the other hand, took care to build up competing centers of power inside his political machine to keep General Quang from gaining too much power. As a result, Quang has never had the same control over the various pro-Thieu mini-factions as Loan had over Ky's apparatus. As the Ky apparatus's control over Saigon's rackets weakened after June 1968, various pro-Thieu factions moved in. In the political shift, General Quang gained control of the special forces, the navy and the army, but one of the pro-Thieu cliques, that headed by Gen. Tran Thien Khiem, gained enough power so that it gradually emerged as an independent faction itself. However, at the very beginning most of the power and influence gained from Ky's downfall seemed to be securely lodged in the Thieu camp under General Quang's supervision.
There is evidence that one of the first new groups which began smuggling opium into South Vietnam was the Vietnamese special forces contingents operating in southern Laos. In August 1971 The New York Times reported that many of the aircraft flying narcotics into South Vietnam "are connected with secret South Vietnamese special forces operating along the Ho Chi Minh Trail network in Laos. Based in Konturn Province, north of Pleiku, the special forces "assault task force" has a small fleet of helicopters, transports, and light aircraft that fly into southern Laos on regular sabotage and long-range reconnaissance forays. Some special forces officers claim that the commander of this unit was transferred to another post in mid 1971 because his extensive involvement in the narcotics traffic risked exposure. But clandestine forays were a relatively inefficient method of smuggling, and it appears that General Quang's apparatus did not become heavily involved in the narcotics trade until the Cambodian invasion of May 1970. For the first time in years the Vietnamese army operated inside Cambodia; Vietnamese troops guarded key Cambodian communication routes, the army assigned liaison officers to Phnom Penh, and intelligence officers were allowed to work inside the former neutralist kingdom. More importantly, the Vietnamese navy began permanent patrols along the Cambodian stretches of the Mekong and set up bases in Phnom Penh.
The Vietnamese Navy
The Vietnamese navy utilized the Cambodian invasion to expand its role in the narcotics traffic, opening up a new pipeline that had previously been inaccessible. On May 9 an armada of 110 Vietnamese and 30 American river craft headed by the naval fleet commander, Capt. Nguyen Thanh Chau, crossed the border into Cambodia, speeding up the Mekong in a dramatic V-shaped formation. The next day the commander of Riverine Task Force 211, Capt. Nguyen Van Thong, landed several hundred Vietnamese twenty miles upriver at Neak Luong, a vital ferry crossing on Route I linking Phnom Penh with Saigon. Leaving their American advisers behind here, the Vietnamese arrived at Phnom Penh on May 11, and on May 12 reached Kompong Chain, seventy miles north of the Cambodian capital, thus totally clearing the waterway for their USe. Hailed as a tactical coup and a great "military humanitarian fleet" by navy publicists, the armada also had, according to sources inside the Vietnamese navy, the dubious distinction of smuggling vast quantities of opium and heroin into South Vietnam.
An associate of General Quang's, former navy commander Rear Admiral Chung Tan Cang, rose to prominence during the Cambodian invasion. Admiral Cang had been a good friend of President Thieu's since their student days together at Saigon's Merchant Marine Academy (class of '47). When Admiral Cang was removed from command of the navy in 1965, after being charged with selling badly needed flood relief supplies on the black market instead of delivering them to the starving refugees, Thieu had intervened to prevent him from being prosecuted and had him appointed to a face-saving sinecure. Sources inside the Vietnamese navy say that a smuggling network which shipped heroin and opium from Cambodia back to South Vietnam was set up among high-ranking naval officers shortly after the Vietnamese navy docked at Phnom Penh. The shipments were passed from protector to protector until they reached Saigon: the first relay was from Phnom Penh to Neak Luong; the next, from Neak Luong to Tan Chau, just inside South Vietnam; the next, from Tan Chan to Binh Thuy. From there the narcotics were shipped to Saigon on a variety of naval and civilian vessels. As the Cambodian military operation drew to a close in the middle of 1970, the navy's smuggling organization (which had been bringing limited quantities of gold, opium, and dutiable goods into Vietnam since 1968) expanded.
Some of these smuggling operations within the Vietnamese navy were exposed in the summer of 1971. Shortly before this happened, the U.S. government had finally begun pressuring the South Vietnamese to crack down on the drug smuggling. According to sources inside the navy, the American demands were a cause of some concern for General Quang and Admiral Cang. General Quang thoughtfully had Admiral Cang appointed as chairman of the National AntiNarcotics Committee and his associate, Commodore Thanh, installed as chairman of the Navy Anti-Narcotics Committee. Although these precautions should have proved adequate, events and decisions beyond General Quang's control nearly resulted in a humiliating public expose. On July 25, 1971, Vietnamese narcotics police, assisted by Thai and American agents, broke up a major Trieu chau Chinese syndicate based in Cholon, arrested 60 drug traffickers, and made one of the largest narcotics seizures in Vietnam's recent history -51 kilos of heroin and 334 kilos of opium. Hailed in the press as a great victory for the Thieu government's war on drugs, these raids were actually something of a major embarrassment, since they partially exposed the navy smuggling ring. This Cholon Trieu chau syndicate was organized in mid 1970 when "Mr. Big" in Bangkok, a Trieu chau Chinese reputed to be one of the largest drug financiers in Southeast Asia, decided to start dealing in South Vietnam. He contacted a respectable Trieu chau plastics manufacturer in Cholon, Mr. Tran Minh, and the two soon came to an agree ment. The Vietnamese navy, of course, was to provide protection). Sometime in mid 1970 a Thai fishing vessel arrived off the coast of Puolo Dama, a tiny Vietnamese island in the Gulf of Siam, with the first shipment. Waiting for the boat was a Vietnamese fishing boat under the command of a Trieu chau captain named Tang Hai. Hired by Mr. Tran Minh, Tang Hai was the link between the Bangkok and Cholon syndicates. After two hundred kilos of opium had been transferred in mid-ocean, the Vietnamese boat chugged off toward its home port, Rach Gia, about fifty-five miles to the northeast. In Rach Gia, the bundles of opium were loaded onto a river sampan for the voyage to Saigon. Concealed under a layer of coconut shells, the opium appeared to be just another commercial cargo as it wound its way through the maze of canals that led to the docks of Cholon. Once the sampan docked at a wharf in Cholon's seventh district, the cargo was transferred to a micro-bus, driven to Tran Minh's warehouse in Cholon's sixth district, and eventually dispensed to the opium dens of Saigon-Cholon. All the traffic on these waterways was policed and protected by the Vietnamese navy. Tran Minh's business prospered and the smuggling continued.
By the third shipment Mr. Tran Minh had decided to expand into the GI market, and ordered ten kilos of Double U-0 Globe brand heroin as well as the usual two hundred kilos of opium. For the fourth shipment, Tran Minh was afraid the deliveries might start attracting notice and changed the transfer point to Hon Panjang, an island 115 miles southwest of Rach Gia. By mid 1971 business was going so well that the Cholon syndicate boss ordered a double shipmentfour hundred kilos of opium and sixty kilos of heroin. The heroin alone was worth more than $720,000 retail, and for the fishing captain Tang Hai and his military protectors at the Rach Soi Naval Base it turned out to be an irresistible temptation.
In early July 1971 Tang Hai kept his appointment with the Thai fishing boat and picked up the cargo near Hon Panjang Island. But instead of returning to Rach Gia, he then proceeded to sail sixty miles north to Phu Quoc Island, where he buried the opium and hid the heroin in some underbrush. Then he returned to Rach Gia and told Mr. Tran Minh's contact man that the shipment had been stolen by the Vietnamese navy. Apparently this was a convincing explanation, and the contact man relayed the news to Cholon. When Mr. Tran Minh agreed to buy back half of the shipment from the navy for $25,000, Tang Hai returned to Phu Quoc Island, dug up most of the cache, and delivered half of the original shipment to the contact man in Rach Gia after burying the difference near his home. The contact man hired the usual sampan owner to smuggle the drugs to Cholon, but he was robbed, this time for real, by three ARVN corporals only ten miles up the canal from Rach Gia.
The Vietnamese Army: Marketing the Product
While the Vietnamese navy is involved in drug importing, pro-Thieu elements of the Vietnamese army (ARVN) manage much of the distribution and sale of heroin to GIs inside South Vietnam. But rather than risking exposure by having their own officers handle the more vulnerable aspects of the operation, highranking ARVN commanders generally prefer to work with Cholon's Chinese syndicates. Thus, once bulk heroin shipments are smuggled into the countryeither by the military itself or by Chinese protected by the military-they are usually turned over to Cholon syndicates for packaging and shipment. From Cholon, Chinese and Vietnamese couriers fan out across the country, delivering multikilo lots of heroin to military commanders from the Delta to the DMZ. In three of the four military zones, the local distribution is supervised and protected by high-ranking army officers. In the Mekong Delta (IV Corps) local sales are controlled by colonels loyal to General Quang; in the south central part of the country (II Corps) heroin distribution has become a subject of controversy between two feuding generals loyal to President Thieu, the former II Corps commander Gen. Lu Lan and the present commander Gen. Ngo Dzu; and in northernmost I Corps the traffic is directed by deputies of the corps commander.
The Lower House: Heroin Junkets
Another avenue of the narcotics traffic that has proved embarrassing to President Thieu is the smuggling operations indulged in by pro-Thieu members of the National Assembly's lower house. The buffoonlike ineptness of many of these politicians has turned out to be more of a liability than an asset. At one point in Thieu's rivalry with the increasingly important Prime Minister Khiem, the ease with which these politician smugglers could be exposed created a good many political problems for the Thieu apparatus. While only the slightest hint of the pro-Thieu faction's massive smuggling operation has leaked out of the security-conscious military, the opera bouffe antics of bumbling lower house representatives have rated incredulous headlines around the world. Between September 1970 and March 1971 no less than seven representatives returning from foreign study tours were caught trying to smuggle everything from gold and heroin to Playboy calendars and brassieres into South Vietnam. Foreign observers were genuinely dismayed by the smuggling arrests, but the Vietnamese public simply regarded them as a new low in the lower house's four-year history of bribery, corruption, and scandal. The outrageous behavior of its representatives on the floor of the house, where insults of every order are freely and openly traded, has cost the lower house any semblance of popular respect among the essentially honest, puritanical South Vietnamese peasants. It is widely regarded as the longest-running comedy show in Saigon. Votes on crucial issues are sold to the highest bidder, and the Saigon press cheerfully keeps a running tally of the going price. In addition to regular monthly stipends and special New Year's bonuses of $350, pro-Thieu representatives have earned up to $1,800 apiece for voting the right way on crucial government measures. In fact, even staunch opposition members vote the right way to pick up a little extra cash when defeat for their side looks inevitable.
In the lower house, President Thieu relies on members of the Independence Bloc to do the bargaining and make the payments, rather than negotiating personally or working through his military advisers. Consisting almost entirely of North Vietnamese Catholic refugees, this bloc has maintained a militantly anti-Communist position since it was formed in 1967. Although the bloc is nominally independent, its leader, Rep. Nguyen Quang Luyen, met with President Thieu soon after it was formed and "verbally agreed" to support the president in exchange for unspecified favors. The bloc has influence far beyond its numerical strength, and all its members occupy key positions as committee chairmen, fund raisers, or whips; with only nineteen members, the Independence Bloc controls six out of the lower house's sixteen committee chairmanships. During the debates over the 1971 election law, for example, it was an Independence Bloc member, Rep. Pham Huu Giao, who floor managed the passage of article 10. This controversial clause required a minimum of forty Congressional signatures on every nominating petition for the upcoming presidential election and made it possible for President Thieu to eliminate Ky from the running.
Loyalty to Thieu seems to have its benefits. No opposition members have even been implicated in a serious smuggling case. All lower house representatives implicated in the heroin and gold traffic are either present or past members of the Independence Bloc. The reason for this is simple; opposition deputies often lack the necessary capital to finance such trips, and are not guaranteed "courtesy of the port" when they return. However, pro-government deputies who are bankrolled by an official travel grant or savings from months of voting the right way are able to take advantage of their four exit visas per year, a privilege guaranteed I deputies for foreign travel during the legislative holidays. The result has been an orgy of foreign junketeering on the part of pro-government deputies. In 1969-1970 junketeering representatives purchased $821,000 worth of foreign currency for their travels. One prominent pro-government representative was abroad for 119 days in 1969, 98 days in 1970, and 75 days during the first three months of 1971.
Although most pro-government deputies had usually returned with some form of contraband or undeclared dutiable item, they passed through customs without being checked. Even if a representative was caught, customs officers merely imposed a "fine" and allowed the illegal items to pass through. For example, in August and December 1970 Vietnamese customs officers at Tan Son Nhut Airport discovered gold and dutiable goods in the luggage of Rep. Pham Huu Giao, one of the Thieu regime's most important lower house whips. The representative paid a rather nominal fine, and the whole matter was hushed up until it was revealed during the height of the smuggling controversy several months later.
The tempo of parliamentary smuggling seems to have been intensified by the eruption of the GI heroin epidemic and the liberalization of the assembly's travel laws. In December 1970 a group of pro-Thieu deputies who control the lower house administrative office decided to allow representatives four foreign trips each year instead of two. When the annual January-March legislative holiday started a few weeks later, one Saigon daily reported that a record 140 out of the National Assembly's 190 members would soon be going abroad.
The smuggling bonanza that followed resulted in three sensational customs seizures within ten days of each other in March as the legislators returned one by one to prepare for the upcoming session of the National Assembly.
The first deputy implicated was Rep. Vo Van Mau, a Catholic refugee from North Vietnam and a member of the pro-Thieu Independence Bloc. During Air Vietnam's regular Vientiane-Saigon flight on March 10, a Chinese smuggler transferred a suitcase to one of the stewardesses, Mrs. Nguyen Ngoc Qui. But instead of being waved through customs at Tan Son Nhut, as Air Vietnam stewardesses usually were, Mrs. Qui was subjected to a thorough search, which turned up 9.6 kilos of Laos's most popular export-Double U-0 Globe brand heroin-and a letter addressed to Rep. Vo Van Mau. Showing unusual insensitivity to Representative Mau's high official status, officers of customs' Fraud Repression Division followed up the lead. A search of Representative Mau's offices turned up the Chinese smuggler's identity card. Although a spokesman for Prime Minister Khiem's office later announced that this seizure was being thoroughly investigated "because it appears to implicate directly" a deputy, Representative Mau was never officially charged and quietly faded from view when he failed to stand for reelection several months later.
On March 17 another pro-Thieu representative, Pham Chi Thien, landed at Tan Son Nhut Airport on the 4:30 P.m. flight from Bangkok. Much to Representative Thien's surprise, a customs officer insisted on giving his luggage a thorough search and opened a gift-wrapped box he found in the legislator's suitcase, which turned out to contain four kilos of Double U-0 Globe brand heroin. Announcing his resignation from the lower house a week later, Representative Thien denied that he was "actually" a smuggler and claimed that he had simply agreed to carry a package to Saigon as a favor to "a soft-spoken lady I met in Vientiane." He admitted to accepting money for carrying the package, but denied any knowledge of its contents.
While the charges against Vo Van Mau and Pham Chi Thien, both rather unimportant legislators, caused a certain amount of dismay, the arrest of a third pro-Thieu legislator, Rep. Nguyen Ouang Luyen, for gold smuggling was a major scandal. Representative Luyen was second deputy chairman of the lower house, chairman of the Asian Parliamentary Union, and had been chairman of the pro-Thieu Independence Bloc from 1967 to 1970 (he, too, was a North Vietnamese refugee). As he was boarding a flight for Saigon at the Bangkok Airport on March 18, Thai customs searched his luggage and discovered fifteen kilos of pure gold, worth about $26,000 on Saigon's black market. However, the Vietnamese Embassy intervened and secured his immediate release after another legislator traveling with Representative Luyen raced into downtown Bangkok to plead for assistance.
Four days later one Saigon newspaper reported that Thai customs had suspected Representative Luyen of being part of an international smuggling ring for several years but had been maintaining a discreet surveillance because of the sensitive nature of ThaiVietnamese relations. The fifteen kilos seized in Rep. Luyen's luggage were reportedly part of a larger shipment of ninety kilos of gold (worth $158,000 on the Saigon black market) being smuggled piecemeal into Saigon by this ring. Reliable sources inside the lower house report that other members of the Independence Bloc had helped finance this shipment.
By all accounts, lower house representatives had been smuggling narcotics, gold, and dutiable goods into South Vietnam for over three years without such sensational exposes. Arrests were rare, and when they occurred the legislator almost always settled the matter quietly by just paying a "fine." Why had Vietnamese customs officials suddenly become so aggressive, or more pointedly, why was the Thieu faction suddenly subjected to the humiliating indignity of having three of its staunchest legislative supporters implicated in contraband smuggling within ten days of one another? The answer, as usual in South Vietnam, was political. Ironically, President Thieu's gadfly was his own handpicked prime minister, Tran Thien Khiem.
The Khiem Apparatus: All in the Family
While the Independence Bloc enjoys President Thieu's political protection, unfortunately for these three smugglers the customs service was controlled by Prime Minister Khiem's apparatus. After four years of political exile in Taiwan and the United States, Khiem had returned to Vietnam in May 1968 and was appointed minister of the interior in President Thieu's administration. Khiem, probably the most fickle of Vietnam's military leaders, proceeded to build up a power base of his own, becoming prime minister in 1969. Although Khiem has a history of betraying his allies when it suits his Purposes, President Thieu had been locked in a desperate underground war with Vice-President Ky, and probably appointed Khiem because he needed his unparalleled talents as a political infighter. But first as minister of the interior and later as concurrent prime minister, Khiem appointed his relatives to lucrative offices in the civil administration and began building an increasingly independent political organization. In June 1968 he appointed his brother-in-law mayor of Saigon. He used his growing political influence to have his younger brother, Tran Thien Khoi, appointed chief of customs' Fraud Repression Division (the enforcement arm), another brother made director of Saigon Port and his cousin appointed deputy governor-general of Saigon. Following his promotion to prime minister in 1969, Khiem was able to appoint one of his wife's relatives to the position of director-general of the National Police.
One of the most important men in Khiem's apparatus was his brother, Tran Thien Khoi, chief of customs' Fraud Repression Division. Soon after U.S. customs advisers began working at Tan Son Nhut Airport in 1968, they filed detailed reports on the abysmal conditions and urged their South Vietnamese counterparts to crack down. However, as one U.S. official put it, "They were just beginning to clean it up when Khiem's brother arrived, and then it all went right out the window. Fraud Repression Chief Tran Thien Khoi relegated much of the dirty work to his deputy chief, and together the two men brought any effective enforcement work to a halt. Chief Khoi's partner was vividly described in a 1971 U.S. provost marshal's report:
He has an opium habit that costs approximately 10,000 piasters a day [$35] and visits a local opium den on a predictable schedule. He was charged with serious irregularities approximately two years ago but by payoffs and political influence, managed to have the charges dropped. When he took up his present position he was known to be nearly destitute, but is now wealthy and supporting two or three wives.
The report described Chief Khoi himself as "a principal in the opium traffic" who had sabotaged efforts to set up a narcotics squad within the Fraud Repression Division. Under Chief Khoi's inspired leadership, gold and opium smuggling at Tan Son Nhut became so blatant that in February 1971 a U.S. customs adviser reported that ". . . after three years of these meetings and countless directives being issued at all levels, the Customs operation at the airport has . . . reached a point to where the Customs personnel of Vietnam are little more than lackeys to the smugglers . . ." The report went on to describe the partnership between customs officials and a group of professional smugglers who seem to run the airport:
Actually, the Customs Officers seem extremely anxious to please these smugglers and not only escort them past the examination counters but even accompany them out to the waiting taxis. This lends an air of legitimacy to the transaction so that there could be no interference on the part of an over zealous Customs Officer or Policeman who might be new on the job and not yet know what is expected of him.
The most important smuggler at Tan Son Nhut Airport was a woman with impressive political connections:
"One of the biggest problems at the airport since the Advisors first arrived there and the subject of one of the first reports is Mrs. Chin, or Ba Chin or Chin Map which in Vietnamese is literally translated as "Fat Nine." This description fits her well as she is stout enough to be easily identified in any group.... This person heads a ring of 10 or 12 women who are present at every arrival of every aircraft from Laos and Singapore and these women are the recipients of most of the cargo that arrives on these flights as unaccompanied baggage. . . . When Mrs. Chin leaves the Customs area, she is like a mother duck with her brood as she leads the procession and is obediently followed by 8 to 10 porters who are carrying her goods to be loaded into the waiting taxis....
I recall an occasion . . . in July 1968 when an aircraft arrived from Laos.... I expressed an interest in the same type of Chinese medicine that this woman had received and already left with. One of the newer Customs officers opened up one of the packages and it was found to contain not medicine but thin strips of gold.... This incident was brought to the attention of the Director General but the Chief of Zone 2. . . . said that I was only guessing and that I could not accuse Mrs. Chin of any wrong doing. I bring this out to show that this woman is protected by every level in the GVN Customs Service."
Although almost every functionary in the customs service receives payoffs from the smugglers, U.S. customs advisers believe that Chief Khoi's job is the most financially rewarding. While most division chiefs only receive payoffs from their immediate underlings, his enforcement powers enable him to receive kickbacks from every division of the customs service.
In early 1971 U.S. customs advisers mounted a "strenuous effort" to have the deputy chief transferred, but Chief Khoi was extremely adept at protecting his associate. In March American officials in Vientiane learned that Rep. Pham Chi Thien would be boarding a flight for Saigon carrying four kilos of heroin and relayed the information to Saigon. When U.S. customs advisers asked the Fraud Repression Division to make the arrest (U.S. customs officials have no right to make arrests), Chief Khoi entrusted the seizure to his opium-smoking assistant. The "hero" was later decorated for this "accomplishment," and U.S. customs advisers, who were still trying to get him fired, or at least transferred, had to grit their teeth and attend a banquet in his honor.
Frustrated by months of inaction by the U.S. mission and outright duplicity from the Vietnamese, members of the U.S. customs advisory team evidently decided to take their case to the American public. Copies of the unflattering customs advisory reports quoted above were leaked to the press and became the basis of an article that appeared on the front page of The New York Times on April 22, 1971, under the headline, "Saigon Airport a Smuggler's Paradise."
The American response was immediate. Washington dispatched more customs advisers for duty at Tan Son Nhut, and the U.S. Embassy finally demanded action from the Thieu regime. Initially, however, the Saigon government was cool to the Embassy's demands for a cleanup of the customs' Fraud Repression Division. It was not until the smuggling issue became a political football between the Khiem and Thieu factions that the Vietnamese showed any interest in dealing with the problem
Tempest in a Teapot:
The Thieu-Khiem Squabble
The Thieu-Khiem Squabble
When the enormous political dividends of the Fraud Repression Division were added to Khiem's other sources of power, such as the police and the Saigon port authority, the result was all the strength necessary to form an independent political faction. Prime Minister Khiem's reemergence as something of a political power in his own right seems to have created tensions inside the Thieu organization and produced some heated political infighting.
As relations between the Thieu and Khiem factions soured, the smuggling issue became just another club to use against the competition. As one frank U.S. Embassy official in Saigon put it, "Our role essentially ends up allowing one faction to use U.S. pressure to force the other faction out of business. And," he added rather glumly, "the way these guys jump on each other so gleefully makes it look like they are really eager to cut themselves in on . . . an enormously lucrative traffic."
When the Air Vietnam stewardess was arrested with 9.6 kilos of heroin, it was Prime Minister Khiem's office that issued an official statement confirming rumors that a pro-Thieu representative was involved. Furthermore, reliable lower house sources claim that the aggressiveness shown by Chief Khoi's Fraud Repression Division in investigating the case was politically motivated. President Thieu later retaliated. According to one Saigon press report, members of Prime Minister Khiem's cabinet "protested . . . President Thieu's remark that the smuggling involved many high ranking officials who smuggled through the Tan Son Nhut Airport where one of the Prime Minister's brothers was in control." Despite the cabinet's protest, the director-general of customs was dismissed, and in late June Tran Thien Khoi left for a short vacation in Paris. On his return several weeks later, he was transferred to a less lucrative post in the Cholon Customs House. His opium-smoking assistant was likewise transferred, and wound up in the Customs Library, a traditional dumping ground for those in disgrace.
Three months later, the director-general of the National Police, one of Mrs. Khiem's relatives, resigned under pressure. The Saigon press reported that the director-general had been involved in the heroin traffic and was being dismissed as a part of the antinarcotics campaign. Prophetically, one Saigon daily had earlier reported that President Thieu was "taking advantage of the antinarcotics smuggling drive" to force officials out of office and to replace them with his own supporters. Interestingly enough, the new police director-general is Col. Nguyen Khac Binh, a nephew of Mrs. Thieu.
Despite all this political agitation over the narcotics traffic, heroin smuggling continues unabated. U.S. customs advisers have pointed out that commercial air flights have been only one of several routes used to bring narcotics into South Vietnam. Now that airport security has tightened up, smugglers have simply diverted narcotics shipment to other routes, particularly military air bases and coastal and river shipping. Throughout 1971 unlimited quantities of heroin were readily available near every U.S. installation in Vietnam, and there was no appreciable rise in price.
The Consequences of Complicity: A Generation of Junkies
In the face of the twin horrors of the Vietnam drug problem-the heroin epidemic among GIs and the growing exports to the United States what has been the response from American diplomatic and military officials in Vietnam? On the whole, their reaction has been a combination of embarrassment and apathy. Embarrassment, because they are all aware to some degree, even though they will not admit it, that elements of the Vietnamese government they have been praising and defending all these years are pushing heroin to American GIs Apathy because most of them feel that anybody who uses heroin deserves what he gets. Almost all U.S. officials knit their brows, cluck their tongues, and try to look very, very concerned whenever the heroin problem is mentioned, but most simply could not care less. They are in Vietnam to beat the VC, smash the Communists, and defend Democracy; the fact that some of Democracy's proteges are pushing heroin is something they would rather not think about.
In the early years of the Diem administration, American pronouncements about its goals in Vietnam had an almost naively innocent quality about them. President Diem was seen as a middle path of virtuous democracy between the Viet Minh's brutal "Communist dictatorship" on the left and the corrupt, dopedealing Binh Xuyen pirates on the right. When Diem refused to fire his corrupt brother, who had revived the endemic corruption so characteristic of the Binh Xuyen, the U.S. mission helped engineer Diem's downfall in the hope that an honest, efficient government would emerge from the confusion. But as Vietnam's politics proceeded to plunge into chaos and Saigon's security reached the critical level, the U.S. mission saw the light and prayed for the return of another "strong man."
The answer to the American prayer was the Thieu-Ky administration. Although Thieu and Ky devoted too much of their time to fighting each other, the Americans have generally been pleased with their ability to govern with a firm, if despotic, hand. Having learned that this type of heavy-handed government is the only kind compatible with American interests, U.S. officials were hardly going to protest when the close associates of both leaders were involved in systematic corruption, including the narcotics traffic. As long as the narcotics traffic was directed exclusively at Chinese and Vietnamese opium smokers, U.S. congressional complaints about corruption were muted. When in 1968 Senator Albert Gruening accused Air Vice-Marshal Ky of smuggling opium, the U.S. Embassy in Saigon issued a firm, if inaccurate, denial, and the matter was forgotten. But when South Vietnam's narcotics syndicates started cultivating the GI heroin market, the problem was not dismissed so cavalierly. After NBC's Saigon correspondent accused President Thieu's chief adviser, General Quang, of being "the biggest pusher" of heroin to GIs in Vietnam the U.S. Embassy "filed a top level report to Washington saying it can find no evidence to support recent charges that President Nguyen Van Thieu and Vice-President Nguyen Cao Ky were involved in or profiting from the drug trade." Simultaneously, U.S. officials defended Thieu and Ky publicly by leaking the Embassy report to members of the Saigon press corps in an off the-record background briefing.
According to a U.S. Embassy official assigned to the drug problem, the U.S. mission "can find no evidence" because it studiously avoids looking for any. It is an unwritten rule among Embassy officials that nobody can mention the names of high-ranking Vietnamese during discussions of the heroin traffic. The CIA avoids gathering information on high-level involvement, and even in its closed-door sessions with high Embassy officials discusses only minor pushers and addicts.
The U.S. mission's handling of the accusations concerning Gen. Ngo Dzu's involvement in the heroin trade is another case in point. Beginning in January 1971, the U.S. army's Criminal Investigation Division (CID) began gathering detailed information on Gen. Ngo Dzu's involvement in GI heroin traffic. Although these reports were sent to the U.S. Embassy through the proper channels, the U.S. mission did absolutely nothing. When U.S. Congressman Robert H. Steele told a congressional subcommittee in July 1971 that "U.S. military authorities have provided Ambassador Bunker with hard intelligence that one of the chief traffickers is Gen. Ngo Dzu, the commander of 11 Corps, the U.S. mission did its best to discredit the Congressman. Rather than criticizing Gen. Ngo Dzu for pushing heroin, the senior U.S. adviser for 11 Corps declared publicly, "There is no information available to me that in any shape, manner or fashion would substantiate the charges Congressman Steele has made." In light of the CID report quoted earlier, the U.S. mission has apparently decided to use any means possible to protect the Thieu regime from investigation of its involvement in the heroin trade.
While the U.S. Embassy has done its best to shield the Thieu regime from criticism, the Nixon administration and the U.S. military command have tried to defuse public concern over the GI heroin epidemic by minimizing the extent of the problem. The military offers two main arguments to justify its official optimism: (1) the definitive urinalysis test administered to every Vietnam GI just before he returns to the United States has shown that no more than 5.5 percent of all army personnel in Vietnam are heroin users; (2) since only 8.0 percent of the GI addicts in Vietnam inject, or "mainline," the great majority who smoke or snort heroin are not seriously addicted and will have no problem kicking the habit once they return home.
Unfortunately, the army's first supposition is not true. On June 22, 1971, the U.S. military command ordered every GI leaving Vietnam to submit to a sophisticated test that can detect significant amounts of morphine in the body. Any GI who tested positively was confined to a special detoxification center and could not be allowed to return home until he had "dried out" and could pass the test. From the very first, GIs started devising ingenious ways of belting the system.
Almost every American soldier in Vietnam knows the exact date of his scheduled return to the "world," and most keep a running countdown, which often includes hours and minutes as the time gets shorter. Every GI's DEROS (Date of Expected Return from Overseas) has an historic, even religious quality about it, and the thought of having to stay an extra week, or even a few days more is absolutely intolerable. Most GI addicts accept the pain of voluntary withdrawal in order to pass the test and get on their scheduled flight. Those who are too weak to make it on their own volunteer for the base "amnesty" program.
As the number of American troops in Vietnam rapidly dwindles, there will be a natural tendency to forget the whole nightmarish experience of the Vietnam heroin epidemic. In time the Nixon administration may even claim the end of the GI heroin problem as one of the more solid accomplishments of its Vietnamization program. Despite these fervent hopes, it will probably be a long time before the memory of the Vietnam heroin epidemic can take its richly deserved place in the garbage can of history. For returning GI addicts have come home as carriers of the disease and are afflicting hundreds of communities with the heroin virus. The Golden Triangle heroin laboratories, which had been supplying American soldiers in Vietnam since late 1969, are not going out of business. When the number of GIs in Vietnam declined drastically in 1971, Corsican and Chinese syndicates started shipping Laotian heroin directly to the United States. In April 1971 the Laotian Ambassador to France was apprehended in Paris with sixty kilos of Double U-0 Globe brand heroin destined for the United States. On November 11, 1971, a Filipino diplomat and a Bangkok Chinese merchant were arrested at the Lexington Hotel in New York City with 15.5 kilos of Double U-0 Globe brand shortly after they arrived from Vientiane. Heroin is following the GIs home. During the 20 years before 1972 the US Bureau of Narcotics claimed that only 5% of American heroin came from Southeast Asia. By 1972 that figure has risen to 30%.
In 1974 there were an estimated 150 000 Vietnamese heroin addicts in Saigon. The following year, with the fall of the government of South, these addicts became the problem of the new regime, in a manner similar to that of that of American Vietnam veteran addicts in the United States. The US government was unable to end its heroin problem in Vietnam even by ending its participation in the war: heroin came home with us…
World War I produced a "lost generation" of writers, poets, and artists. World War II gave us a generation of collegians and suburbanites. The Vietnam War seems to be fathering a generation of junkies.
Phuc Nguyen 2012
