Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (9 page)

The war in Laos had developed as a consequence of the expanding war in Vietnam. As the Vietnam War intensified, troops and supplies from the north made their way to battlefields in the south, often via the jungles of southern Laos. The American strategic objective was to close this route—dubbed Ho Chi Minh Trail by the U.S. military. Toward this end, the United States cultivated a proxy of local mercenaries and reinforced them with massive airpower. For more than a decade, the CIA led a secret army of thirty thousand Hmong mercenaries against Communist guerrillas in the mountains of northern Laos. As opposition to the Vietnam War mounted back home, the advantages of proxy war
became clear: waged in secret, it was at the same time removed from congressional oversight, public scrutiny, and conventional diplomacy. Even at the end of the war, few Americans knew that the U.S. Air Force had fought “the largest air war in military history over Laos, dropping 2.1 million tons of bombs over this small, impoverished nation—the same tonnage that Allied powers dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II.” The Laos model combined proxy war on the ground with a fierce and relentless American air war. Whereas proxy war became the order of the day throughout the late Cold War, the air war came into its own only after that war’s end.

Financing Proxy Wars

If one advantage of proxy war was that its conduct could be hidden from public scrutiny, the disadvantage was that it was not easy to finance from public funds. This explains why covert wars have often tended to go hand in hand with illicit trade, usually in drugs. There has been a long-established link between the drug trade—whether licit or illicit—and the financing of colonial wars. In the early nineteenth century, the British empire set up an official monopoly for the cultivation of opium seed in its Indian colony and exported the harvest to China. When the Chinese emperor objected, the British claimed he was in violation of freedom of trade. To defend the freedom to trade opium, the empire sent gunboats up the Yangtze River and fought the ignoble Opium War. Similarly, in neighboring Indochina, the French used officially sanctioned opium revenues to pay the cost of their colonial occupation.

In a monumental historical study of the link between the drug trade and counterinsurgency,
The Politics of Heroin
, University of Wisconsin scholar Alfred McCoy has traced the global expansion
of drug-production centers—in Burma (Myanmar), Laos, Colombia, and Afghanistan—to the political cover provided by CIA-sponsored covert wars. At the heart of the global drug trade after the Second World War has been trade in opium, the raw material base for the industrial manufacture of high-grade heroin. When the CIA began its alliance with drug lords, the global opium trade was “at its lowest ebb in nearly two centuries.” The war had disrupted international shipping, and tight security had blocked heroin smuggling into the United States. The CIA entered into two sets of alliances it considered key to waging the Cold War, both of which boosted the drug trade far beyond prewar levels. The first was with the Mafia in Italy and France, the second was with anti-Communist Chinese forces along the Burma-China border. From 1948 to 1950, the CIA allied “with the Corsican underworld in its struggle against the French Communist Party for control over the strategic Mediterranean port of Marseille.” The Corsicans triumphed and “used their control over the Marseille waterfront to dominate the export of heroin to the U.S. market” for “the next quarter century.” At the same time, “the CIA ran a series of covert operations along the China border that were instrumental in the creation of the Golden Triangle heroin complex.” Beginning in 1950, these operations were aimed at creating an anti-Communist Chinese force to mount an invasion of mainland China. The invasion never happened, but the anti-Communist Chinese (KMT) “succeeded in monopolizing and expanding the Shan states’ opium trade.” The CIA retained these forces along the Burma-China border, hoping they would function as an advance warning system against an anticipated Chinese invasion of Southeast Asia. Instead, this anti-Communist army “transformed Burma’s Shan states into the world’s largest opium producer” over the next decade.

The CIA applied these very tactics to Laos from 1960 to 1975 when it created a secret army of thirty thousand Hmong peasants to battle Laotian Communists near the border with North Vietnam. The Hmong’s main cash crop was opium, and the CIA readily turned the other way as the Hmong commander, General Vang Pao, used a Corsican charter to export his crop to distant markets. In 1965, when the escalating air war and the political infighting in the Laotian elite “forced the small Corsican charter airlines out of the opium business,” General Pao was able “to use the CIA’s Air America to collect opium from his scattered highland villages” for delivery to Long Tieng and Vientiane. The Air America operation played a key role in expanding the opium market: “CIA and USAID funds went to the construction of more than 150 short, so-called LIMA landing strips in the mountains near the opium fields, thus opening these remote spots to the export trade.” In 1967, the CIA and USAID bought two C-47 planes for General Pao, who then opened his own air-transport company, which he called Xeng Khouang Air and everyone else called Air Opium. Interestingly, when General Pao decided in 1969 to bring in Chinese master chemists from Hong Kong and set up an enormous heroin plant to manufacture fine-grain, high-grade, 80 to 99 percent pure, number 4 heroin—instead of number 3 crude that had long been the stuff of local and regional consumption—and began to supply it to the growing concentration of U.S. troops in Vietnam, the CIA still looked the other way. That Pao was becoming a world-class player in the heroin market became evident on April 25, 1971, when French custom officials opened a suitcase belonging to the newly arrived Laotian ambassador in Paris, Prince Sopsaisana, and found it contained sixty kilos of high-grade Laotian heroin, worth $13.5 million on the streets. It was “one of the biggest heroin seizures in French history.” Later reports received
by the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics showed that the Laotian ambassador’s venture “had been financed by Hmong General Vang Pao, and the heroin itself had been refined in a laboratory at Long Tieng, the CIA’s headquarters for clandestine operations in northern Laos.”

The Long Tieng laboratory was reputed to be the world’s largest heroin-processing plant. When massive American bombing and the ensuing refugee-relocation program reduced the amount of Hmong opium available for the laboratory, Pao’s officers turned to northeastern Laos for supplies of Burmese opium. Guaranteed a captive high-income market with the U.S. troops in Vietnam, the Golden Triangle came to grow “about 70% of the world’s illicit opium supply” by 1971, and Laos emerged as “the most important processing center of raw opium” there. Its laboratories rivaled those of Marseille and Hong Kong in the quality and quantity of their production.

Alfred McCoy has gone through U.S. intelligence reports to identify the ownership of key heroin-processing facilities in the Golden Triangle. In a classified report leaked to the
New York Times
, the CIA identified twenty-one opium refineries in the area, of which seven were capable of producing 90 to 99 percent pure number 4 heroin. McCoy noted that most of these operated under the protection of key CIA assets: “These intelligence reports indicated a clear pattern: the CIA’s covert action assets had become the leading heroin dealers in Laos.”

Proxy Wars and the Clark Amendment

Arising out of the contrast between Laos as an example to be emulated and Vietnam as the danger to be avoided, the Nixon Doctrine turned one lesson of Laos—proxy war—into a model for
military strategy in Third World theaters. When it was applied to Africa in the period after Vietnam, it was also modeled on an earlier American experience on the African continent, in the Congo, on the eve of African independence in the early sixties. Determined to prevent the ascent of militant nationalism in Africa’s prize resource-rich country, Washington did not hesitate to put together a mercenary force of mainly South African and Rhodesian whites. From Washington’s point of view, militant nationalism was nothing but a proxy for Soviet expansion into a rapidly decolonizing Africa. The mercenary solution worked, but it left a bitter legacy in independent Africa. When the United States turned to Africa a decade later, this time determined to block the ascent of another militant nationalist movement, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), a renewed attempt to use mercenaries did not work. With hardly an ally in a region impatient to decolonize, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—speaking for the United States—encouraged apartheid South Africa to intervene. The result was the Angolan debacle. Following close on the heels of defeat in Vietnam, it produced a powerful antiwar response in the American legislature. That response crystallized as the Clark Amendment.

Embracing Mercenaries in Congo

Congo became independent on June 30, 1960. Less than two weeks later, on July 11, its richest province, Katanga, seceded. The armed contingent of secessionists led by Moise Tshombe, who was made president, was supervised and trained by officers from Belgium, the former colonial power there. Katanga’s mines were operated by a Belgian company, Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, in which the Rockefellers were soon to acquire a major interest.
Late in the summer of 1960, the Eisenhower administration concluded that Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s militantly nationalist prime minister, was “an African Castro” and must be eliminated. Lumumba’s crime was that he had requested and received some military aid from the Soviet Union in August 1960, in the face of “considerable Western support for the Katanga secession and UN reluctance to use force to end it.” On August 18, following a National Security Council briefing, Eisenhower asked his aides whether “we can’t get rid of this guy.” True, the 1975-1976 Senate committee headed by Frank Church investigated the role of the CIA in Lumumba’s assassination and later absolved the agency of any direct role in it. But subsequent investigation by a Belgian parliamentary committee in 1999, combined with research in the UN archives by a Congolese intellectual, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, has brought new facts to light. After Eisenhower’s comment of August 18, the CIA began a two-track strategy. Having received a direct order from CIA head Allen Dulles, Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s chief scientist, already on the lookout for a way to poison Castro’s cigars, landed in Leopoldville (Kinshasa) “equipped with a deadly substance made of cobra venom, to be applied on Lumumba’s food or toothpaste.” The problem was how to deliver the venom to the target. In light of the obstacles faced by a James Bond-type operation, the CIA station chief in Kinshasa proposed a second plan of action: to eliminate Lumumba “politically, and maybe later, physically.” It is this plan that the United States followed in collaboration with Belgium. On December 1, Lumumba was captured by soldiers loyal to Congolese chief of staff Joseph Mobutu (also a CIA asset), flown to secessionist Katanga, and killed—as Belgian officers stood watching. With Lumumba out of the way, in December 1962 President Kennedy concurred with the use of UN troops to quash the Katangan rebellion. In May 1963, a
grateful Kennedy welcomed Mobutu in the White House: “General, if it hadn’t been for you, … the Communists would have taken over.”

By the end of 1963, anti-Mobutu rebellion broke out in Kwilu, led by Pierre Mulele, a prominent Lumumbist. The rebels were poorly armed, and there was no evidence of outside (i.e., Soviet) involvement. But the CIA did intervene on the government’s behalf, hiring several Cuban exile pilots with American green (residency) cards and providing them with a few Italian planes for aerial bombing missions. No sooner was the Kwilu rebellion crushed than another broke out in the eastern province of Kivu. Once again, the rebels were poorly armed, according to the French daily
Le Monde
, with no more than “bows, arrows, and bicycle chains.” Led by Lumumba’s followers, the rebels were known as the Simba (lions). The U.S. ambassador confirmed that their confused ideology reflected a purely local rebellion: “Despite the revolutionary slogans which its leaders mouthed … the rebels have to all intents and purposes no political programme. It’s definitely an African and a Congolese movement but all very confused.” Yet the revolt spread quickly, and the Congolese army collapsed as the Simba took Stanleyville (Kisangani), Congo’s third-largest city, on August 5, 1964. Just two days before, Congress had passed the Tonkin Gulf resolution; anti-Communist hysteria seemed to have gripped Washington. Piero Gleijeses, professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University, the first scholar to have read through official U.S. archives on the Congo crisis, remarked after looking at the National Security Council debates on Congo: “No one challenged the basic premise” that “the rebels had to be defeated.”

On August 5, the day the Simba took Kisangani, a cable from the American embassy in Congo laid out three options for the government of Congo (GOC):

a) GOC can seek direct Belgian military intervention; b) it can attempt to recruit white mercenary brigade[s]; c) it can ask for U.S. troops…. If Belgian government refuses to accept risks of intervention … mercenary brigade is second best alternative…. From U.S. standpoint employment of mercenaries would carry advantage of being done on GOC responsibility and would reduce overt Western [i.e., Belgian or U.S.] involvement…. It would place burden of responsibility on GOC and not on ourselves or Belgians.

Already, Washington had tried to convince the Belgians to intervene, but British ambassador Edward Rose reported from Kinshasa that the Belgians were amused at the Americans seeing the Communist specter everywhere. In Brussels, the Belgian foreign minister, Paul-Henri Spaak, told the U.S. ambassador that Belgian industrialists who had the largest investments in Congo felt that they could do business with rebel leaders since those leaders were aware that the Belgian investment and technical know-how were crucial to the economy of Congo. The French agreed that there was no need to be concerned since the revolt had not been stirred up by outside forces. On August 7, after Spaak told Washington “unequivocally that neither Belgium nor any other European country would send troops,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk approved a proposal to recruit a mercenary force and pressured Belgium to join in the effort. This is how Gleijesis summed up Rusk’s cable to roving ambassador Averell Harriman in Brussels: “Washington and Brussels would supply the money to pay the mercenaries and the weapons to arm them” but “Washington alone would provide the planes to fly them.” Gleijesis concludes his reading of the archives thus: “Bowing to U.S. pressure, the Belgians embraced the mercenary option.”