The Strength of the Wolf (74 page)

In return for having been granted such power, Ky awarded the CIA the right to establish the Revolutionary Development (RD) Program in Vung Tau – where, fifteen years earlier, SDECE had based its opium smuggling Operation X. The RD Program was designed to win back the loyalty of Vietnamese in the countryside through a mixture of civic action, propaganda, and counter-terror operations. In July, Ky appointed General Nguyen Duc Thang as RD minister, and in August 1965, Edward Lansdale, a CIA officer masquerading as an Air Force general, arrived as the CIA's liaison to General Thang and the RD Program.

Lansdale's resumé included experience in an array of political and psychological warfare operations that involved drugs. In 1953, he had viewed the vast Laotian opium fields, and in 1955, he had chased the French out of Saigon and installed the Catholic Ngo regime. The Ngo regime's own drug smuggling operation was directed by Diem's brother Nhu (an opium smoker) through his secret police chief, Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen. (Ky's First Transport Group was at Tuyen's disposal and shuttled Tuyen's drug couriers between Laos and Saigon from 1956 until 1963.) In 1960, Lansdale had investigated SDECE's involvement in drug smuggling, and in 1962 he'd employed drug smuggling Mafiosi in the CIA's shadow war against Cuba and its KGB advisors. Possessed of a wild imagination, Lansdale had even proposed the introduction of cheap marijuana as a way of undermining Cuba's economy.
⁷

In mid-1965, Lansdale assembled a team of American unconventional warfare experts and Filipino mercenaries to wage, undercover of the RD Program, a secret war against French nationals supporting the insurgents. His arrival in Vietnam also occurred just as “political upheavals” forced the Corsican airlines in Laos out of business.
⁸
According to Professor Alfred McCoy, the first thing Lansdale did was to arrange a “truce” with the Corsican drug smugglers in Saigon.
⁹
Lansdale's motive was to protect himself from anyone who might still be holding a grudge from the
sale guerre
of 1955. In return for a guarantee that he would not be harmed, Lansdale gave the Corsicans free passage and thus enabled them, their Mafia associates, and a group of Vietnamese officials to control Saigon's lucrative drug market.

Assisting Lansdale was his
consigliere
, Lucien Conein. The most adept member of Lansdale's team, Conein was born in Paris and raised in Missouri. He joined the OSS in 1940 and reportedly formed guerrilla groups in Southern France using Corsican outlaws. In late 1944, he was transferred to OSS headquarters in Kunming, China, and fought alongside French Special Forces units conducting sabotage operations against the Japanese in Northern Vietnam.

After the war, Conein married a Vietnamese woman, and during this tumultuous period, he became acquainted with the Vietnamese gangsters, Kuomintang Chinese, SDECE and Sûreté officials, and Corsican policemen (perhaps even Paul Mondoloni) and seamen involved in Saigon's opium trade. He also hobnobbed with the upscale business and political crowd that gathered at the Continental Hotel, including Monsieur Franchini, its influential owner. Conein joined the CIA shortly after its formation, and in 1954 was assigned as Lansdale's deputy in Vietnam. His help was instrumental in snatching the divided nation away from the French and the nationalists led by Ho Chi Minh. In 1956, Conein joined a military intelligence unit operating in Germany and Luxembourg, and from 1960 through 1962, he trained Iranian Special Forces in the opium-rich outlands of Iran. In 1962, he returned to South Vietnam as a floating emissary. Reporting directly to the White House, Conein coached the cabal of military officers that murdered Diem and Nhu. Afterwards he helped recruit Catholic refugees from the Ngo regime into top jobs in the police, intelligence, and security agencies of the de facto parallel government established by the CIA.

Conein's knowledge and contacts were invaluable when Lansdale returned to Vietnam to manage the RD Program, and among his many functions, Conein served as the guardian angel of Lansdale's protégé, Daniel Ellsberg. Sent to Vietnam by the Defense Department to monitor the RD Program, good-looking, fast-talking, quick-witted Dan Ellsberg shared quarters with tall, swarthy Frank Scotton. A CIA officer working undercover with the US Information Service, Scotton had created the RD Program's “motivational indoctrination” component. A subtle form of brainwashing, motivational indoctrination was the key to transforming average soldiers into the programmed assassins that operated secretly inside the RD Program's civic action teams.

Ellsberg began working with Scotton's counter-terror teams and participating in operations against the insurgency's political leaders. His photographic memory and pleasing personality also qualified him as a potential spy, and soon Conein and Scotton had introduced him into
Saigon's swinging in-crowd. Ellsberg's mission was to engage Vietnam's leading political thinkers in conversation and then report what they said directly to John Hart, the CIA's station chief in Saigon.

Then Ellsberg threw a wrench into the works. At a party at the fashionable Cercle Sportif, Scotton introduced Ellsberg to a beautiful Eurasian woman named Germaine. Ellsberg found her simply irresistible, although she was engaged to Michel Seguin, a Corsican opium trafficker. Germaine, however, shared Ellsberg's passion, and they began a torrid love affair that forced Seguin to defend his honor. After slipping into Ellsberg's villa late one night, he put a pistol to Ellsberg's head, and warned him to stay away from his fiancée. According to Scotton and Conein, the only thing that saved Ellsberg's life was a promise they made to Seguin; that if anyone hurt Ellsberg, they would wage a bloody vendetta against the Corsicans.

Here the plot thickens. Lansdale claimed that he had nothing to do with the Corsicans after they reached their truce in 1965. But, by another account, the truce allowed the Corsicans (including, presumably, Seguin) to traffic in narcotics, as long as they served as contact men for the CIA. In this role, the Corsicans kept their CIA case officers posted on the price, quality, and availability of narcotics. The truce also endowed them with free passage at a time when, according to McCoy, Marseilles's heroin labs were turning from Turkish to Southeast Asian morphine base.
¹⁰

After Professor McCoy published
The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
in 1972 and exposed this truce, Conein wrote to McCoy's publisher and insisted that his meeting with the Corsicans was solely to resolve a problem caused by “Ellsberg's peccadilloes with the mistress of a Corsican.”
¹¹
Conein didn't say what the problem was, but one can infer that Ellsberg's affair with Germaine threatened to upset a very sensitive counterintelligence operation, in which the drug-smuggling Corsican contact men were serving as double agents and reporting on French nationals involved with the insurgents.

Ellsberg told this writer that Conein and Scotton never intervened on his behalf, and that their statements were CIA disinformation designed to impugn his character, because he leaked the Pentagon Papers (the military's top secret account of the official lies that led to the Vietnam War) in the summer of 1971, and thus inadvertently helped bring down the Nixon administration. He also insists that Lansdale had nothing to do with narcotics trafficking while in Vietnam.

Ellsberg's assertions may be true, but what is important is that Lansdale and Conein knew that certain Corsicans in Saigon shipped morphine base to associates in Marseilles. Although Conein, in his letter to Harper Row,
denied having said so, McCoy quotes him as stating that it was impossible to completely stop the Corsicans from smuggling drugs, unless someone put the opium growers in Laos out of business. According to McCoy, that is “why Conein and Lansdale did not pass on the information they had to the US Bureau of Narcotics.”
¹²

CIA officers Lansdale and Conein knew that Corsican drug smuggling in Vietnam relied on the CIA-protected opium growers in the Golden Triangle, but they didn't tell the FBN; which brings us back to the overarching fact, discovered by FBN Agent Bowman Taylor in Laos in 1963, that the CIA was not only protecting the opium growers in Laos, it was facilitating the drug trade in Vietnam. As FBN Agent Al Habib explained, “Vietnam was off-limits” because, as Sal Vizzini observed, “the CIA was flying opium to its warlords.” The FBN knew about the CIA's involvement in the Hobbs case in 1964, and that Air America (aka Air Opium) was smuggling opium to Vietnamese officials. As we shall see, the FBN knew that top officials like Air Marshall Ky's right-hand man, General Loan, were involved, as was Customs Director Nguyen Vinh Loc. As Habib noted in
chapter 21
, Vietnamese Customs had a warehouse full of confiscated opium that it sold “out the back door.”

The CIA's complicity in the Southeast Asian drug trade was known to the FBN in 1965, and yet it listed only two Southeast Asian drug smugglers in its International Book: Rolf Schmoll, a Corsican later identified as SDECE Agent Ange Simonpierri (the source in the Nebbia case and, through Paul Pasqualini, to Maurice Castellani); and Michel Libert, a Corsican residing in Saigon. And by never making public its knowledge of CIA drug smuggling, the FBN itself became complicit in the great conspiracy it had been searching for since its inception.
¹³

Not only was the CIA protecting the GVN's top drug smuggling politicians and generals, their Corsican accomplices, and its private army of opium growers in Laos, it was managing the caravan that delivered raw opium to the world's biggest opium market in Houei Sai, Laos. CIA officer William Young helped to initiate this operation. The son of an American missionary in Burma, Young learned the local dialects before he mastered English. During the Second World War, his family was forced to move to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, and afterwards, Young's father taught Ambassador William Donovan about the intricacies of the region's opium business.

Following a tour of duty with the US Army in Germany, Young was recruited into the CIA and, in 1958, was posted to Bangkok. When the CIA pretended to move its Kuomintang mercenaries out of Burma, he was reassigned to Chiang Mai, and from there led a succession of CIA case officers to the strategically placed Laotian and Burmese villages that would eventually serve as Agency bases. It was Young who introduced General Vang Pao, chief of the opium-growing Meo tribesmen, to Joe Houdichek, Pao's first official CIA case officer.

From his headquarters at Long Tieng, the CIA's major air base on the south side of the opium-rich Plain Of Jars, Vang Pao conscripted some 30,000 Meo tribesmen into a secret army to fight the Laotian communists and their Vietnamese allies. In exchange for selling his people as cannon fodder, he was allowed to make a fortune selling opium. Much of the brokering was done at the village of Houei Sai in western Laos on the Thai border, in the heart of the opium-rich Golden Triangle formed by the borders of Burma, Thailand, and Laos. Vang Pao's front man was the chieftain of the local Yao tribe, but behind the scenes Bill Young coordinated Pao with the generals and politicians running the Laotian Opium Administration, as well as with three Kuomintang generals inside Burma. These generals operated clandestine CIA radio listening posts inside Burma, and in return were allowed to move 90 percent of the opium that reached Houei Sai.
¹⁴

It was a happy arrangement until October 1964, when the Chinese detonated an atomic bomb at Lop Nor. That seminal event signaled a need for better intelligence inside China, and resulted in the CIA directing Bill Young to set up an intelligence network at Nam Yu, a few miles north of Houei Sai. The purpose of the 118A Strategic Intelligence Network was to use a Kuomintang opium caravan to insert agents inside China. The agents placed by Young in the caravan were his childhood friends, Lahu tribesmen Moody Taw and Isaac Lee. Young equipped them with the best CIA cameras, and while in China they photographed Chinese engineers building a road toward the Thai border, as well as the soldiers massing along it. Knowing the number and location of these Chinese troops helped the CIA plot a strategy for fighting the Vietnam War.

Once the 118A Network was up and running, Young turned it over to CIA officer Lou Ojibwe, and after Ojibwe was killed in the summer of 1965, Anthony Poshepny took charge. A Marine veteran who had served with the CIA in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Tibet, “Tony Poe” was the balding, robust model for Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz in
Apocalypse Now!
He also served as a father figure to the junior CIA officers (including
Terry Burke, the future acting chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration) he commanded in the savage jungles of Laos.

In an interview with the author, Poe said he “hated” Vang Pao because he was selling guns to the communists. But Poe was a company man, and he remained silent and dutifully made sure that the CIA's share of opium was delivered from Nam Yu to the airfield at Houei Sai. The opium was packed in oil drums, loaded on CIA C-47s, flown by Taiwanese mercenaries to the Gulf of Siam, then dropped into the sea and picked up by accomplices in sampans waiting at specified coordinates. The people on the sampans ferried the drugs to Hong Kong, where the opium was cooked into heroin by Kuomintang chemists and then sold to Mafiosi. As described by Young and Poe, this was the CIA's private channel to its old Luciano Project partners in Hong Kong.

Albert Habib, in a Memorandum Report dated 27 January 1966, cited CIA officer Don Wittaker as confirming that opium drums were dropped from planes, originating in Laos, to boats in the Gulf of Siam. Wittaker identified the chemist in Houei Sai, and fingered the local Yao leaders as the opium suppliers.

By 1966, when Agent Doug Chandler arrived in Bangkok from New Orleans, the existence of the CIA's 118A opium caravan was also known to the FBN. As Chandler recalls, “An interpreter took me to meet a Burmese warlord in Chiang Mai. Speaking perfect English, the warlord said he was a Michigan State graduate and the grandson of the king of Burma. Then he invited me to travel with the caravan that brought opium back from Burma.” Chandler pauses. “When I sent the information to the CIA, they looked away, and when I told the Embassy, they flipped out. We had agents in the caravan who knew where the Kuomintang heroin labs were located, but the Kuomintang was a uniformed army equipped with modern weapons, so the Thai government left them alone.”