The U.S. Pivot to Asia: Cold War Lessons from Vietnam for Today

[This is a chapter from my book ‘The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set: the Birth of International Fascism and Anglo-American Foreign Policy.’ For further details on different formats and how to purchase click here.]

Col. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy and was a former Col. in the U.S. Air Force, goes over in his book JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy how the CIA was used to instigate psy-ops and paramilitary activities in Vietnam to create the pretext required for an open declaration of war and for the entry of the U.S. military into a twenty-year-long meat grinder.

This was a strategy reserved not just for Vietnam but had become the general U.S. foreign policy in all regions that were considered threats to American foreign interests within the Cold War Grand Strategy, as seen under the directorship of the Dulles brothers. Any country that held views that were not aligned with U.S. foreign policy could not simply be invaded in most scenarios, but rather, the ground would need to be prepared to create the justification for a direct military invasion. In other words, ‘fake it till you make it.,’ and quite literally so.

Don’t have an actual ‘enemy’ to fight and justify your meddling into another country’s affairs? Not a problem. Just split your paramilitary team into ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ and have them pretend fight. Go village to village repeating this action-drama and you will see how quickly the word will spread that there are ‘dangerous extremists’ in the area that exist in ‘great numbers.’

Prouty described this paramilitary activity, which is called ‘Fun and Games,’ and how this tactic was also used in the Philippines, resulting in the election of Ramon Magsaysay who was declared a hero against a non-existing enemy. In fact, the Filipino elite units that were trained by the CIA during this period were then brought into Vietnam to enact the very same tactic.

Prouty writes in JFK:^[1] “I have been to such training programs at U.S. military bases where identical tactics are taught to Americans as well as foreigners. It is all the same…these are the same tactics that were exploited by CIA super-agent Edward G. Lansdale [the man in charge of the CIA Saigon Military Mission] and his men in the Philippines and Indochina.

This is an example of the intelligence service’s ‘Fun and Games.’ Actually, it is as old as history; but lately it has been refined, out of necessity, into a major tool of clandestine warfare.

Lest anyone think that this is an isolated case, be assured that it was not. Such ‘mock battles’ and ‘mock attacks on native villages’ were staged countless times in Indochina for the benefit of, or the operation of, visiting dignitaries, such as John McCone when he first visited Vietnam as the Kennedy appointed director of central intelligence [after Kennedy fired Allen Dulles].”

What Prouty is stating here, is that the mock battles that occurred for these dignitaries were CIA trained agents ‘play-acting’ as the Vietcong…to make it appear that the Vietcong were not only numerous but extremely hostile. If even dignitaries can be fooled by such things unfolding before their own eyes, is it really a wonder that a Western audience watching or reading about these affairs going on in the world through their mainstream media interpreter could possibly differentiate between ‘reality’ vs. a ‘staged reality’? Not only were the lines between military and paramilitary operations becoming blurred, but as Prouty states in his book JFK, the highest-ranking officers who were operating and overseeing the Vietnam situation were all CIA operatives, not only within the U.S. military but including the U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge.[2]

Prouty writes in JFK:^[3] “U.S. Ambassador Lodge – had since 1945 been one of the most important agents of the OSS and later the CIA in the Far East. His orders came from that agency.”

Prouty goes further to state that Lodge was brought into the role as Ambassador on August 26^th, 1963 specifically to remove Ngo Dinh Diem President of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), who was seeking a peaceful resolution to the conflict at that point. Ngo Dinh Diem was killed two months after Lodge’s arrival in Vietnam, on November 2^st, 1963. His brother and chief advisor Ngo Dinh Nhu was killed the same day.

Kruger writes:[4] “Indochina remained Conein’s base of operations after World War II…and became the top U.S. expert on the area – as well as on the opium-smuggling Corsican Mafia. He was Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge’s middle man in the 1963 plot to overthrow South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem (who was assassinated along with his brother Ngo Ding Nhu, the Corsican’s partner in the drug traffic). A decade later, Conein and Hunt, working for the Nixon White House Plumbers, would attempt to make it appear that the plot had been ordered by JFK.”

The CIA and the Pentagon: A Tale of Two Star Crossed Lovers

As already discussed, with the Eisenhower-Nixon victory in 1952, the culmination of years of political strategizing by Wall Street Republican power brokers, the new heads of the State Department and the CIA were selected as none other than John Foster and Allen Dulles respectively; and they would go on to direct the global operations of the most powerful nation in the world.

The entire period, from April 12^th, 1945 (Roosevelt’s death) to that fateful Election Day, can be best understood as the first stage of America’s coup.^[5] This is especially clear between the period of 1945 and 1949, when a number of new pieces of legislation were passed which successfully reorganised the departments within the United States such that much of the government and military decisions would be beholden to the authority of a few men, men who were much more powerful than the president himself.

As previously discussed, the National Security Act of 1947, a Trojan horse, was one of the first of this new breed of legislation and led to the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, placing it under the direction of the National Security Council. Although it did not explicitly authorize the CIA to conduct covert operations, Section 102 was sufficiently vague to permit abuse. By December 1947, (less than four months after the creation of the CIA), the perceived necessity to “stem the flow of communism” in Western Europe—particularly Italy—by overt and covert “psychological warfare” forced the issue and NSC 4-A was born.

NSC 4-A was a new directive to cover “clandestine paramilitary operations, as well as political and economic warfare,” this provided the authorization for the intervention of the CIA in the Italian elections of April 1948. It was understood that the U.S. military could have no ‘direct’ role in covert operations, since that would defeat the purpose of deniability.

In just a few months from its creation, the CIA went from what was supposed to be a civilian intelligence gathering arm of the government to being responsible for covert operations including ‘psychological warfare.’ This was a far cry from what had organised the United States prior to the Second World War, which relied on a civilian army. Such a government mandate for cloak and dagger operations during a time of peace would have been considered unthinkable.

But that is why the Cold War narrative was so imperative, since under this paranoid schizophrenic nightmare, it was thought the world would never be at peace until a significant portion of it was wiped out. The Cold War defined a pixelated enemy that was under-defined and invisible to the eye. The enemy was what your superiors told you were the enemy, and like a shape-shifter could take the form of anybody, including your neighbour, your colleague, your partner…even the president. There would always be an enemy, because there would always be people who would resist the envisioned New World Order.

Recall, NSC 4-A was replaced by NSC 10/2, approved by President Truman on June 18^th, 1948, creating the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). NSC 10/2 was the first presidential document which specified a mechanism to approve and manage covert operations, and also the first in which the term ‘covert operations’ was defined. From 1948-1950 the OPC was not under CIA control, but rather was a renegade operation run by Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner. The OPC was later renamed the Directorate of Plans and Frank Wisner would continue at its helm.

Although the CIA was strictly in charge of covert operations, it often needed the military for additional personnel, transport, overseas bases, weapons, aircraft, ships, and all the other things the Department of Defense had in abundance. In reality, the military, whether it liked it or not, found itself forever in the embrace of its toxic lover, the CIA.

Prouty writes in JFK, first published in 1992:^[6]

“[The] OPC and other CIA personnel were concealed in military units and provided with military cover whenever possible, especially within the far-flung bases of the military around the world… The covert or invisible operational methods developed by the CIA and the military during the 1950s are still being used today despite the apparent demise of the Cold War, in such covert activities as those going on in Central America and Africa…the distinction between the CIA and the military is hard to discern, since they always work together.”

A Daring Declaration

On September 2^nd, 1945, Ho Chi Minh signed the Declaration of Independence for a new nation, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which stated the following lines:

 “A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eighty years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years—such a people must be free and independent.”

Ho Chi Minh had been leading the nationalist Viet Minh independence movement since 1941 against the colonial rule of Japan. Like most of the world, Ho Chi Minh viewed the war against the fascists as aligned to a war against imperialism. He believed that if the world was to finally make a stand against such tyranny, then there would be no place for colonialism in the post-war world. The world would have to be organised according to the recognition and respect of independent nation states, along the lines of Roosevelt’s post-war vision.

After a long and horrific battle against the ruthless Japanese fascists, with support during the war from the United States and China, it was the hope of Ho Chi Minh that Vietnam could return to its former days of peace with its new-found independence from colonial rule. The Japanese had surrendered and were leaving. The French had been defeated by the Japanese and would not return—or so it was thought.

Vo Nguyen Giap, Ho Chi Minh’s brilliant military commander, while serving as Minister of the Interior of the provisional government, delivered a speech describing the United States as a good friend of the Viet Minh. That, too, was in September 1945. Ho Chi Minh had been supplied with a tremendous stock of military equipment by the United States, and he expected to be able to administer his new government in Vietnam without further opposition. But on September 23^rd, 1945, just a couple of weeks after the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had issued its Declaration of Independence, a group of former French troops, acting with the consent of the British forces (who had been given jurisdiction of the area from the Potsdam Conference) and armed with Japanese weapons stolen from surrender stockpiles, staged a local coup d’état and seized control of the administration of Saigon, in South Vietnam.

By January 1946, the French had assumed all military commitments in Vietnam and reinstalled the French government.[7] It should be understood that the removal of the French presence in Indochina was no small feat, since it was not only their military presence that had to be dealt with, but also its business interests including French banks, among the most powerful in Asia. The French had imposed its colonial presence in Indochina since 1787.

Negotiations between the French and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam began early in 1946. Ho Chi Minh traveled to Paris, but the conference failed due to French intransigence. The French Indochina War broke out in 1946 and went on for eight years, with France’s war effort largely funded and supplied by the United States. In 1949, Bao Dai, the former emperor who spent most of his time in the lap of luxury in Paris, France, was set up by foreign interest to be the puppet government of the State of Vietnam (South Vietnam).

On May 8^th, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson announced that the United States would give both economic and military aid to France and to the State of Vietnam. The value of this military assistance surpassed $3 billion. There was never any official reason for why the United States changed its allegiance from Ho Chi Minh to the French colonial interests and their puppet government. Although Ho Chi Minh’s belief in communism was used to justify this betrayal, the truth was that he was a threat because he considered himself first and foremost a nationalist, who believed that the Vietnamese people were one and that his nation deserved independence from colonial dominance.

It was this nationalism that could not be tolerated in areas of the world which were regarded as imperial territories and subject lands. It is for this very same reason that MI6 and the CIA staged a coup against the beloved nationalist Mosaddegh in Iran, a non-communist who held a Ph.D. in law and was well on his way to removing all British imperial claims on oil in the country after winning his case against the British at the Hague and at the UN Security Council in 1951.^[8]

Ho Chi Minh was an ally to the Americans under the leadership of Roosevelt. However, with Roosevelt’s death and the soft coup within the U.S. that followed, Ho Chi Minh was now regarded as an enemy under the revamped U.S. foreign policy which had been hijacked by the British Commonwealth post- WWII, such that American interests would now forever been in alignment with Britain’s colonial interests.[9]

The Saigon Military Mission

On January 8^th, 1954, at a meeting of the National Security Council, President Eisenhower made his views clear that Americans did not belong in the Vietnam War. But that did not really matter. Eisenhower, who was used to people diligently following his line of command as a General of WWII, was soon to learn that this did not apply as President of the United States.

Among those at the January 8^th, 1954 meeting of the National Security Council were Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles. There was no way that the Dulles brothers could have misunderstood the words of President Eisenhower. Yet, on January 14^th, 1954, only six days after the President’s vehement statement against the entry of U.S. armed forces in Indochina, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said:

“Despite everything that we do, there remained a possibility that the French position in Indochina would collapse. If this happened and the French were thrown out, it would, of course, become the responsibility of the victorious Vietminh to set up a government and maintain order in Vietnam…[I do] not believe that in this contingency this country [the United States] would simply say, ‘Too bad; we’re licked and that’s the end of it’.”[10]

Thus, the seed was planted. If the French were forced out, which was rather predictable, it was understood that the U.S. would not engage in open warfare with the Viet Minh. However, it could carry out clandestine operations against Ho Chi Minh’s forces so as to cause them trouble, or in the words of John Foster Dulles ‘to raise hell.’ This is how American intervention and direct involvement in the Vietnam War began, to which there was no official military objective except ‘to raise hell.’

According to a record of the January 14^th, 1954 National Security Council meeting, it was:

“Agreed that the Director of Central Intelligence [Allen Dulles], in collaboration with other appropriate departments and agencies should develop plans, as suggested by the Secretary of State [John Foster Dulles], for certain contingencies in Indochina.”[11]

And, just like that, the entire overseeing of the Vietnam War was placed into the hands of the Dulles brothers. Two weeks later, on January 29^th, Allen Dulles selected Colonel Lansdale to head the team that was going to be deployed in Vietnam ‘to raise hell.’ Edward G. Lansdale, chief of the Saigon Military Mission, arrived in Saigon on June 1^st, 1954, less than one month after the defeat of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, for the purpose of a covert operation to conduct psychological warfare and paramilitary activities in South Vietnam.

Prouty writes in JFK:^[12] “It was not a military mission in the conventional sense, as the secretary of state had said. It was a CIA organization with a clandestine mission designed to ‘raise hell’ with ‘guerrilla operations’ everywhere in Indochina, a skilled terrorist organization capable of carrying out its sinister role in accordance with the Grand Strategy of those Cold War years.

…With this action, the CIA established the Saigon Military Mission (SMM) in Vietnam. It was not often in Saigon. It was not military. It was CIA. Its mission was to work with the anti-Vietminh Indochinese and not to work with the French. With this background and these stipulations, this new CIA unit was not going to win the war for the French. As we learned the hard way later, it was not going to win the war for South Vietnam, either, or for the United States. Was it supposed to?”

Daniele Ganser writes in NATO’s Secret Armies:^[13]

“In another top-secret operation U.S. Green Berets trained genocidal Khmer Rouge units in Cambodia after the contact had been established by Ray Cline, senior CIA agent and special adviser to U.S. President Ronald Reagan. When the Iran Contra scandal got under way in 1983, President Reagan, fearing another unpleasant exposure, asked British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to take over, who sent SAS [Special Air Service; British special forces] to train Pol Pot forces. ‘We first went to Thailand in 1984’, senior officers of the SAS later testified, ‘The Yanks and us work together; we’re close, like brothers. They didn’t like it any more than we did. We trained the Khmer Rouge in a lot of technical stuff,’ the officer remembers. ‘At first they wanted to go into the villages and just chop people up. We told them to go easy.’ The SAS felt uneasy with the operation and ‘a lot of us would change sides given half the chance. That’s how pissed off we are. We hate being mixed up with Pol Pot. I tell you: we are soldiers, not child murderers.”

It should be noted here that although NSC and Department of State records show that the Saigon Military Mission did not begin until January 1954, there were other CIA activities in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, such as the White Cloud teams, long before 1954, and some members of the SMM had participated in these earlier activities as far back as 1945.^[14]

Though Lansdale is listed as a U.S. Air Force Col. who was put in charge of the SMM, this was just a ploy. He would continue in Vietnam, as he had in the Philippines, to exploit the cover of an air force officer and to be assigned to the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) for ‘cover assignment’ purposes. He was always an agent of the CIA, and his actual bosses were always with the CIA.

With Ho Chi Minh’s defeat of the French in 1954 at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, ending the First Indochina War, it was understood that new oppositional leadership would be required if Ho Chi Minh were to be prevented from taking control of South Vietnam. Ngo Dinh Diem would oust Bao Dai in a rigged referendum vote in 1955, becoming the first President of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). The South Vietnamese were not interested in either candidate.

The reader should take note here that South Vietnam, otherwise known as Cochinchina for centuries, had never had a real form of government because it had never been a nation in its entire existence but rather had been made up of ancient villages for several centuries with relatively little change. There was no congress, no police, and no tax-system – nothing essential to the function of a nation. Diem’s ‘government’ was nothing but a façade of bureaucracy.

Despite this, Diem’s Republic of Vietnam was treated as an equal member of the family of nations, as if it could stand on its own two feet and respond accordingly to the crisis its people were being thrown into. The Vietnamese government that Eisenhower believed ought to be fighting the Viet Minh on its own behalf did not exist.

The Vietnam War, as it is understood today, was full of oversights. But perhaps the most serious oversight of all was that not one of the six U.S. administrations who oversaw the Vietnam War ever stated a positive American military objective for that war. The generals sent to Saigon were told not to let the ‘communists’ take over Vietnam, period. As Prouty stated repeatedly in his book JFK, “this does not constitute a military objective.”

The Saigon Military Mission was sent to Vietnam to preside over the dissolution of French colonial power. The Dulles brothers knew, by January 1954 if not long before that, that they would be creating a new Vietnamese government that would be neither French nor Vietminh and that this new government would then become the base for continuing the decade-old war in Indochina. That was their primary objective.

A Genocidal Exodus in the Guise of Humanitarianism

The defeat of the French resulted in the Geneva Accords in July 1954 which established the 17^th parallel as a temporary demarcation line separating the military forces of the French and the Viet Minh. Within 300 days of the signing of the accords, a demilitarized zone, or DMZ, was created, and the transfer of any civilians who wished to leave either side was to be completed.

Ho Chi Minh and all Northern Vietnamese believed the nation to be one. They did not want a division of their country, as the Geneva Agreements had guaranteed. The closing article of the Geneva Agreements, Number 14, a scarcely noticed few lines, read; “…any civilians residing in a district controlled by one party, who wish to go and live in the zone assigned to the other party, shall be permitted and helped to do so by the authorities in that district.” The ominous meaning of this was concealed under the guise of humanitarian words. The American-British note spoke of a “peaceful and humane transfer,” as if they were being kind and sensitive to the situation at hand, ready to uproot people who had lived all their lives in a settled village that had existed for tens of thousands of years.

The people of the world, most of whom had no knowledge of the Tonkinese, were led to believe that this offer was a most compassionate gesture. And, what is worse, the planners of this sinister plot were certain that the people of the world would never learn the truth, that this movement of one million North Vietnamese was really intended to be the kindling that would set the country ablaze. It was a set-up and would lay the essential groundwork for America’s direct entry into the war.

A map of North and South Vietnam after the Geneva Accords of 1954. Source: BUREAU OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS US GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE - http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/vietnam_strug.htm

The mass exodus of North Vietnamese to South Vietnam would be orchestrated by the Saigon Military Mission (SMM). This was a terrible upheaval for these people but it was sold to the West as if they were refugees fleeing Ho Chi Minh. In reality, they were fleeing the ‘psychological warfare’ and ‘paramilitary tactics’ that the SMM were unleashing in these small Northern villages. In their own words, as found in documents released within the Pentagon Papers, leaders of the SMM wrote that the mission had been sent into North Vietnam to carry out “unconventional warfare,” “paramilitary operations,” “political-psychological warfare,” and rumor campaigns and to set up a Combat Psy War course for the Vietnamese. The members of the SMM were classic ‘agents provocateurs.’

Prouty writes in JFK:^[15] “This movement of Catholics—or natives whom the SMM called ‘Catholics’—from the northern provinces of Vietnam to the south, under the provisions of the Geneva Agreement, became the most important activity of the Saigon Military Mission and one of the root causes of the Vietnam War. The terrible burden these 1,100,000 destitute strangers imposed upon the equally poor native residents of the south created a pressure on the country and the Diem administration that proved to be overwhelming.

These penniless natives…were herded into Haiphong by the Saigon Military Mission and put aboard U.S. Navy transport vessels. About 300,000 traveled on the CIA’s Civil Air Transport aircraft, and others walked out. They were transported, like cattle, to the southernmost part of Vietnam, where, despite promises of money and other basic support, they were turned loose upon the local population. These northerners are Tonkinese, more Chinese than the Cochinese of the south. They have never mixed under normal conditions. Wherever these poor people were dumped on the south were given the name ‘Communist insurgencies,’ and much of the worst and most pernicious part of the twenty years of warfare that followed was the direct result of this terrible activity that had been incited and carried out by CIA’s terroristic Saigon Military Mission.

…Nothing that occurred during these thirty years of warfare, 1945-75, was more pernicious than this movement of these 1,100,000 ‘Catholics’ from the north to the south at a time when the government of the south scarcely existed.”

It didn’t take long before the disturbance caused by the Diem-favored Northern intruders onto the Southern natives broke out into violence. Before long, the ‘friends,’ according to the Diem government and its CIA backers were the one million Northern ‘Catholics’, and the ‘enemy’—or at least the ‘problem’—was the native Cochinese of the South.

The time was right to fan the flames of war and bring in the Americans.

Vietnam’s Heroin Tales

1970 was the year that Nixon would implement his ‘Vietnamization’ program. Vietnamization was a policy of the Richard Nixon administration to reportedly end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War through a program to “expand, equip, and train South Vietnamese forces and assign to them an ever-increasing combat role, at the same time steadily reducing the number of U.S. combat troops”, as per the United States Department of Defense. According to Henrik Kruger, in reality this meant simply that the controls in Vietnam were returned to the CIA to manage the heroin trade.

Henrik Kruger writes in his The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence and International Fascism:[16]

“[Nixon’s Vietnamization]…program pumped a fortune into South Vietnam, much of it pocketed by officials. Investigations of endemic corruption among non-coms and senior U.S. Army personnel led to a Hong Kong office run by a lieutenant of drug czar Trafficante.

Pure no. 4 heroin appeared in Saigon in 1970, creating an epidemic of addiction among GIs. All previously available heroin had been the coarse form that could only be smoked. The new heroin wave was hushed up.

…On 27 May 1971 Congressmen Morgan Murphy and Robert Steele issued their report, ‘The World Heroin Problem’. Among their sensational figures was that some 15 percent of the GIs in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. The causes were easy to identify. Most obvious was the sudden appearance of enormous quantities of no. 4 heroin. Fourteen-year old girls sold 90 percent pure heroin for peanuts. Pushers stuffed it into soldiers’ pockets free of charge. Add to that the crackdown that effectively eliminated marijuana and hash from the barracks.

…The heroin coup was complete by 1973. The French were out, and new labs, routes, and buyer networks were in place, with Southeast Asia the main supplier.”

Here is a mini-history of how Vietnam was commandeered from the Corsican Mafia to form new heroin channels that would be in service to the CIA-NATO-Gladio construct and its Asian terrorist networks. Kruger writes:[17]

“In 1955 CIA agent General Edward Lansdale began a war to liquidate the Corsican supply network…The Lansdale/Corsican vendetta lasted several years…Oddly enough, his principal informant on Corsican drug routes and connections was the former French Foreign Legionnaire, Lucien Conein, then of the CIA. Conein knew just about every opium field, smuggler, trail, airstrip, and Corsican in Southeast Asia.

…Lansdale returned to Vietnam as an advisor to Ambassador Lodge. There was also an upheaval in the narcotics traffic, and perhaps the two were connected. CIA-backed South Vietnam and Laotian generals began taking over the opium traffic and as they did so, increasing amounts of morphine and low-quality heroin began showing up on the Saigon market.

The first heroin refineries sprang up in Laos under the control of General Ouane Rattikone. President Ky in Saigon was initially in charge of smuggling from the Laotian refineries to the South Vietnamese; and Lansdale’s office, it is to be remembered, was working closely with Ky. Lansdale himself was one of Ky’s heartiest supporters, and Conein went along with whatever Lansdale said.

…General Lansdale returned to the U.S. in 1967, leaving Conein in Vietnam. The next year Conein greeted his new boss, William Colby. Since 1962 Colby had run the agency’s special division for covert operations in Southeast Asia, where his responsibilities included the ‘secret’ CIA war in Laos with its 30,000-man Meo army…Many of the agents who ran the CIA’s war in Laos had earlier trained Cuban exiles for Bay of Pigs invasion, and afterward had taken part in the agency’s continued secret organisations against Cuba…

It was during Colby’s tour in Vietnam that the heroin turned out by General Ouane Rattikone’s labs appeared in quantity, and with unusually high quality. The great heroin wave brought on a GI addiction epidemic in 1970; Congressional reports indicated that some 22 percent of all U.S. soldiers sampled the drugs and 15 percent became hooked.

…In the face of skyrocketing GI heroin abuse, the Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) looked into General Ngo Dzu’s complicity in the heroin traffic and filed a lengthy report at the U.S. embassy. The embassy ignored the report and chose not to forward it to Washington. The BNDD also investigated the roots of the heroin epidemic, but was impeded in its work by the CIA and U.S. embassy. In 1971, however, a string of heroin labs were uncovered in Thailand, and a number were closed down.

In 1971, furthermore, Colby and Conein were recalled to the United States, Colby became the Deputy Director of Operations, the man in charge of the CIA’s covert operations…

At the war’s cataclysmic end, the CIA admitted that ‘certain elements in the organization’ had been involved in opium smuggling and that the illegal activities of U.S. allies had been overlooked to retain their loyalties. In reality, the agency had been forced to confess because of its inability to refute the tale of returning GIs, among them that of Green Beret Paul Withers, a recipient of nine Purple Hearts, the Distinguished Service Cross and Silver and Bronze Stars:

‘..The mission in Laos was to make friends with the Meo people and organize and train them to fight the Pathet Lao. One of the main tasks was to buy up the entire local crop of opium. About twice a week an Air America plane would arrive with supplies and kilo bags of opium which were loaded on the plane. Each bag was marked with the symbol of the tribe.’

The CIA, reportedly, did not support any form of smuggling after 1968. Del Rosario, a former CIA operative, had something to say about that:

‘In 1971 I was an operations assistant for Continental Air Service, which flew for the CIA in Laos. The company’s transport planes shipped large quantities of rice. However, when the freight invoice was marked ‘Diverse’ I knew it was opium. As a rule an office telephone with a special number would ring and a voice would say ‘The customer is here’ – that was the code designation for the CIA agents who had hired us. ‘Keep an eye on the planes from Bam Houai Sai. We’re sending some goods and someone‘s going to take care of it. Nobody’s allowed to touch anything, and nothing can be loaded,’ was a typical message. These shipments were always top priority. Sometimes the opium was unloaded in Vientiane and stored in Air America depots. At other times it went to Bangkok or Saigon.’

Even while the CIA trafficked in opium, President Nixon ranted on TV against drug abuse and lauded the crackdown against French smuggling networks.”

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Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the book “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.

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Footnotes:

[1] Prouty, L. Fletcher. (1996) JFK: the CIA, Vietnam, and the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy. Carol Pub. Group, New York, pg. 32-34.

[2] Henry Cabot-Lodge’s family history goes back to the Opium Wars on the Cabot side. See Chapter 12 for more on this story.

[3] Prouty, L. Fletcher. (1996) JFK: the CIA, Vietnam, and the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy. Carol Pub. Group, New York, pg. 260.

[4] Kruger, Henrik. (1980) The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism. South End Press, pg. 129.

[5] The priming stage for this coup was under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt who was responsible for establishing America’s secret police. For more on this story refer to my paper The Origins of America’s Secret Police. https://cynthiachung.substack.com/p/the-origins-of-americas-secret-police.

[6] Prouty, L. Fletcher. (1996) JFK: the CIA, Vietnam, and the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy. Carol Pub. Group, New York.

[7] De Gaulle who was Chairman of the Provisional Government of the French Republic served from June 3, 1944 to January 26, 1946. He had resigned his post on January 26, 1946, likely due to his disagreement with French escalation in Vietnam. De Gaulle would later serve as Prime Minister of France from June 1, 1958 to January 8, 1959; and as President of France from January 8, 1959 to April 28, 1969.

[8] For more on this refer to my paper Iran’s Century and a Half Fight for Sovereignty.

Iran’s Century and a Half Fight for Sovereignty

[9] Recall Chapter 3.

[10] Prouty, L. Fletcher (1992) JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy. Birch Lane Press Book, pg. 57.

[11] Ibid, pg. 38, 58.

[12] Ibid, pg. 58.

[13] Ganser, Daniele. (2005) NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. Frank Cass, London, New York, pg. 44.

[14] Prouty, L. Fletcher (1992) JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy. Birch Lane Press Book, pg. 61.

[15] Prouty, L. Fletcher (1992) JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy. Birch Lane Press Book.

[16] Kruger, Henrik. (1980) The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism. South End Press, pg. 123-124.

[17] Kruger, Henrik. (1980) The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism. South End Press, pg. 133-136.