Opium

by Martin Booth

  Formed in September 1947, one of the CIA’s early projects was the funding of Corsican gangsters, especially in Marseilles, to disrupt Communist-led unions which organised labour strikes in 1947 and 1950. The underlying aim was to destroy or ineffectualise the French Communist Party. From this covert operation two Corsican gangster brothers, Antoine and Barthélemy Guerini, rose to such power that, after the 1950 dock strike, they themselves controlled the Marseilles docks. The assistance this gave to the heroin industry need not be spelt out.

  To maintain the anti-Communist status quo, the CIA continued to finance and supply weapons to the Corsicans which gave them a strong power base from which they cemented their relationship with the Mafia. In 1951, the first Corsican heroin laboratory started refining in Marseilles. It was good timing for the Italian Mafia were at that moment looking for a new source of heroin.

  It has been said the Corsicans also received political protection from the French government in exchange for an under-the-table agreement that all the heroin would be exported. With characteristic French self-interest, the idea was to ignore the damage done to other countries, even those of war-time allies. Rumours also exist to the effect that the Service de Documentation Extérieure et du Contre-Espionage (SDECE, the French equivalent of the CIA) was also involved in organising drugs shipments to the USA: certainly, they were heavily involved in the opium trade in French Indo-China.

  Although the Corsican gangs were not as tightly organised as Mafia groups, their supply lines were very efficient. Field traders bought opium in small batches direct from poppy farmers in Turkey, reselling to a broker who arranged for it to be smuggled into Syria. At Aleppo, it was transhipped on to Beirut and converted into morphine base. Lebanese banks guaranteed strict client confidentiality and the trade provided a good income for various political groups. From Beirut, the morphine was shipped to Marseilles where it was either landed at a dock or hermetically sealed and dumped at a pre-arranged place offshore, attached to a brightly coloured fishing buoy, to be collected later by ‘fishermen’. Some morphine base arrived from Indo-China where the Corsicans also operated on a smaller scale.

  The refining laboratories, staffed with the best heroin chemists (nicknamed ‘cooks’), were very hard to discover. Some were sited in remote houses in the countryside around Marseilles, some in cellars, outhouses or garages, and some in city tenement blocks. Many were systematically moved from location to location to avoid detection through the characteristic smell of acetic acid which accompanies the chemical process. At the pinnacle of production in the mid-1960s, there were about two dozen laboratories operating around the clock, outputting high-grade heroin of a purity usually difficult to attain.

  Success in busting the laboratories was patchy but a high point was reached in October 1964 when a French narcotics squad raided a house near Aubagne and caught Joseph Cesari red-handed. The arrest was the result of a two-year-long surveillance and Cesari was a major catch. A leading Corsican heroin chemist, he was capable of achieving 98 per cent purity and had been refining 40 kilograms per week for some years in a complex permanent laboratory. His capture resulted in all laboratories being more mobile to confound detection.

  Around the time of Cesari’s bust, Turkish traders began to make their own morphine base, sending it direct to Marseilles, at first by sea and then overland, carried by Turkish migrant workers living in West Germany. By 1972, three-quarters of the morphine in Europe originated in Turkey, with Munich as the way station and transit warehouse.

  After the morphine was refined in Marseilles, the resulting heroin was sent on to New York with merchant seamen couriers. When the authorities caught on to this, the transhipments were shifted to go via Canada or Latin America. The Latin American route was devised and run by one of the Mafia’s all-time most powerful godfathers, Santo Trafficante, Jr., who ‘owned’ Florida and the Caribbean. He established a select band of couriers and distributors, opening up routes bringing European heroin into Miami through Latin America. At the time, travellers from France were always suspect in the eyes of the US Customs: those from Latin America were not. Trafficante’s couriers were further aided by the fact the heroin often went by way of the French possessions of Martinique and Guadeloupe, where a French national was not subject to customs formalities, thence to Puerto Rico, an American possession, from which it could be sent on to Miami without passing through customs.

  As long as the Guerinis controlled Marseilles, a moratorium existed on drug trafficking within France but, by the mid-1960s, their influence was in decline and they were being ousted by younger, more thrusting characters like Jean Jehan who was the inspiration behind the Hollywood movie, The French Connection. The newcomers considered such a ban irrelevant and contrary to good business: it was not long before France deservedly developed her own heroin problem.

  For twenty years, until 1972, the Corsicans in alliance with both the Italian Mafia (which it is alleged, until the present day, have had high political protection in their home country) and the American Mafia, ran the US heroin market: they accounted for over 80 per cent of American consumption.

  Once in the USA, the heroin was taken to cutting and packing centres known as ‘heroin mills’, such as those in Pleasant Avenue in New York’s East Harlem, where it was adulterated and repackaged for bulk, retail or street sale. By the 1970s, the avenue and the area around it was a wholesale heroin market, known as the Pleasant Avenue Connection. Some of the tenements contained ‘cut houses’, small mills in stifling, air-tight rooms in which, under armed guard, women, naked due to the heat, cut heroin and weighed it into small plastic bags which retailed at $5 each. Outside, teenagers called ‘movers’, paid up to $2000 a week, loaded and unloaded pure heroin from sellers’ to buyers’ vehicles. The business was conducted overtly with the connivance of certain corrupt police officers from a supposedly untouchable New York Police Department squad known as the Special Investigations Unit (SIU). Its members collaborated with the Mafia to create a local heroin epidemic amongst neighbourhood blacks and Puerto Ricans, Jewish dealers acting as middlemen. The Pleasant Avenue Connection was finally closed down in 1973 when a specially constituted squad of untouchable police and federal agents side-stepped the SIU. Nearly a hundred gangsters were arrested. One of these, caught with a million dollars, was asked what he was going to do with the money: he sarcastically replied he was going to buy a newspaper.

  Some sections of the American Mafia also trafficked in heroin (called babania in Sicilian slang) from Sicily, their trade known as the Sicilian Connection. In Sicily itself, friction in the Mafia between traditionalists and the new realists had produced a new breed of mafiosi who not only held America in thrall but, through their international connections and by dealing with other overseas suppliers, were to become intercontinental heroin brokers.

  French addiction rates soared after the moratorium ended and the police substantially increased their Marseilles operations from 1971, encouraged by the American ‘war on drugs’ initiative instigated by President Nixon and aided by the US drugs agencies. Huge heroin stocks were seized. Traffickers were arrested. In 1972, six laboratories were unearthed, one being run by Cesari who had recently been released from prison. In the same year, the Turkish authorities outlawed poppy cultivation under pressure from the American government.

  This was a major victory in Nixon’s drug war. Poppies had been cultivated in Turkey for centuries whilst opium could be exported from the Ottoman Empire without restriction until 1923 when the state took control and a compulsory purchase scheme was introduced. By 1964, although only certain provinces were permitted a harvest quota, Turkey being one of the few countries allowed by international convention to export opium for pharmaceutical use, production was mostly unrestricted. Inevitably, peasants secretly held back a proportion of their opium to sell on the black market where prices were higher and traffickers paid cash on delivery. Considering Turkey the main opium source for heroin bound for the USA the Americans, using the threa
t of diminished military and economic aid, forced Turkey first to reduce, then eventually close down, its poppy farms to starve the French Connection.

  Public opinion in Turkey was outspoken, the Ankara government criticised for caving in to American demands and being made to pay the penalty for the failure of drug enforcement in France and North America. A negotiated settlement was sought and Turkey received $35.7 million in compensation. It was one-tenth of what the Turks demanded and a fraction of their legitimate per annum opium trade earnings. Only two years later, the Turkish state monopoly decided to resume business and allow poppy growing once more but, in the meantime, the Americans claimed a moral victory: Nixon gained political kudos and the Franco-Turkish criminal relationship was broken. The ban was long enough to seal the fate of the French Connection and, although the Italian Mafia and the Corsicans re-entered the trade in the late 1970s, establishing isolated heroin laboratories across rural southern France and Italy, their hold on the US market was broken. The cutting of the supply of Turkish morphine base forced the American Mafia to find a new heroin source, for which they had in fact already been searching, appreciating the pressure being put on Turkey to stop production.

  Geographically speaking, they did not have far to look. Poppy cultivation was common from Turkey to Tibet in an area loosely termed the Golden Crescent and consisting of the mountains of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan where opium had been produced since at least the sixteenth century.

  In Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province there exist autonomous regions belonging to the Pathan (also known as Pushtun) tribes where the laws of the Karachi government hold no sway whatsoever. Fierce and proud, the Pathans have been a thorn in the side of governments for centuries: the British colonial rulers, unable to suppress them, had instead made a loose alliance with them, allowing them to keep their arms and autonomy in exchange for a quiet time. The tribesmen run their own affairs, pay allegiance to local chiefs and refuse to acknowledge national boundaries which they traverse at whim. They are, therefore, the region’s smugglers, bringing contraband into and out of Afghanistan. Their main stock in trade was munitions but, in more recent times, they have turned to drugs.

  Under British rule, the area produced little opium although poppies have been farmed in the Mahaban Mountains along the Pakistan–Afghanistan border since the nineteenth century when the British started planting the crop for the legal opium trade. It is perfect poppy country with suitable soil, steep and well-drained hillsides, long hours of sunshine and the right amount of rainfall. There being no other forms of income apart from agriculture, it follows that the opium poppy provides an ideal cash crop. In the 1970s, opium was sent to Afghanistan and thence distributed internationally, although the amounts were comparatively small: today, there are extensive poppy growing areas on either side of the Pakistan–Afghanistan border.

  The Afghan government passed a law in 1958 prohibiting opium but no penalties were levied so it was ignored. By the early 1970s the Afghanis, with no heroin problem of their own, still saw no need for action: furthermore, the country was very poor and politically unstable. There were, officials said, other more pressing priorities. In fact, even had they decided to act, the Afghan administration would have been powerless. It lacked law enforcement resources, the poppy-growing areas were geographically remote and inaccessible, the peasants had no other livelihood, the tribesmen were liable to armed rebellion if they were interfered with and corruption was endemic. On top of this, opium was a foreign currency earner. The capital, Kabul, was on the ‘hippy trail’ of the late 1960s and 1970s and hippy transients were prepared not only to imbibe but to act as couriers for the opium dealers and heroin refineries which were being set up, funded by well-placed and -funded Afghanis including government ministers.

  Afghanistani and Pakistani opium and heroin, the latter in fairly small amounts, were run across the border to Iran. It was a frontier beyond policing, being 500 miles long and very rugged, criss-crossed with mule tracks and rough roads. From Iran, some of the drugs went west to Turkey or south to the Persian Gulf, especially Dubai, whence they were shipped on to Europe and the rest of the world. Most of the opium, however, went no further than Iran which had a huge addict population caused by the years when the country was a major opium producing nation.

  In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, opium had been a major. Iranian export commodity, accounting for 15 per cent of its foreign income. Medicine was backward and opium so commonly used it was known as teriac (cure-all) rather than afyon, the Persian for opium. When official smoking shops were introduced in 1931, ostensibly as a form of treatment clinic, the already widespread addiction rocketed. By 1949, it was estimated 11 per cent of the adult population were habituated with 90 per cent of the population smoking opium in some regions. Villages of 600 inhabitants might have up to 16 smoking shops whilst Tehran contained 500 opium dens: the country had an estimated two million addicts who consumed two tons of opium per day in the mid-1950s. The ruling families, including those closely allied to the Shah, owned vast acreages of poppies and earned substantial incomes from them. Weak laws and corruption made sure they were protected.

  In 1950, Iran began to reduce opium production until, in 1955, poppy cultivation was halted and addicts given six months to cure themselves, after which poppy growing and opium smoking, selling or possessing meant imprisonment. It was reported the Shah took this move because of the poor quality of military recruits due to addiction and under international pressure.

  After the 1955 ban, addict numbers reduced but many turned to the black market for supplies. Production increased in Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The traffickers demanded payment in gold bullion. Such was the size of the trade, the national reserves began to dwindle. Then heroin grew in popularity, particularly amongst the urban young, because it was less obvious when used. Illicit refineries were established in Tehran, linked to suppliers in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  By 1968, 70 per cent of the Iranian prison population were inside on narcotics offences and the government did a volte face. Blaming neighbouring countries for their plight and the failure of the outright ban, which was accepted to be ineffectual, they announced a provisional resumption of poppy cultivation and opium production.

  The international community was incensed: it was said the decision was the greatest setback to global drug control since 1945. Yet Iran was adamant and cited the social and economic effects the blanket ban had had on the country. A law was ratified in June 1969 authorising opium production to satisfy domestic demand, poppy cultivation being condoned only in rigidly controlled areas. No sooner was the law passed than poppy fields sprang up everywhere.

  Under the provision of the law, opium could only be legally used by addicts over sixty years old and by those who were unable on medical grounds to undergo detoxification. Most addicts overcame the restriction by failing to register and by buying their opium illegally. Although the law carried the death penalty for trafficking, corruption and the widespread use of opium made it impractical.

  Until about 1972, the drug output of the Golden Crescent stayed largely contained within the confines of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. As long as the Iranian ban lasted, there was good money to be made from a sizeable addict population there. With the ban lifted and Iran growing her own opium again, some of the Golden Crescent product was released for the international market but it was several more years before it was to become a significant source.

  With the collapse of the French Connection, therefore, the Mafia and other criminals were unable at that time to obtain large scale supplies of narcotics from the Golden Crescent and they set their sights further afield on South-east Asia. The region was already producing up to 70 per cent of the world’s illicit opium and Chinese chemists in laboratories in Hong Kong were refining heroin of comparable purity to that of Cesari. This, the gangsters decided, was the area in which to expand so contacts were built up between them and both Corsican syndicates operating in
Indo-China and Chinese criminal fraternities existing in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand and Taiwan.

  The next development in the opium story, and one of the most shameful, was just around the corner.

  14

  Soldiers and Secrets

  In 1969, the US Bureau of Narcotics reckoned only 5 per cent of the heroin on American streets originated in South-east Asia. This was more than likely a gross underestimate. However, in three years, the guestimate had gone up to 30 per cent and was rising. The source of the heroin was the Golden Triangle.

  The Golden Triangle, a name made popular by journalists in the 1970s, is an area of at least 225,000 square kilometres, roughly three-sided and straddling the frontiers of Laos, Thailand and Burma, just south of the Chinese border. It is a mountainous, isolated region of sharp ridges, wide plateaux and tall peaks, the uplands formed of limestone and ideal opium poppy country, especially for the Yunnanese variety of the opium poppy which prefers a temperate climate: at altitudes above 1000 metres, conditions are perfect.

  Other factors make the Golden Triangle a top quality opium producing region. Opium has been a trade commodity here for at least two centuries. Like the Mahaban Mountains on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border, the area is remote and inaccessible, beyond the laws of the respective governments and politically chaotic: that the Thai, Laotian and Burmese governments are also riddled with corruption more than helps. The collusion of many politicians, officials and military leaders is virtually certain. If not, a tolerance of the trade may be relied upon.