by Martin Booth
So rampant was heroin abuse, questions were asked as to whether or not the Viet Cong were behind the trade but they were not: it was solely run by American allies on the take.
In the summer of 1971, army medical officers reckoned 25,000 to 37,000 (10–15 per cent) serving rank-and-file troops were heroin addicts. In some units, the rate was nearer 20 per cent, with whole combat units made ineffectual by drug usage. It was discovered that 85 per cent of all American personnel, regardless of rank, were offered heroin with 35 per cent accepting and 19 per cent becoming habituated. So overt was drug taking in Vietnam soldiers had their Zippo lighters, a part of the personal kit of every ‘grunt’ (an ordinary enlisted soldier), engraved with drug-related poems and maxims such as:
Always ripped
Or always stoned
I made a year
I’m going home
or:
‘Say Hi! if you’re high’.
Many took their habits home with them: in November 1971, there were about 10,000 Vietnam veteran addicts in New York. A third of these were enrolled on detoxification programmes but, generally speaking, treatment for Vietnam veterans was shoddy and many remained addicted, spreading the habit to their home areas and escalating US addiction rates.
It was not only back home the troops spread heroin. They took it with them on R ‘n’ R (rest and recreation) leaves to Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei, the Philippines and Australia. Certainly, US troops on week-long R ‘n’ R in Sydney brought an increase in heroin addiction: an entire street culture of hookers and hustlers grew up around them, sharing their heroin.
Much has been written about the cause of US troop heroin addiction. Theories abound: they turned to it from marijuana to avoid that drug’s tell-tale smell or they took it to counteract boredom, fear or from shame at being involved in an unjust, amoral conflict. The truth is less complex. They took it because it was there, as accessible as tobacco and often more acceptable than liquor on which restrictions exist in the US armed forces. It was supplied through a highly sophisticated and organised marketing and distribution system targeted especially at forces personnel. The men behind the trade were untouchable, being highly placed or well protected local civil and military officials, politicians and businessmen who were in a position themselves to safeguard the Chinese syndicates in charge of the day-to-day retailing and smuggling.
One of the most notorious heroin rings was that run by senior officers of the Vietnamese military. Their modus operandi show the byzantine workings of the heroin trade and the corruption which accompanied it.
The ring dealt directly with a heroin refinery near Vientiane run by a Chinese called Hu Tim-heng who was himself in business with General Ouane Rattikone. With the son of Souvanna Phouma, the Laotian prime minister, as managing director of a front company, Hu and two Chinese partners siphoned off money from a USAID grant for the building of a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant in Vientiane in 1965. The plant, which was still incomplete in 1970, was used as a cover to purchase heroin processing chemicals and as a laundry for drug income.
The heroin was transported to Pakse or Phnom Penh in Cambodia from where it was smuggled to Saigon on commercial cargo flights or Vietnamese military C-47 transports. The heroin was off-loaded at the Vietnamese air force base at Tan Son Nhut and sold to the Chinese syndicates which distributed it locally or exported it by sea.
As the political situation changed, other military officers under President Nguyen Van Thieu accepted their predecessors’ trafficking mantle. One of these was the president’s personal intelligence adviser, General Dang Van Quang. He was in charge of the Vietnamese navy which he used to ship heroin into South Vietnam from Cambodia. By 1973, the South Vietnamese armed forces, in alliance with the utterly corrupt customs authorities and Chinese syndicates, were in control of the whole market.
Thieu was, in effect, an American appointee, his authoritarian style of government pleasing to the Americans who were not quick to condemn his drug-dealing minions: when Thieu himself was accused of complicity, no thorough investigations were undertaken even though, in 1972, a US Senate Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee was told there was overwhelming evidence of systematic corruption running through the entire Saigon government.
America was caught in a cleft stick. Congress declared war on drugs on the streets of the nation but the only effective course of action was to eradicate the corrupt generals and officials of South Vietnam who were needed in the crusade against Communism. US aid supported the drug trade and GIs’ salaries were spent on it. With the benefit of hindsight, many more American lives were probably destroyed with opium in the cause of fighting Communism than were lost to military action in the paddyfields of South-east Asia. Indo-Chinese loyalties were ultimately paid for with the lives of hundreds of thousands of American addicts.
After being demobilised, some American personnel remained in the region and dealt in narcotics. Syndicates formed. One, run exclusively by black American ex-servicemen, was based in Bangkok and smuggled heroin to the USA using grunts as couriers or mailing supplies to pre-arranged addresses via the US military postal service.
As the war began to turn in favour of the Viet Cong and the US military presence was reduced, the dealers found themselves with a heroin glut. Having learnt of the profitability of heroin and having gained valuable market experience with the GIs, the Chinese syndicates made a calculated decision. They would create mass markets elsewhere.
Their obvious targets were Europe, Australia and, especially, America. Chinese, Corsican and American syndicates began sending No. 4 heroin in bulk to the USA, much of it Double UOGlobe branded. The Golden Triangle, as well as producing 70 per cent of the world’s illicit opium, became a mass high grade heroin producer rivalling both Marseilles and Hong Kong in quality and quantity.
When Saigon fell in 1975, the syndicates had to leave Vietnam, abandoning a substantial local heroin addict population. The Communist government quickly instituted a widespread treatment programme although this did not eradicate the problem. As other Communist administrations took to governing the region, in Laos and Cambodia (renamed Kampuchea), the eastward flow of drugs across South-east Asia was mostly brought to a halt.
Meanwhile, in Thailand, the Bangkok corridor was still open. After the Vietnam War, Thailand became throughout the 1970s South-east Asia’s main opiate exporter. Heroin from the Golden Triangle arrived in Bangkok by road, rail and air where it was loaded into fishing boats which either transported it around the Malaysian peninsula as far as Hong Kong or passed it to ocean-going vessels. On occasion, it was dropped in waterproof sacks for later interception.
To try to stem the Thai trade, the UN Fund for Drug Abuse Control commenced a long term crop substitution programme in the north of the country. Tropical fruit, coffee and beans were distributed. Agricultural skills were taught but the plan was destined to fail. Although some poppy acreage was lost, the new cash crops were more difficult to grow and get out to market from the remoter areas. All that happened was opium production increased pro rata in the Burmese section of the Golden Triangle.
Another factor working against the international authorities was the degree of corruption in Thailand. Some police and narcotics agents were readily bribed. In 1972, a Thai journalist observed:
In this country there are no police officers honest or conscientious enough to refuse a bribe or a sweetener. The agents of the Thai Bureau of Narcotics are usually better paid by the traffickers to keep their mouths shut than they are by the government to catch the traffickers.
Senior Thai military officers were integral parts of the heroin trade and, although they lost their positions when a civilian government ruled from 1973, they were back in place after the government was overthrown in a military coup in 1977. General Kriangsak ruled the country for three years: he was deeply involved with the opium trade. Only in 1980, when a coalition led by General Prem replaced Kriangsak, were things to change, for Prem was not connected to opium.
Others were now moving into the scene. In Burma, the Burmese Communist Party (BCP) became the strongest force in the Shan states, controlling most of it by 1978. At first they were opposed to opium, driving out the warlords, abolishing the opium tax and encouraging the hill tribes to grow other crops. By 1983, however, they started to deal in opium and heroin to gain revenue to make up for Chinese political aid which had been withdrawn: by the end of the decade, the BCP was in decline.
Chaos ruled as ever. The Shan states rebels were breaking into splinter groups, fighting over opium harvests and territory. From 1976, the Burmese army also attacked them, burning opium stocks and spraying weed-killers on poppy fields with the idea of beating them by removing their economic foundation of opium. Heroin refineries were bombed and mule trains attacked. Yet these military operations had limited effect and, as one group declined so another rose, the warlords returned and expanded once more. One returning warlord was to gain pre-eminence. It was Khun Sa.
While he had been imprisoned, Khun Sa’s men abducted two Russian doctors from a hospital in Taunggyi. A Western television crew was invited to film them and broadcast the kidnappers’ demand of Khun Sa’s release in exchange for the doctors. The Burmese government spent some months trying to find the doctors, without success. In the end, they conceded defeat and Khun Sa was handed over to his men in 1974.
He quickly regained his former lands, his 3500-strong Shan United Army (SUA) taking control of half the Shan opium harvest. The Shan states seeking independence from Burma, Khun Sa proclaimed himself spokesman for the nationalist cause, considering himself a nationalist leader, calling international media conferences at which he candidly admitted his opium trading, giving it as an indication of his power. In an interview in 1977, he described himself as ‘King of the Golden Triangle’, adding with regard to his opium business, ‘I know it is a social evil and understand the damage it does, not only in the West, but among my own people. But I don’t feel guilty. What we are doing is justified.’
To justify further his role as a statesman, he held meetings with both US congressmen and the Thai media at his base at Ban Hin Taek, just inside Thailand. The government, rather embarrassed at his presence on Thai soil, said he would not be allowed to remain. In response, Khun Sa moved 16 kilometres into Burma, only to return a few months later to Ban Hin Taek.
Having had enough of Khun Sa’s political stance, the Thai air force bombed his base in 1980, with no discernible effect, then put a price on his head. Two years later, a full-scale assault was made against Ban Hin Taek which was overrun. The invaders discovered not only seven heroin laboratories but also 300 brick-and-concrete houses with zinc roofs and running water, an electrical generator to power soldiers’ accommodation, a substantial modern armoury, a fully equipped 100-bed hospital, basketball courts and a brothel. Khun Sa, it was found, had been living in a comfortable villa with a swimming pool and private videotape library, a few kilometres to the north.
They did not capture Khun Sa who again moved over the border into Burma, gained control of new territory and rebuilt his heroin refining operations. Within four years, he controlled 70 per cent of Burma’s opium trade, closed down General Li’s mule train routes and demolished Li’s private house in Chiang Mai. By 1986, Khun Sa was collecting, transporting and refining 80 per cent of the annual Golden Triangle harvest. He retained this level of activity despite concerted joint Thai – Burmese attacks which only resulted in the enforced re-siting of several heroin refineries in Laos.
In the late 1980s, the Thai economy was in the ascendant. Tourism and legitimate business superseded opium money in the political arena, although they did not entirely remove it. The loose understanding which had existed between government and opium armies was over and opium smuggling was now mainly done by low-ranking corrupt officials rather than with the collusion of their seniors. In 1990, Thailand and Burma signed a trade pact which it was – and still is – hoped will bring about further co-operation over the Golden Triangle problem.
As opium production in South-east Asia increased in the 1960s, international criminals had become more interested in the region. Corsican gangsters in Vientiane acted as brokers between opium producers or heroin manufacturers and Corsican syndicates in France and heroin distributors in America. As Turkey started to cut back on poppy growing, so South-east Asian–Marseilles dealing became more important.
Not only GIs arrived in Vietnam in 1965. So did the American Mafia. Initially, they busied themselves with taking kickbacks from military contracts and running a few escort services in Saigon but they soon entered narcotics smuggling, establishing contacts in Hong Kong and with the Chinese syndicates.
The main distributors of heroin in South-east Asia were – and still are – Chinese criminal syndicates, known colloquially as the Triads. These are criminal fraternities which can trace their semi-mythical roots back two millennia to the Han dynasty but they have been most active since the birth of the Qing dynasty, to the overthrow of which they were dedicated. Only in the last 150 years have they increasingly become involved in criminal activity ranging from prostitution and protection rackets to narcotics and, more recently, white collar crime.
The South-east Asian heroin trade was first infiltrated by Chiu Chau Triads in the 1950s: they have retained it as their fiefdom ever since. The largest autonomous cultural grouping of international Chinese expatriates and the Chinese majority in Thailand, not to mention the second largest Chinese ethnic group in Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia, they are more correctly known as the Teochiu people, originating from a rural area near the seaport of Swatow. Their positions of prominence overseas date back a long way. In Thailand, when it was still known as Siam, they gained high profiles in the government, commerce and industry which they have maintained to the present. They have been involved in opium from around 1875 when a cartel of local merchants won the official contract to retail opium in the French concession in Shanghai, since when they have been the Oriental equivalent of the Mafia in Italy or the Corsicans in France. Their international network of contacts includes not just smugglers but chemists, money launderers, skilled managers and businessmen, politicians and lawyers. They have their own banks which are among the world’s most prosperous. By law enforcement agencies, the Triads are considered the largest, most efficient and most secretive criminal organisation on earth.
As the Communists grew in political and military power in post-war China, the future looked bleak for the gangsters of Shanghai, many of whom had taken part in the notorious 1927 massacre of Communists. As Mao’s victory looked more and more likely, most of the Shanghai, Canton and coastal city underworlds of China
moved to Hong Kong. Amongst them were Chiu Chau Triad gangs, the Green Gang and even Big-eared Tu himself, although he died in 1951. Organised crime exploded in the British colony and No. 4 heroin production began, supplanting the local fashion for opium smoking.
The Chiu Chau Sun Yee On Triad Society already had good contacts in Hong Kong. Their influence was well established in the police force which was still riddled by corruption: it was jokingly referred to until the 1970s as the best police force money could buy. Within a short time, the Green Gang’s business was destroyed and the Chiu Chau Triads gained complete domination over the importation of Thai opium and morphine base.
Hong Kong was a good place for the Chiu Chau gangs to do business, for reasons other than their contacts and a morally elastic police force. It was only a short time since 1945, when opium had been made illegal and it was still both available and commonplace. The tens of thousands of refugees crowded into Hong Kong to escape Communism existed in atrocious conditions in squatter shack settlements on the hillsides: opiates were often smoked by them to alleviate their squalor. When opium was prohibited, there was scant detoxification provision and many opium addicts switched to heroin because it gave off no obvious scent. New addicts, especially amongst the young, went straight to heroin.
Most smoked it, the slang expression being to ‘chase the dragon’, a term which gained wider international currency from the 1960s onwards. The smoking variety was usually an uncharacteristically pure No. 3 heroin, nicknamed White Dragon Pearl of between 40 and 50 per cent purity.