Opium

by Martin Booth

  Future poppy production in the Lebanon relies on how long peace there lasts and how effectively the economy is rebuilt. Yet poppy growing in the region is not restricted to Lebanon for it is going on in the Gaza Strip where Palestinians, displaced by Israeli politics and lacking any substantial form of local industry, regard it as a viable means of income. Palestinian police seized opium to the value of $1.5 million in just a few days of raids in 1994.

  It has been suggested narcotics were to blame for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in December 1988 over Lockerbie, in Scotland, when 259 passengers and 11 people on the ground were killed. The official view of the American and British governments is that the blame lies with Libya but it is now thought by many observers that the bombing was carried out in retaliation for the shooting down of an Iranian Airbus five months previously by an American warship. It is believed that Iran put out a $10 million contract for the bringing down of an American aircraft and it has been alleged that this was accepted by Ahmed Jibril, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

  The suggested scenario is that the CIA was trying to gain influence with Middle East power-brokers, such as PFLP and Hezbollah, to obtain a bargaining advantage in freeing Western hostages in Lebanon. The terrorist groups relied on cash raised through trafficking and they were involved in heroin production in the Bekaa Valley. The DEA and other intelligence agencies were impotent to act against the heroin producers, left merely to monitor the situation. As part of their influence-building strategy, the CIA was covertly permitting – even aiding – specified trafficking shipments (known as ‘controlled runs’) from the Middle East to the USA. At the same time, it is suggested the CIA was using these controlled runs as part of a ‘sting’ operation to identify and apprehend big-time, American-based narcotics importers.

  Couriers carried heroin through airport security as part of these controlled runs, being allowed through without let or hindrance. It is suggested Ahmed Jibril saw this as a means of not only earning risk-free drugs money but also of getting a bomb on an American aircraft. If a bomb could be placed in a container used on a controlled run, it would go undetected through security checks and on to the aircraft. A young Lebanese courier, Khaled Jaafar, is said to have taken a Toshiba radio-cassette player on board flight 103, thinking it contained heroin: instead, the Toshiba was the bomb.

  More recently, drugs are being used in the buying of favours against Iraq which is itself now dealing in heroin to keep its currency afloat in the face of UN sanctions. Western intelligence agencies (particularly the CIA) are reputed to be purchasing Arab anti-Iraqi attitudes either with hard cash or by turning a blind eye to narcotics smuggling. It is even suggested the CIA has reverted to its South-east Asian practices of the 1960s and is itself dealing in heroin as a part of its Middle East strategy.

  This stratagem is not restricted to the Americans: drugs featured in the game plan of the former Communist bloc as well. As late as 1979, the Soviet Military Encyclopaedia provided a list of measures to be used to promote Soviet foreign policy objectives: it included the use of poisons and narcotics. Reports appeared in 1990 showing how East Germany’s premier, Erich Honecker, had encouraged trafficking for twenty years as his contribution towards the Soviet undermining of NATO, his government assisting in the laundering of drug and terrorist money.

  Bulgaria was similarly active in the narcotics trade, its geographic position making it an ideal transit centre between Asia and Europe. As early as the 1950s, it had put in place money laundering capabilities, providing a safe haven for criminals who deposited foreign currency in Bulgarian banks. A decade later, Bulgaria was making a profit from imported Turkish morphine base and heroin which was transhipped to the rest of Europe. Then it started to deal in arms. By the early 1970s, the Bulgarian secret service (the KDS) was purchasing drugs from the Palestinians and Middle Eastern terrorists in exchange for weapons. The drugs were sent on to Europe and the USA. Money earned from the transactions was laundered through Swiss banks and subsequently used to buy arms for international – especially Middle Eastern – terrorist organisations.

  The transactions were processed by Kintex, a Bulgarian state-owned export company formed in 1968 and fully staffed by KDS operatives. Kintex acted as a middleman, providing cover for criminal associates and linking itself to Lebanese traffickers, the Sicilian Mafia and bent Swiss bankers. By 1980, the trade was worth several billion dollars per annum to Bulgaria.

  Kintex also directly financed heroin processing. When Italian police discovered a Mafia-owned heroin laboratory in the Sicilian province of Trapani in the early 1980s, they found it was fitted out with Bulgarian equipment. The annual production of this one plant was said to be 4.5 tonnes of No. 4 heroin. By 1985, another fifteen Bulgarian-backed heroin refineries were unearthed in Italy.

  The CIA compiled a dossier on Kintex’s activities and, in January 1983, the US government made an official complaint to the Bulgarians, attacking them for their involvement in narcotics and terror. Under US pressure, Kintex was closed down but within months another Bulgarian state-owned company, Globus, took up where Kintex left off: Kintex, today renamed KoKintex (the o being shaped like the cross-hairs in a telescopic gunsight) is suspected of being a major illegal arms dealing company.

  The passing of Communism has not led to the eradication of the drugs trade in former Eastern bloc nations. There is a new storm blowing over the horizon. The CIS, the former USSR, has been an opium producer for decades but, because of the hermetically sealed Communist borders, the trade was contained. Between 1986 and 1991, Soviet authorities conducted regular poppy field eradication programmes. Thousands of hectares were destroyed with many arrests and the confiscation of drugs, weapons and money but in the political turmoil since the end of Communist rule, inter-republican co-operation has all but ceased whilst former law enforcement agencies have virtually collapsed.

  The main CIS poppy-growing regions are the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan where cultivation has been going on for centuries. To date, it seems the opium has not been refined into heroin on a large scale but it surely will be. In January 1992, Kazakhstan declared its intention to legalise poppy farming. Although it later rescinded the decision, Kazakhstan indicated what might happen in such republics which are eager for hard currencies to build up trade or finance separatist armies.

  If these republics do start large-scale opium production, much will enter the illicit world market, for Afghanistan heroin travels through the region where local clans and criminal groups are already fighting to control the routes. Central Asian republics also produce large quantities of cannabis which is already smuggled to the West: heroin could easily join this less pernicious drug. In the days of the French Connection, it was Armenian nationals who facilitated the purchase of morphine base from Turkey. They were close at hand for Armenia lies on the borders of Turkey and Iran. Today, Armenians continue to broker and transport morphine and heroin originating in the Middle East and the Golden Crescent out to the West. Morphine base is sent to refineries in Lebanon with heroin going to Turkey and on to the rest of Europe. Within Armenian society, Mafia-style practices have become institutionalised with nationalist fighters using drugs as a finance source. Pessimistic – but realistic – Western intelligence agencies sardonically call all of this region the ‘New Colombia.’

  During the decades of Communism, whilst alcoholism was of serious social concern in the USSR, drug addiction was not such a problem but now opiate abuse, especially heroin, is on the increase, particularly in Russia where there is a growing problem amongst young adults and in the lower ranks of the armed forces. A massacre in Chechnya in 1995 was reportedly committed by Russian troops high on drugs.

  In Russia as elsewhere in the CIS, Mafia-style gangs are proliferating and exploiting economic and social instabilities. These hoodlums, commonly referred to as the ‘Russian Mafia’, mostly exist in ethnically orientated group
s dating back to the last century when they operated as either bandit gangs or politically motivated anti-Tsarist partisans. Today, they contain not only hardened criminals but substantial elements of the former KGB, men with expert knowledge of undercover and underworld operations who have turned from being secret policemen into secretive, ruthless and highly organised national and international mobsters.

  The hard-core of these gangsters emanate from Chechnya and it is said that as Sicily is to Italy so Chechnya is to the CIS. There is a rumour circulating amongst international drug enforcement officers to the effect that the UN have avoided becoming involved in a humanitarian role in the Chechnya conflict because there is tacit agreement not to criticise Russian military behaviour there because the conflict affords a fine opportunity to hit at the heart of CIS gangsterism.

  With links to heroin producers and organised crime in Europe and the USA, these Russian gangs deal in narcotics, distributing throughout Europe and exporting heroin from South-east Asia to North America, using increased tourism and the post-Communist relaxation of travel rules as cover. At their present rate of expansion, Russian gangsters are anticipated to become one of the world’s leading drug (and weapons) suppliers by the year 2000, if not before.

  Gangsters are not solely involved for heroin in former Eastern bloc countries is not just made in criminal-owned factories. Some pharmaceutical companies, bereft of state subsidies and facing the open market with inefficient or out-dated factories, are thought to have begun their own heroin production.

  The political liberation of Eastern Europe, the restructuring of police and security services and political turmoil in the region has been a boon to ethnic organised crime groups who are developing new routes between the old East and the West. It is thought they are encouraging poppy growing in areas such as the Elbasan province of Albania. Indeed, Albanians are following the example of their Bulgarian neighbours, generating foreign currency by transporting heroin through their country whilst also buying morphine base from Afghanistan, Iran, Syria and Turkey and manufacturing heroin in Albania. They also traded arms and fuel to the protagonists in the Yugoslavian civil war, investing the profits in drugs. In the former Yugoslavia, where poppies used to be farmed under licence, warring factions were preparing to use opium as a means of financing their struggles but the conflict ended before the means of income was developed. This is not to say opium may not appear in the future as a source of finance in the war-torn countryside and it follows, as other states slide toward separatism, they too may turn to narcotics for funding. In neighbouring Macedonia, an opium producer in the 1920s and 1930s, poppy cultivation is once more prevalent with heroin laboratories appearing to process the harvest.

  Not only post-Communist ethnic nationalist movements deal in drugs in Europe. The Basque separatists (ETA) in Spain, the IRA and Loyalist paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland have all claimed to be engaged in political wars but they have all used drug dealing to finance arms purchases. The IRA have known links to Irish-American gangs and have worked in collaboration with them in drug dealing and other rackets whilst Loyalist units have gained funds from drug dealing despite their quasi-social role as moralists who knee-cap or kill members of their community who are involved in peddling.

  The Turkish ban of 1972 ended that country’s role as a major opium source but it has since played upon its geographical position to become an important processing and transit centre for Golden Crescent products. Heroin refineries near Istanbul and in south-eastern Turkey receive morphine base from Afghanistan by truck via Tajikistan, Azerbaijan and Georgia, about 65 per cent of the heroin being re-exported by road to Europe, much of it in bonded trucks covered by Transport International Routier (TIR) regulations and not subjected to customs inspection. The TIR system is an international agreement, the signatories to which ease cross-border transportation by removing as much bureaucracy as possible. Once vehicles have been cleared by customs at the start of a journey, they are not inspected again until reaching their destination. This plays into traffickers’ hands, especially if the journey commences where controls are lax or officials corrupt.

  The trail taken from Turkey is called the Balkan Route which goes to Western Europe by way of Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and the Czech and Slovak Republics. A southern leg goes through Cyprus (where heroin is also refined), Greece and Albania, thence by sea to Italy from the ports of Durres and Vlore: the seepage of heroin across the Adriatic is extensive. More than 75 per cent of heroin seized in Europe comes along the Balkan Route which is dominated by Turkish and Turkish Cypriot traffickers in league with criminal gangs based in Sofia, Tirana and Bucharest where law and order has broken down.

  Italy, Germany and Spain each have an addict population of over 100,000, a per capita rate higher than the USA. In Italy, despite recent successful law enforcement initiatives against them, the Mafia is still active but their involvement in narcotics is reduced, at least as far as the Sicilians are concerned. Other criminal syndicate groups, especially the Calabrian Ndrangheta and the Sacra Corona Unita from Puglia, are becoming more active. The Ndrangheta have expanded internationally, particularly amongst Italian communities in Australia, while the Sacra Corona Unita gains influence in the Balkans where it co-operates with Albanians and Macedonians, trafficking not only in narcotics but also in illegal Eastern European immigrants and arms. As a result of this increased activity, Milan has become a seminal European money laundering centre.

  Most of the heroin entering Italy is smuggled by Albanians and Macedonians, street pushing in Italy and surrounding countries being increasingly conducted by black Africans or illegal Chinese immigrants, members of the criminal labour market now existing in Europe. Italy, in particular, is having a huge problem with Chinese illegal immigrants: it is estimated there are over 100,000 in the country, transported in by Albanians from Bucharest, the base of a Triad society which deals in people. Latin American heroin trafficking organisations are also making their presence felt in Europe, especially Colombians in Rome and Madrid: having studied the market in the early 1990s, they are now exporting to Europe in substantial and increasing quantities.

  A large percentage of the heroin coming into Germany arrives via the northern Balkan Route and is primarily handled by Chechens. The Netherlands, in particular Amsterdam, is still the drugs centre for Europe and a prime transit point for heroin from both the Golden Triangle and Crescent heading for European and American markets. Many dealers collect their supplies from the Netherlands: in April 1995, 90 kilograms of heroin worth £12 million were found in London under the false floor of a horse-box towed by a Dutch-registered vehicle. Even Switzerland, usually thought of as staid to the point of banality, is not exempt. Parts of Zurich are becoming notorious for attracting large numbers of addicts from all over Europe, catered to by over 100 gun-toting Lebanese and Kosovar Albanian pushers who deal in full view of the police.

  France remains a heroin transit nation and is a main consumer with a serious urban addict problem. Distribution is still handled by traditional French organised crime syndicates which continue to process some heroin around Marseilles: as has long been the case, there are still heroin refining laboratories hidden in the rural south of France. Trafficking across the Straits of Gibraltar from Morocco has recently increased with heroin and cocaine beginning to take the place of hashish, drugs shipments entering through Gibraltar and along the adjacent Spanish coast. At least 100 rubber and fibreglass speedboats, costing £30,000 each, with engines capable of 50 knots and berthed at Gibraltar, regularly traverse the straits to Africa: more are harbouring in Spain. In July 1995, the Royal Gibraltar Police confiscated fifty vessels believed to have been used by drug smugglers. Gibraltar, with the rest of Spain, is also becoming a drug-dealing and money laundering centre.

  Heroin in Britain mostly originates from the Golden Crescent. In 1993, 52 per cent came via Turkey and Cyprus, 12 per cent from Pakistan, with the remainder arriving via India, the Lebanon, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Ghana
and Poland. Only about 1 per cent of heroin was from the Golden Triangle. Today, however, Colombian herion importation would considerably distort this analysis. Turkish and Cypriot dealers play an important role, sending most of their consignments by lorry disguised in general cargo or concealed in the vehicle’s body or chassis, often within ‘traps’ built into the vehicle, those constructed inside fuel tanks being the most reported. Their involvement is central: in London, one of the members of the prominent Turkish Cypriot Arif family has served a nine-year sentence for his role in an £8.5 million drug smuggling operation.

  In 1993, 200 kilograms of heroin were found at Dover, hidden in a truck carrying tomatoes whilst a year later, heroin worth £9 million was detected in a lorry carrying a load of Mars bars. The total heroin seizure haul in Britain for 1994 was 620 kilograms but, in 1995, seizures virtually doubled to 1200 kilograms worth £150 million. In September 1995, three heroin hauls were seized in one week, worth a total value of £35 million. It is an indication of the profligacy of heroin in Britain today and makes one wonder how much gets through undetected: official figures state probably only 10 per cent of imported heroin is seized. It seems, furthermore, that smuggling into Britain will increase for heroin is coming through the Channel Tunnel with almost daily seizures, this conduit presumably set to play an increasing part in the future.

  The street prices for heroin in Britain in 1995 were about £80 a gram or £10 for a one-twelfth to one-sixteenth of a gram fix but have more recently fallen to as low as £40 a gram in some parts of the country. The profit margin is massive. A kilogram of heroin in Pakistan costs approximately £1500 but the British distributor pays £27,000 per kilogram before cutting. After cutting, it is worth approximately £140,000. Prices are not the only factor to fluctuate. In 1992, British heroin was 45 per cent pure but it is now reduced to 35 per cent which means even greater distributor profits.