Patrick Winn on the Southeast Asian Narco-state the CIA Helped Build: In Wa State, in Myanmar, the economy is inextricable from the opium and methamphetamine trade ( crimereads.com )
Q: You detail a long clash in Southeast Asia between the CIA and the DEA. What resulted from this?
A: In the course of writing this book, it became very obvious that this was another example of the CIA utterly failing to comprehend the repercussions of its actions. The CIA used drug traffickers as intelligence-gathering assets during the Cold War in Southeast Asia, and my research indicates it protected them from prosecution from local governments—and when the DEA came into the picture initially, from the DEA as well. The CIA and the DEA just think completely differently on this issue. If the ultimate goal of the CIA is to maintain American supremacy and working with a drug trafficker will weaken your rival or help you get intelligence on your rival, they think it’s worth it.
Q: Whereas the DEA wants to shut it down completely, no matter what.
A: The DEA sees this from a strict law enforcement perspective—our job is to take down drug traffickers, whoever they are. The law is the law. And as a former CIA officer that I interviewed for this book explained to me: We’re allowed to break the law. And then he quickly followed up, Foreign laws, not US laws. But… (laughs). Look, spies deceive. Spies lie.
When there’s a drug-trafficking organization out there that is not serving America’s interests or has no valuable role in intelligence-gathering, the CIA is happy to help bring them down. The CIA has an anti-narcotics division, and I’m sure it’s responsible for bringing hell on all sorts of drug-trafficking syndicates. But not the ones that are valuable to maintaining American dominance.
Q: What’s the relationship between enabling drug trafficking and the heroin that American soldiers discovered during the Vietnam War?
A: The roots of the war on drugs originate in Southeast Asia. The moral panic over narcotics really began with GIs in Vietnam doing heroin and bringing that addiction back home to the United States. The war on drugs was a response to that. The heroin that those GIs were doing originates in the highlands of Southeast Asia, and one of the major producers of the opium that was refined into heroin were the Wa people. That opium was collected by an organization affiliated with the CIA, used by the CIA as intelligence-gathering assets.
Archived at - https://archive.is/jtuj3
Another interview I saw with this author and a bit more info, "How Narcotics have shaped everything for the Wa, an ethnic minority in Myanmar"
The U.S. has had a profound impact on Myanmar's Wa people. NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to Patrick Winn about his new book, Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel That Survived the CIA.
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INSKEEP: Now, as isolated as they are - I'm just looking at a map and seeing that this corner of Myanmar is next to Thailand, which is a U.S. ally, next to Laos, which was of great interest to the United States during the Vietnam War period, next to China, which is of great interest to the United States now. Is there a history of the United States in this otherwise very isolated region?
WINN: Very much so. And the original U.S. entity that was interested in this place was the CIA. What the CIA did manage to do is to use this area as a launching pad for covert missions into Communist China, to steal documents, to tap phone lines, in one story I uncovered to blow up a bridge, to do anything they could to gather intelligence and pull information out of Communist China, which was very, very difficult to access at that time. Later on, other American agencies, namely the DEA, became interested in the area as well because it was churning out so much narcotics, and so much of it was going to the United States.
INSKEEP: OK, so the DEA is not a fan of the Wa or of that area anyway or of their drug activity, but it sounds like the CIA had quite a relationship going. What was in it for the Wa to work with the United States in these covert operations decades ago?
WINN: Growing opium and selling opium is a capitalist endeavor. At the time, the Communist Party was dead set against opium. So if China were to expand into this area, which was a very genuine threat, it would end the opium business, and that would have affected these Wa warlords.
INSKEEP: How effective is the DEA, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, trying to cut back on the drug traffic from this area?
WINN: The DEA has utterly failed. At one point, the DEA actually wanted to work with the Wa to cut this deal. The U.S. would go in and provide education, schools, hospitals, basically to modernize the Wa people. And in return, the Wa would wind down their drug production. But it didn't work out, in part because the CIA did not want it to work out. These different wings of the U.S. government don't always get along, and at that point in time - this is the mid-1990s - the CIA and the DEA wanted very different things from them.
[Bolding added]
