¹ San Anselmo, California. Please contact me at [email protected]. I especially thank Matthew Pembleton, American University, for his generous and valuable research assistance. I also thank Jeremy Kuzmarov, Peter Dale Scott and William Walker III for commenting on an earlier version of this essay.

² On the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, see Robert J. Hanyon, “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964,” Cryptologic Quarterly, no date (declassified version available at http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/gulf_of_tonkin/articles/rel1_skunks_bogies.pdf, accessed December 12, 2012). On Team B and other examples of politicized intelligence around strategic arms, see Joshua Rovner, Fixing the Facts: National Security and the Politics of Intelligence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). On Iraq, see the short but insightful exchange by Fulton Armstrong and Thomas Powers, “The CIA and WMDs: The Damning Evidence,” The New York Review of Books, August 19, 2010, and Paul Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Among other studies of the politicization of intelligence, see Robert Gates, “Guarding against Politicization,” Studies in Intelligence: Journal of the American Intelligence Professional 36 (Spring 1992), 513; Harry Howe Ransom, “The Politicization of Intelligence,” in Stephen J. Cimbala, ed., Intelligence and Intelligence Policy in a Democratic Society (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Transnational Publishers, 1987), 25-46; Mel Goodman, Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and the Fall of the CIA (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008); Richard K. Betts, Enemies of Intelligence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Uri Bar-Joseph and Jack S. Levy, “Conscious Action and Intelligence Failure,” Political Science Quarterly 124:3 (2009), 461-488; and “Revisiting Intelligence and Policy: Problems with Politicization and Receptivity,” a special issue of Intelligence and National Security, 28 (February 2013).

³ In 1954 President Eisenhower launched what The New York Times called “a new war on narcotic addiction at the local, national, and international level.” See “President Launches Drive on Narcotics,” New York Times, November 28, 1954. Nearly two decades later, his former vice president, Richard Nixon, said “This administration has declared an all-out global war on the drug menace.” (“Nixon Plans to Unify Drug Enforcement Agencies,” New York Times, March 29, 1973.)

⁴ Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Jonathan Marshall, Drug Wars: Corruption, Counterinsurgency, and Covert Operations in the Third World (Forestville, Calif.: Cohan and Cohen, 1991); Jonathan Marshall, The Lebanese Connection: Corruption, Civil War, and the International Drug Traffic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). Washington's shifting stance on Panama in the 1980s and 1990s——alternately suppressing evidence of drug crimes and then using inflated claims to justify a military invasion——was a particularly striking example of the power of politicized drug claims. Jonathan Marshall, “Unjust Cause: Drug Trafficking and Money Laundering in Post-Noriega Panama,” unpublished manuscript.

⁵ Alfred McCoy, with Catherine Read and Leonard Adams II, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

⁶ Douglas Clark Kinder, “Bureaucratic Cold Warrior: Harry J. Anslinger and Illicit Narcotics Traffic,” Pacific Historical Review 169 (1981), 169-191; cf. Douglas Clark Kinder and William O. Walker III, “Stable Force in a Storm: Harry J. Anslinger and United States Narcotic Foreign Policy, 1930-1962,” The Journal of American History 72 (March 1986), 908-927. See also works cited in this paper by Douglas Valentine, David Bewley-Taylor, Kevin Ryan, Kathleen Frydl, Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parssinen, among others.

⁷ Kevin F. Ryan, “Toward an Explanation of the Persistence of Failed Policy: Binding Drug Policy to Foreign Policy, 1930-1962,” in Drug War, American Style: The Internationalization of Failed Policy and Its Alternatives, eds. Jurg Gerber and Eric L. Jensen (New York: Garland Publishing, 2001), 35.

⁸ John C. McWilliams, The Protectors: Harry J. Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1930-1962 (Newark: University of Delaware press, 1990), 13-17.

⁹ According to Douglas Kinder, “Anslinger led an investigation of the Bolshevik movement in cooperation with the British Intelligence Service and … submitted one of the first reports about Soviet Russia's world revolutionary plans. “Bureaucratic Cold Warrior,” 172.

¹⁰ See for example Anslinger's article, “Marijuana: Assassin of Youth,” The American Magazine, 124 (July 1937).

¹¹ Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parssinen, Webs of Smoke: Smugglers, Warlords, Spies, and the History of the International Drug Trade (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 285; see also Kinder, “Bureaucratic Cold Warrior,” 179-81; Jill Jonnes, Hip-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of America's Romance With Illegal Drugs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 160-161; Eric Schneider, Smack: Heroin and the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 7.

¹² “Luciano Rules U.S. Narcotics from Sicily, Senators Hear,” New York Times, June 28, 1951; “Italy Called Heroin Center, Luciano, Mafia Shippers,” New York Times, September 1, 1951; “Luciano is Linked to Heroin Arrests,” New York Times, March 9, 1952.

¹³ “U.S. Finds Heroin Big Narcotic Snag,” New York Times, May 2, 1951.

¹⁴ As early as the summer of 1951, as the Federal Bureau of Narcotics faced budget cuts, Deputy Narcotics Commissioner G. W. Cunningham made the case for more funding and more agents by warning that the PRC had accumulated 500 tons of opium for sale abroad, “more than enough to supply the whole world for a year.” See “New Tactics Urged in Narcotic Battle,” New York Times, June 19, 1951; “House Told Red China Tried to Trade Opium,” New York Times, August 17, 1951.

¹⁵ “Big Narcotics Ring Traced to Peiping,” New York Times, April 27, 1952; cf. “Red China Accused of ‘Dope Warfare,’” Miami News, April 26, 1952.

¹⁶ Victor Riesel, “Soviet Opium Trust Financed North Korean War Through Sales of Dope Across World,” Tri City Herald, May 22, 1952.

¹⁷ See UN Economic and Social Council, Commission on Narcotic Drugs, “Summary Record of the Hundred and Eighty-Second Meeting,” mimeograph, May 5, 1952, E/CN.7/SR.182 July 10, 1952; People's Republic of China, “Foreign Ministry Issues Statement on Narcotics Slander Made by U.S. Representative at the UN Commission,” July 2, 1954, in “U.N. Documents Relating to Communist China” file, box 153, Record Group 170, Records of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, National Archives (hereafter “BNDD records”). Excerpts from Anslinger's statement to the CND can be found in H. J. Anslinger and William F. Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1953), 70-75; “Traffic in Narcotics is Flourishing,” New York Times, May 11, 1952; “Narcotic Charge Scored,” New York Times, May 20, 1952. Anslinger continued to reap publicity by publishing a nationally syndicated column in place of vacationing Victor Riesel, “Probe Shows How Commies Handle Opium,” Tri City Herald, July 29, 1952.

¹⁸ As examples from Australia, see “Store of Opium in China,” The West Australian (Perth), March 29, 1951; “Red China Drug Source for U.S.,” The Advertiser (Adelaide), June 20, 1951; “Reds Using Drug Warfare, is U.N. Charge,” The Argus (Melbourne), April 28, 1952; “Dope Running by Communists,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 7, 1952; “Big Seizure of Heroin,” The West Australian, April 7, 1954; “Narcotics are Policy Weapon for Red China,” The West Australian, May 6, 1954.

¹⁹ “Reds Push Drug Trade,” Reading Eagle [Pa.], November 23, 1953; “Coast Heroin Flow Laid to Red China,” New York Times, November 24, 1953; cf. George Sokolsky, “Red China's Dope Traffic Perils American Youth,” Milwaukee Sentinel, October 4, 1954.

²⁰ “U.S. Charges China Spurs Drug Habit,” New York Times, May 5, 1954.

²¹ U. S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, hearings, Communist China and Illicit Narcotics Traffic, 84/1, (Washington, U. S. Government Printing Office, 1955), 3-14; U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Improvements in the Federal Criminal Code: Illicit Narcotics Traffic, 84/1 (Washington, U. S. Government Printing Office, 1955-56), 275-278; “Investigations: Dope from Red China,” Time, March 21, 1955.

²² Harry J. Anslinger with Will Oursler, The Murderers: The Shocking Story of the Narcotic Gangs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961), 228. He also began asserting the existence of “a definite tie-in between Red China and Cuban dope operations,” as he added Fidel Castro to his list of subversive drug kingpins. See “Cuba is Accused of Cocaine Plot,” New York Times, April 14, 1962.

²³ “Two Communist Rackets,” New York Times, May 3, 1952; “Peiping's Narcotics Trade,” New York Times, May 15, 1954.

²⁴ See, for example, Donald J. Cantor, “The Criminal Law and the Narcotics Problem,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 51 (January-February 1961), 512-527. Cantor, a Hanford attorney, called for “some form of legal dispensation of opiates to addicts” in part because law enforcement was incapable of staunching the flow of drugs from Communist China (527).

²⁵ John O’Kearney, “Opium Trade: Is China Responsible?” The Nation, October 15, 1955, 320-322. Senior FBN officer Charles Siragusa sent Anslinger a photocopy of the article, saying of The Nation, “This is a pro-Communist publication, isn’t it?” More substantively, he reported that contrary to O’Kearney, the head of Customs in Singapore “told me that almost all of the opium trafficked in his area originates in Red China.” See Siragusa to Anslinger, November 4, 1955, in “Communist China, 1955-1958” file, box 153, BNDD papers.

²⁶ See “Review of the Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs Throughout the World As Reported Between April 1, 1951 and March 31, 1952,” submitted by Mr. H. J. Anslinger to the CND, April 15, 1952. The draft text, in “Communist China, 1952-1954” file, box 153, BNDD papers, was edited to eliminate mention of opium originating in the Shan States of Burma, Thailand, and Iran, leaving only Communist China as the source of Far Eastern seizures.

²⁷ Memorandum from B. T. Mitchel, Assistant to the Commissioner of Narcotics, to District Supervisor Gentry, San Francisco, May 20, 1953, in “Wayland L. Speer Foreign Assignment” file, 0660-A-3 Correspondence, box 165, BNDD records.

²⁸ Memorandum to Anslinger from Walter P. McConaughy, director of the Office of Chinese Affairs, Department of State, forwarded December 16, 1953, in “Wayland L. Speer Foreign Assignment” file, 0660-A-3 Correspondence, box 165, BNDD records.

²⁹ U.S. Mission to the United Nations press release 1481, May 27, 1952, quoting remarks of Walter Kotschnig, deputy U.S. representative on the Economic and Social Council, in “Communist China, 1952-1954” file, box 153, BNDD papers.

³⁰ Marshall, Drug Wars, 30-31.

³¹ Nixon White House background memo, “Alleged Involvement of the People's Republic of China in Illicit Drug Traffic,” February 15, 1972, reprinted in Congressional Record——House, March 29, 1972, 10881.

³² McCoy et al., The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, 145-148.

³³ Popular journalist and historian George McCormick, writing under the pseudonym Richard Deacon, dismissed such denials by British authorities in Hong Kong as the product of police corruption, “complacency” and “a desire to co-exist with the Communists at all costs.” Following a cleanup of the colony's police force in 1973, he maintained, drug seizures “proved conclusively that the goods came from the mainland.” Richard Deacon, The Chinese Secret Service (New York: Ballantine Books, 1974), 446, 448. This largely unreferenced work is of uncertain reliability.

³⁴ Comments of Rep. John Ashbrook, R-OH, in Congressional Record-House, March 29, 1972, 10878. See also Allan C. Brownfeld, The Peking Connection: Communist China and the Narcotics Trade (Washington, D.C.: The Committee for a Free China, 1972), reprinted in The Congressional Record-House, August 17, 1972, 28934-28940; Joseph D. Douglass, Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America and the West (London: Edward Harle Ltd., 2 001), 11-14; J. H. Turnbull, Chinese Opium Narcotics: A Threat to the Survival of the West (Richmond, U.K.: Foreign Affairs Publishing Company, 1972); John Chamberlain, “Coverup of China's Drug Traffic Won’t Aid U.S.,” Evening Independent [St. Petersburg], July 18, 1972.

³⁵ Congressional Record——House, March 29, 1972, 10881.

³⁶ William O. Walker III, Opium and Foreign Policy: The Anglo-American Search for Order in Asia, 1912-1954 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 197.

³⁷ Sal Vizzini, Vizzini (New York: Pinnacle Books, 1972), 221.

³⁸ Matthew Pembleton, “District 17: The First Foreign Engagement in the War on Drugs?” Unpublished paper presented to the American Historical Association, New Orleans, January 4, 2013.

³⁹ Anslinger and Oursler, The Murderers, 228; cf. McWilliams, The Protectors, 151.

⁴⁰ Anslinger memorandum to Chairman of CND, “The Source and Extent of Heroin Traffic in Japan,” April 15, 1952 in “Communist China 1952-1954” file, box 153, BNDD papers; cf. Anslinger and Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics, 70.

⁴¹ Wayland Speer, Chief, Narcotic Control Brigade, GHQ SCAP, memo to Anslinger, April 18, 1952, in “Communist China, 1952-1954” file, box 153, BNDD records.

⁴² For hints of manipulation of SCAP intelligence on narcotics, see Walker, Opium and Foreign Policy, 168.

⁴³ For an official description of SCAP antisubversive operations under Willoughby, see MacArthur in Japan: The Occupation: Military Phase, v. 1 supplement (Center for Military History, 1994), 254-258. Accessed December 16, 2012 from http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/MacArthur%20Reports/MacArthur%20V1%20Sup/Index.htm. Army G-2 in the Far East Command remained insular and “high-handed” at least into 1952; see Curtis Peebles, Twilight Warriors: Covert Air Operations Against the USSR (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2005), 77, 79-80.

⁴⁴ Frank Kluckhohn, “Heidelberg to Madrid——The Story of General Willoughby,” The Reporter, August 19, 1952.

⁴⁵ Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 104-115, 123-129.

⁴⁶ “U.S. Paid Unit 731 Members for Data,” Japan Times, August 15, 2005; Takemae Eiji, The Allied Occupation of Japan (New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002), 162-164; Stephen Mercado, The Shadow Warriors of Nakano (Washington, D.C.: Brassey's, 2002), 207-208, 210-211, 219-20; Michael Petersen, “The Intelligence That Wasn’t: CIA Name Files, the U.S. Army, and Intelligence Gathering in Occupied Japan,” in Researching Japanese War Crimes Records: Introductory Essays (Washington: National Archives and Records Administration, Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, 2006), 197-229.

⁴⁷ Petersen, “The Intelligence That Wasn’t,” 197.

⁴⁸ Takemae, The Allied Occupation of Japan, 165; Mercado, The Shadow Warriors of Nakano, 225-26; Petersen, “The Intelligence That Wasn’t,” 203-204.

⁴⁹ Jonathan Marshall, “Opium, Tungsten, and the Politics of National Security,” 453-54 (Cannon and drugs); Robert Whiting, Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan (New York: Pantheon, 1999], 47-48 (Hisayuki Machii and Cannon); H. Richard Friman, “The Impact of the Occupation on Crime,” Democracy in Occupied Japan: the U.S. Occupation and Japanese Politics and Society, eds. Mark E. Caprio and Yoneyuki Sugita (New York: Routledge, 2007), 103 (Machii and methamphetamines).

⁵⁰ Wayland Speer memo to Anslinger, June 7, 1954, in “Wayland L. Speer Foreign Assignment” file, 0660-A-3 Correspondence, box 165, BNDD records. The publication was Richard L. G. Deverall, Red China's Dirty Drug War: the Story of the Opium, Heroin, Morphine and Philopon Traffic (Tokyo: 1954). Deverall was Representative-in-Asia of the American Federation of Labor's CIA-funded Free Trade Union Committee. See Valentine, Strength of the Wolf, 151.

⁵¹ Marshall, “Opium, Tungsten,” 453-454. On the KMT's efforts to recruit Japanese military officers, with SCAP's secret blessing, see Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 524-25.

⁵² David Kaplan and Alec Dubro, Yakuza: Japan's Criminal Underworld (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 50-51.

⁵³ Takemae Eiji, quoted in Friman, “The Impact of the Occupation on Crime,” 93. Future prime minister Kishi Nobusuke, who became one of Washington's favorites after being released from prison along with Kodama in 1948, allegedly became “singularly influential——and likely very rich” in part owing to his “connections to the opium trade” while serving with the Japanese military administration in Manchuria. Richard J. Smith, Machiavelli's Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 227.

⁵⁴ Friman, “The Impact of the Occupation on Crime,” 98, 103.

⁵⁵ David R. Bewley-Taylor, United States and International Drug Control, 1909-1997 (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001), 111-112. In a letter to a senior official in the Taiwan government, Anslinger sent thanks “for the excellent material you sent me regarding the illicit narcotic traffic from Communist China which will be of great value when the subject is again discussed at the next Commission meeting.” See Anslinger to Yong- ling Yao, Senior Special Assistant, Ministry of Interior, Republic of China, November 18, 1955, in “Communist China, 1955-1958” file, box 153, BNDD papers. He uncritically accepted claims from Free China and Asia, published by the Asian Peoples’ AntiCommunist League in Taipei, to the effect that rioters in Japan against President Eisenhower were paid by profits from “Red China's sale of dope——heroin mostly——smuggled into Japan.” See Harry Anslinger, “The Red Chinese Dope Traffic,” Military Police Journal, February- March 1961, 6.

⁵⁶ Kettil Bruun, Lynn Pan and Ingemar Rexed, The Gentlemen's Club: International Control of Drugs and Alcohol (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1975), ch. 15.

⁵⁷ Jonathan Marshall, “Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism in Nationalist China, 1927-1945,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 8 (Fall 1976). See also Edward R. Slack, Opium, State and Society: China's Narco-Economy and the Guomintang, 1924-1937 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001); Brian G. Martin, The Shanghai Green Gang: Politics and Organized Crime, 1919-1937 ((Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Walker, Opium and Foreign Policy; and Jonathan Marshall, “Opium, Tungsten, and the Search for National Security, 1940-52,” Journal of Policy History, 3 (Fall 1991), 445-450. In 1929, China's Minister in Washington, and a top consular official in San Francisco, were both indicted on heroin smuggling charges, but were allowed to return home rather than face trial. See “Drug Shipment Worth Million Seized by U.S.” Washington Post, July 9, 1929; “Consul, Wife Held in Opium Smuggling,” Washington Post, July 13, 1929; Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs (New York: Verso, 2004), 14.

⁵⁸ Wellington Koo to Anslinger, June 3, 1953, in “Communist China, 1952-1954,” file, box 153, BNDD papers.

⁵⁹ Marvin Liebman, secretary of the Committee of One Million, to Anslinger, June 10, 1955, in “Communist China, 1955-1958” file, box 153, BNDD papers; “Peiping Narcotics Cited as UN Bar,” New York Times, August 1, 1955; Stanley D. Bachrack, The Committee of One Million: ‘China Lobby’ Politics, 1953-1971 (New York: Columbia University, 1976), 122.

⁶⁰ The film is available at http://vimeo.com/18895068 (assessed August 11, 2013).

⁶¹ Ross Koen, The China Lobby in American Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1960), ix.

⁶² Bachrack, The Committee of One Million, 167169; Joseph Keeley, The China Lobby Man: The Story of Alfred Kohlberg (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1989); “Publisher to Alter ‘China Lobby’ Book,” New York Times, April 6, 1960. In the new edition, author Ross Koen modified the introduction to read that “some Chinese” had engaged in smuggling with the full knowledge and connivance of “members of the Chinese Nationalist Government,” and that the criminal business had been an important factor in “some activities and permutations” of the China Lobby (emphasis added). Ross Koen, The China Lobby in American Politics (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), xxi.

⁶³ Peter Dale Scott, “Opium and Empire: McCoy on Heroin in Southeast Asia,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 5 (September 1973), 53; Peter Dale Scott, “Transnationalized Repression: Parafascism and the U.S.,” Lobster, no. 12. For Anslinger's claim, see Illicit Narcotics Traffic, 276.

⁶⁴ Ernest O. Hauser, “China's Soong,” Life, March 24, 1941, 96; “Soong Family,” Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, v. 3, ed. H o w a r d L. B o o r m a n (N e w Y o r k : Columbia University Press, 1970), 140.

⁶⁵ Marshall, “Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism in Nationalist China” (Soong and opium); Sterling Seagrave, The Soong Dynasty (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 444, 453; Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 109 (China Lobby).

⁶⁶ “Bank of Canton Deal to be Worth $169 Million,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 29, 2002.

⁶⁷ Harry Anslinger, “The Red Chinese Dope Traffic,” Military Police Journal, February- March 1961, 2-6; “Café Trash Uncovers Evidence,” Oregon Journal, January 15, 1959; Scott, “Transnationalized Repression.” The case involved 270 pounds of heroin.

⁶⁸ Quoted in Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 109.

⁶⁹ Anslinger and Oursler, The Murderers, 181-182. On McCarthy, see Maxine Cheshire, “Drugs and Washington, D.C.,” Ladies Home Journal, 95 (December, 1978), 180-82; McWilliams, The Protectors, 99. For a skeptical report, see “Doubts Arise over Story of McCarthy Drug Use,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 3, 1989. To my knowledge, critics have not offered any more plausible candidate than McCarthy to fit Anslinger's description.

⁷⁰ Bewley-Taylor, United States and International Drug Control, 1909-1997, 112. British authorities were no doubt furious about criticism from pro-Anslinger outlets like the Saturday Evening Post, which ran an editorial in the November 8, 1954 issue titled, “Mr. Attlee's Friends, the Chinese Commies, are the World's Leading Dope Smugglers.”

⁷¹ FBI report by Agent Douglas G. Allen, San Francisco, January 26, 1954, re “Chinese Communist Activities in Narcotic Smuggling,” in “Communist China, 1952-1954” file, box 153, BNDD papers. Anslinger's remarks were quoted in San Francisco Chronicle, October 20, 1953. In a later report, the FBN district supervisor noted, “During the course of investigations made in this district within the past four years we have not established a single instance of the transmittal of funds by violators in the United States directly to persona in Communist dominated areas (Communist China, Communist North Korea and their nationals].” See District Supervisor Ernest Gentry to B. T. Mitchell, Assistant to the Commissioner of Narcotics, June 24, 1954, re “Communist Chinese Narcotics Trade,” in “Communist China, 1952-1954” file, box 153, BNDD files.

⁷² FBN agent John Cusack referred bitterly to Customs agents in the Far East who “have fought me all along the way in an attempt to protect the great deception their service has sponsored these many years” with regard to “our position on the CHICOM narcotic trade.” See Cusack to Anslinger, October 28, 1961, in “Communist China, 1959-1961” file, box 153, BNDD records. Cusack was equally disappointed by the failure of Thai and United Nations experts to acknowledge Red China's involvement. See Cusack to Anslinger, February 23, 1962, in “Thailand, 1957-1963” file, box 163, BNDD records; cf. Cusack to Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Henry Giordano, May 5, 1965, in “Thailand, 1964-65” file, ibid. Wayland Speer also expressed his frustration to Anslinger over the “continuous protests of our representatives in the Far East at the present time against pointing a finger at Red China as the source of narcotics.” See Speer to Anslinger, November 8, 1957, in “Thailand, 1957-63” file, ibid.

⁷³ Kent W. Lewis, Treasury Representative, Tokyo, to Commissioner of Customs, November 29, 1954; Speer to Anslinger, January 10, 1954 [1955?], re “Red China and Sales of Illicit Narcotic——Kyodo News Report,” in Communist China, 1952-1954” file, box 153, BNDD papers.

⁷⁴ Walter O’Brien, Treasury Representative, Hong Kong, to C. A. Emerick, Deputy Commissioner, Division of Investigations, Bureau of Customs, September 28, 1954; O’Brien to Emerick, May 9, 1955; O’Brien to Commissioner of Customs, May 16, 1955, in “Communist China, 1955-1958” file, box 153, BNDD records.

⁷⁵ Kelly to Anslinger, June 17, 1958, quoted in Kathleen Frydl, The Drug Wars in America, 19401973 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 85. See also Kelly to A. Gilmore Flues, assistant secretary of Treasury, September 22, 1960, complaining of Anslinger's acceptance of claims “without fact,” in “Communist China, 1959-1961,” file, box 153, BNDD records.

⁷⁶ Anslinger to A. Gilmore Flues, assistant secretary of Treasury, May 8, 1958, quoted in Frydl, The Drug Wars in America,85.

⁷⁷ Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Research and Reports, “An Examination of the Charges of Chinese Communist Involvement in the Illicit Opium Trade,” CIA/RR IM-438, 9 November 1956. Released Nov. 2003 (with redactions) under Freedom of Information Act.

⁷⁸ CIA report, “The World Opium Situation,” CIA- RDP73B00296R000300060031-9, October 1970, released under Freedom of Information Act, August 30, 2001.

⁷⁹ In addition to McCoy, see Gibson and Chen, The Secret Army; Bertil Lintner, Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency Since 1948 (Chiang Mai: Silkwood Books, 1999); Robert Taylor, Foreign and Domestic Consequences of the Kuomintang Intervention in Burma (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1973); Walker, Opium and Foreign Policy, 189-217; Victor S. Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle: The United States, Taiwan and the 93^rd Nationalist Division,” China Quarterly, no. 166 (June 2001), 440-456; and Peter Dale Scott, The American War Machine, Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 63-108.

⁸⁰ The U.S. agency that initiated covert contacts with the KMT was the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), nominally part of the CIA, but more responsive in practice to the Departments of State and Defense. OPC came under tighter CIA control after Walter Bedell Smith became CIA director (October 1950), and especially after he appointed Allen Dulles deputy director for plans in August 1951. Scott, American War Machine, 75-76; Peebles, Twilight Warriors, 21, 47.

⁸¹ U.S. ambassadors in the region, embarrassed by Washington's continued denials of the obvious, pleaded for a change of policy. In the words of David Key, ambassador to Burma, “this adventure has cost us heavily in terms of Burmese good will and trust. Participation by Americans in these KMT operations well known to GOB [Government of Burma] and constitutes serious impediment to our relations with them … Denial of official US connection with these operations meaningless to GOB in face of reports they constantly receiving from their officials in border areas that KMT troops are accompanied by Americans and receiving steady supply American equipment, some of which dropped from American planes, and of reports from their British Embassy of American support activities going on in Siam, which is an open secret there…. This situation is prejudicing everything which we are striving to accomplish here and threatens all of our future prospects… . For this reason I feel strongly that the time has come to call a halt to any further American participation in these operations …” Ambassador Key to Secretary of State, August 15, 1951, in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1951, Asia and the Pacific, VI, 2 8 (hereafter FRUS). Key resigned a year later in protest. By early 1953, however, his views had been largely enshrined in National Intelligence Estimate 74, “Probable Developments in Burma Through 1953,” FRUS, 1952-1954. East Asia and the Pacific XII, 54.

⁸² Ambassador William Sebald (Burma) to Department of State, November 23, 1953, FRUS, 1952-1954. East Asia and the Pacific XII, 173.

⁸³ Support for the corrupt Thai police was endorsed at the highest levels of the Eisenhower administration by the Psychological Strategy Board and by the State Department, despite the military regime's undemocratic and corrupt record. See Psychological Strategy Board, PSB D-23, “U.S. Psychological Strategy Based on Thailand,” September 14, 1953, FRUS, 1952-1954. East Asia and the Pacific, XII, 688-690, and Memorandum by the Regional Director for Far East, Foreign Operations Administration (Moyer) to the Director of the Foreign Operations Administration (Stassen), December 1, 1954, re “Additional Assistance to Thailand,” ibid., 73948.

⁸⁴ The American Vice Consul in Thailand, John Farrior, wrote in a report on “Smuggling in Northern Thailand and Chinese nationalist Troops in Burma,” July 30, 1951: “It is the conclusion of the embassy that there is a close connection between the opium smuggling business and the supply of Chinese Nationalist troops in Burma. The business is carried on with the active assistance of Phao as a means of enriching the coffers of the Thai National Police but also as part of official Thai government policy.” In Thailand folder, box 26, Records of the Office of Economic and Social Affairs Related to Narcotics, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives.

⁸⁵ McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, 144-145.

⁸⁶ Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin (Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991], 445-460.

⁸⁷ David Wise and Thomas Ross, The Invisible Government (New York: Random House, 1964], 131.

⁸⁸ “CIA-funded corruption and competition rose to a crisis in the Bangkok station early in 1952, when [CIA Director Walter Bedell] Smith had to send top officials” from the CIA's two clandestine branches “out to untangle a mess of opium trading under the cover of efforts to topple the Chinese communists.” Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994], 324. On CIA complicity in running KMT opium to market in Bangkok, and on the apparently related murder of CIA contract pilot Jack Killam, see William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire (New York: The Dial Press, 1977], 322-23. The CIA's Bill Lair, who trained and supervised a guerrilla warfare unit of the Thai police called PARU, recalled that the first operation he mounted was against a KMT opium caravan near Chiang Mai, resulting in the seizure of 40 tons of opium. The police handed the opium over to the government for a large reward, mostly for the personal profit of Thai officers. See Texas Tech University, Vietnam Oral History Project, interview with Bill Lair, December 12, 2001, p://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/star/images/oh/oh0200/OH0200-part2.pdf (accessed August 17, 2013]; Scott, American War Machine, 94.The opium was typically not destroyed, but resold either through the legal opium monopoly, or to international smugglers.

⁸⁹ “New Thai Consulate to be Opened by U.S.,” New York Times, May 23, 1950.

⁹⁰ “Li Mi's Army in ‘Guns for Opium’ Trade,” The Observer, March 2, 1952.

⁹¹ “Adventurism in Burma,” Washington Post, March 15, 1952. The New York Times confirmed elements of the Observer story a few days later, but sidestepped the explosive allegation of direct American criminal complicity. “Chinese Nationalist troops who have taken refuge in northeastern Burma are being supplied regularly through an opium-for- guns smuggling arrangement in Thailand,” it stated. The trade was coordinated by a Nationalist Chinese colonel in Chiangmai, Thailand who forwarded opium south to “Bangkok and onward.” The State Department, however, still denied reports that the United States was assisting the KMT “in any way.” See “Chinese in Burma in Opium-Gun Deal,” New York Times, March 9, 1952; also See also “Burma Chinese Trade Opium for Supplies,” Washington Post, March 9, 1952. For a firsthand account of KMT opium caravans, see Karl Reichel, “I Saw the Dope Runners’ Stronghold,” Saturday Evening Post, March 29, 1952, 4041+.

⁹² Ambassador Sebald (Burma] to Department of State, September 3, 1952, FRUS, 1952-1954. East Asia and the Pacific XII, 29-30.

⁹³ “The Opium Army in Burma,” Lewiston Evening Journal, March 28, 1953. See also John F. Cady, “The Situation in Burma,” Far Eastern Survey, 22 (April 22, 1953], pp. 49-54.

⁹⁴ New York Herald Tribune, March 22, 1953, quoted in Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 131.

⁹⁵ “Embarrassing Army,” Time, April 13, 1953; “Last Ditch Army,” Time, May 18, 1953.

⁹⁶ Joseph Alsop, “Nationalist Force Hated to Leave Burma,” Lewiston Morning Tribune, December 1, 1953; Charles S. Brant, “They Won’t Go Home: Chiang's Guerrillas in Burma,” The Nation, September 25, 1954, 257-259; “Burma Warns UN on Chinese Issue,” New York Times, October 12, 1954; Hugh Tinker, “Burma's Northeast Borderland Problems,” Pacific Affairs, 29 (Dec. 1956], 324-346.

⁹⁷ “Burma Says Invaders Buy American Arms,” New York Times, August 12, 1953. See also, a year later, “Chinese in Burma Hurt U.S. Prestige,” New York Times, October 22, 1954.

⁹⁸ The company's full name was Overseas Southeast Asia Supply Company, or Sea Supply for short. The U.S. ambassador to Burma, William Sebald, was kept in the dark about all these covert operations, but “discovered through personal investigation on the scene that the CIA's involvement was an open secret in sophisticated circles in Bangkok, Thailand. There, he learned, the CIA planned and directed the [KMT] operation under the guise of running Sea Supply, a trading company with the cable address ‘Hatchet’“ (Wise and Ross, The Invisible Government, 131). On Sea Supply, see Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 129-30, 141-42, 145-46, 191; Daniel Fineman, A Special Relationship: The United States and Military Government in Thailand, 1947-1958 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 134-35, 14041; Joshua Kurlantzick, The Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American Way of War (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 106-110; Peebles, Twilight Warriors, 8990.

⁹⁹ “Thai Opium Informers Paid,” New York Times, September 22, 1955. O’Kearney, “Opium Trade: Is China Responsible?” described Phao a month later as “the most notorious name in narcotics.” A British reporter wrote, “There is now no doubt that the so- called opium smuggling is not smuggling at all but a large-scale trading concern organized by the police with the aid of Bangkok financiers. These men and the police share the rewards paid by the Government and also the profit from the sale of the opium …” (“Siamese Attack on the Opium Trade,” Manchester Guardian, September 3, 1955).

¹⁰⁰ “Pibul Tightens Grip on Thailand,” New York Times, August 7, 1955; Darrell Berrigan, “They Smuggle Opium by the Ton,” Saturday Evening Post, May 5, 1956, 156.

¹⁰¹ Senate Judiciary Committee, hearings, Illicit Narcotics Traffic, 276. Anslinger added, “Opium is brought from Yunnan Province to the border of Thailand by horse and mule train. From 200 to 400 tons of raw opium are moved annually to and through Thailand from Mainland China…. The opium reaches Bangkok by boat, truck, rail, and plane, and 3 to 4 tons can be delivered at any time to a point outside the harbor at Bangkok in the open sea.” For similar testimony, see Communist China and Illicit Narcotics Traffic, op. cit., 8, 16.

¹⁰² Berrigan, “They Smuggle Opium by the Ton,” 158.

¹⁰³ Denis Warner, The Last Confucian (New York: Macmillan Co., 1963), 237; cf. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 240.

¹⁰⁴ Speer, a die-hard believer in Red China's guilt, lobbied for the assignment. See Wayland L. Speer memo to Anslinger, “International Narcotic Traffic in the Far East,” September 23, 1953, in “Wayland L. Speer's Foreign Assignment” file, box 165, BNDD records.

¹⁰⁵ Quote is from Speer's memo to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, January 27, 1954, ibid. Anslinger repeated the allegation in his statement to the CND's 9^th session in 1954, contained in “U.N. Documents Relating to Communist China file,” box 153, BNDD records. Anslinger also provided the same quote as “confidential information” to Rep. Gordon Canfield, R.-N.J., in a letter of February 11, 1954, in “Communist China, 1952-1954” file, box 153, BNDD records.

¹⁰⁶ See Wayland Speer memos to Anslinger in “Thailand, 1949-1956” file, box 163, BNDD records, especially dated July 16 and 20, 1954. The only credible evidence of a Communist Chinese connection came in a July 18, 1954 memo, in which Speer reported that an ethnic Chinese smuggler named L. Y. Goh “for the past few years has bought opium in Yunnan, smuggled it into Thailand, transported it into Bangkok in one, two or three-ton lots and sold it to the Thailand Excise Department.” In a July 20 memo, Speer reported flying over part of Northern Thailand: “From the areas I saw yesterday I must conclude that the amounts of opium grown by hill tribes must be small. The real traffic must come out of Red China.” So much for his evidence.

¹⁰⁷ Wayland Speer to Anslinger, July 16, 1954 - re “Red China Traffic in Narcotics——Thailand” in “Thailand, 1949-56 file,” box 163, BNDD papers. The same memo offers information on various other alleged smugglers, including corrupt CAT officials, members of the Taiwan secret police, and a former head of Thai Airways, then serving as ambassador to France. On CAT pilot Robert Brongersma and KMT opium smuggling, see also Gibson and Chen, The Secret Army, 62. Whether as an honest pilot or a smuggler, he certainly made good money, as evidenced by the flashy, $3,800 diamond he showed off to Speer. See Speer to Anslinger, July 24, 1954, in “Wayland L. Speer's Foreign Assignment” file, box 165, BNDD records.

¹⁰⁸ Besides those mentioned in Speer's July 16, 1954 memo, the most notable CAT suspect——who came under FBN investigation in Taiwan–was the pilot Moon Chen, right-hand man to CAT's founder, General Claire Chennault See Speer to Anslinger, July 24, 1954, in “Wayland L. Speer's Foreign Assignment” file, box 165, BNDD records. (For a photo of Chen next to CAT co-founder William Pawley, see http://www.cnac.org/moonchen01.htm, accessed December 20, 2012.) For another report on smuggling by a CAT pilot, see “Vietnam - Dope Smuggling Mission Contract Plane,” October 18, 1956, in box 164, BNDD records.

¹⁰⁹ Speer to Anslinger, July 17, 1954, in “Thailand, 1949-56 file,” box 163, BNDD papers.

¹¹⁰ Speer to Anslinger, July 18, 1954, ibid.

¹¹¹ Speer to Anslinger, July 20, 1954, ibid. A report from the U.S. embassy——which made its way to the FBN——said Bird was “suspected of being the largest opium dealer in Thailand” (emphasis added). See Eric Youngquist, vice consul, Bangkok, to Department of State, April 5, 1955, ibid. However, one of Speer's sources said that widespread rumors implicating Bird in the drug traffic sprang from his relationship with Gen. Phao, not from any specific facts. See Speer to Anslinger, July 21, 1954, ibid. For fine portraits of Bird, including details of his close relationship with the CIA station, see Fineman, A Special Relationship, 133-134; and Kurlantzkik, The Ideal Man, 94-95, and passim. For a photo of Bird and his wife, see “For Westerners, the Good Life,” Life, December 31, 1951, 37.

¹¹² Speer to Anslinger, July 24, 1954, in “Wayland L. Speer's Foreign Assignment” file, box 165, BNDD records.

¹¹³ Dr. James Hamilton letter to George White, FBN District Supervisor, San Francisco, May 5, 1957, in “Thailand, 1957-63” file,” box 163, BNDD papers. Hamilton interviewed approximately 25 informants during an extensive trip to Thailand and Burma. He was a Bay Area psychiatrist who worked with White on two secret CIA programs, MKULTRA and MKSEARCH, which investigated “mind control” techniques using drugs. See John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (New York: Time Books, 1979), 72, 149.

¹¹⁴ On the case of Air Force Sergeant Melvin B. Douglas, who was arrested at Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong with 40 pounds of opium and morphine, see Speer to Anslinger, February 23, 1955 and March 10, 1955, in “Wayland L. Speer's Foreign Assignment” file, box 165, BNDD records.

¹¹⁵ Anslinger to G. E. Yates, Director, Division of Narcotic Drugs, European Office of the United Nations, October 2, 1957, in “Thailand, 1957-63” file, box 163, BNDD papers.

¹¹⁶ Ambassador Johnson in Thailand to the Director of the Office of Southeast Asian Affairs (Kocher), June 19, 1959, FRUS 1958-1960, XV, South and Southeast Asia, 1079-1080. A month earlier, Burmese troops reported capturing three major drug refineries set up by KMT forces near the Thai border. See “3 Dope Factories Seized in Burma,” Meriden Record (Pa.), May 20, 1959.

¹¹⁷ On Williams’ background, see McWilliams, The Protectors, 160-62.

¹¹⁸ Garland Williams, “Narcotic Situation in South Asia and the Far East,” August 4, 1959, in Special file——Garland Williams trip to Middle East (1959) Iran” file, box 158, BNDD records.

¹¹⁹ Eric Youngquist, vice consul, Bangkok, to Department of State, April 5, 1955, in “Thailand, 1949-56 file,” box 163, BNDD papers.

¹²⁰ Consul William B. Hussey, quoted in Jerry Kuzmarov, The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), 8788.

¹²¹ See, for example, Meyer and Parssinen, Webs of Smoke, 272-275; Hans Derks, History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East, ca. 1600-1950 (Leiden: Brill, 2012),700-701.

¹²² Zhou Yongming, Anti-Drug Crusades in Twentieth Century China (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 96.

¹²³ Ibid., 98-111.

¹²⁴ Ibid., 113-114. Years later, when the authority of China's central government was not in question, drugs reemerged as a major national problem. Alan Dupont, “Transnational Crime, Drugs, and Security in East Asia,” Asian Survey, 39 (May-June 1999), 445-446.

¹²⁵ Walker, Opium and Foreign Policy, 197.

¹²⁶ Deacon, The Chinese Secret Service, 440-453. Although the reliability of his sources is unknown, Deacon (George McCormick) claimed to have compiled 37 reports from 26 individuals and to have interviewed more than fifty people——“Chinese, Taiwanese, Communist defectors, police officers, secret agents, drug squad officers and non-Communist Intelligence officers”——who confirmed the involvement of Communist China and its intelligence service in the international narcotics trade (447).

¹²⁷ Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 276-280; Derks, History of the Opium Problem, 704-707; Zhou, Anti-Drug Crusades, 176n18.

¹²⁸ Quoted in Walker, Opium and Foreign Policy, 214-15.

¹²⁹ The quote is from the “Downing Street memo” of July 23, 2002, published in Sunday Times, May 1, 2005.