23. Miles, Donovan’s first OSS chief for China, became more and more closely allied with the controversial Tai Li in a semiautonomous network, SACO. In December 1943 Donovan, alerted to the situation, replaced Miles as OSS China chief with Colonel John Coughlin (Richard Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972], 246–58).
24. Reynolds, Thailand’s Secret War, 191–92, citing documents of September 1944, cf. 175; Stowe, Siam Becomes Thailand, 270.
25. Cf. Jonathan Marshall, “Opium, Tungsten, and the Search for National Security, 1940–52,” in Drug Control Policy: Essays in Historical and Comparative Perspective, ed. William O. Walker III (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 96: “Americans . . . knew that [Tai Li’s] agents protected Tu’s huge opium convoys”; Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs (London: Verso, 2004), 47: “It was an open secret that Tai Li’s agents escorted opium caravans from Yunnan to Saigon and used Red Cross operations as a front for selling opium to the Japanese.”
26. After the final KMT defeat of 1949, the 93rd Division received other remnants from the KMT 8th and 26th Armies and a new commander, General Li Mi of the KMT Eighth Army (Bertil Lintner, Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency since 1948 [Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1999], 111–15).
27. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 106, 188–91, 415–20.
28. Thomas Lobe, United States National Security Policy and Aid to the Thailand Police (Denver: Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver, 1977), 27.
29. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 192.
30. Lintner, Blood Brothers, 241–44. After Sarit died in 1963, Chin was able to return to Thailand.
31. William Stevenson, The Revolutionary King: The True-Life Sequel to The King and I (London: Constable and Robinson, 2001), 4, 162, 195. The king personally translated Stevenson’s biography of Sir William Stephenson into Thai.
32. Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan (New York: Times Books, 1982), 797; Stevenson, The Revolutionary King, 162. In 1970, Thompson’s biographer, William Warren, described the funding of Thompson’s company in some detail but made no reference to the WCC (William Warren, Jim Thompson: The Unsolved Mystery [Singapore: Archipelago Press, 1998], 66–67). Former CIA officer Richard Harris Smith wrote that Thompson was later “frequently reported to have CIA connections” (Smith, OSS, 313n). Joe Trento, without citing any sources, places Jim Thompson at the center of this chapter’s narrative: “Jim Thompson . . . (who in fact was a CIA officer) had recruited General Phao, head of the Thai police, to accept the KMT army’s drugs for distribution” (Joseph J. Trento, The Secret History of the CIA [New York: Random House/Forum, 2001], 346). Thompson disappeared mysteriously in Malaysia in 1967; his sister, who investigated the disappearance, was brutally murdered in America a few months later.
33. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 155. Helliwell in Kunming used opium, which was in effect the local hard currency, to purchase intelligence (Wall Street Journal, April 18, 1980).
34. Sterling Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 361.
35. John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War against the Jews (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 110–11.
