1. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 212, 253–55, 344. Weiner writes that the CIA under Hecksher in the 1950s “installed a new Prime minister, Prince Souvanna Phouma” (212). He actually means Phoumi Nosavan, who briefly overthrew Souvanna Phouma. However Weiner does note that in Thailand Donovan’s boost to CIA covert operations was helped by the “Thai national police force, whose commander [Phao Sriyanon, not named] was an opium king” (257).
2. Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 258–61 (Phoumi and Ouane), 277–81 (Hmong); Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press, 2001), 299–302, 317–21. Cf. Roger Warner, Back Fire: The CIA’s Secret War in Laos and Its Link to the War in Vietnam (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 121, 366–67.
3. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, 14, 353; The Politics of Heroin, 23, 383.
4. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 15.
5. Burton Hersh, The Old Boys (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 300, citing Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984), 67.
6. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, 130. In his 2001 edition, McCoy is much more explicit: “In Washington [actually in Miami] OPC official Paul Helliwell, a lawyer, formed the Sea Supply Corporation to mask the arms shipments” [to Li Mi’s drug-trafficking troops in Burma] (168). I assume that McCoy’s sources in the 1970s never mentioned Helliwell to him, but I had already identified Helliwell and Sea Supply in my own book, The War Conspiracy, which appeared a few months before McCoy’s (“Sea Supply Inc. was organized in Miami, Florida, where its counsel, Paul L. E. Helliwell, doubled after 1951 as the counsel for the C.V. Starr insurance interests, and also as Thai consul in Miami”; The War Conspiracy [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972], 210).
7. “An Interview with Alfred W. McCoy,” Education Forum, http://educationfo
rum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6941&pid=63550&mode=threaded&start=#entry63550, emphasis added.
8. James Mills, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Government Embrace (New York: Dell, 1986), 1142–43; cf. 727, 731.
9. Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Pack: The People, Politics and Espionage Intrigues That Shaped the DEA (Springfield, OR: TrineDay, 2009), 94; cf. Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs (London: Verso, 2004), 332–34.
10. Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 73.
11. Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 164; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 199, 212. One cannot be surprised that some Americans on the scene, witnessing the protected flow of drugs, subsequently enriched themselves from Southeast Asian heroin. Two notable examples are Bernard Houghton and Michael Hand, who moved to Australia and helped found the major drug-trafficking Nugan Hand Bank. Other veterans of covert operations in the area, such as former Bangkok CIA Chief Robert Jantzen, joined them there. Still other veterans engaged in business with the bank, including Theodore Shackley, once the CIA station chief in Laos, and his associate Thomas Clines, once chief of the CIA base with Vang Pao at Long Cheng. See Alfred W. McCoy, Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organized Crime in Australia (Sydney: Harper and Row, 1980); Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots (New York: Norton, 1987).
12. Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 77. He describes Nam Yu as the site of the CIA’s “Strategic Intelligence Network 118A,” where CIA officer William Young had inserted two Lahu tribesmen into KMT caravans penetrating China. Cf. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 420–22; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 335–37.
13. “Lima Sites,” LaoVeterans.com, http://www.laoveterans.com/about.html; Lao Trip Report, May 5–13, 2008, Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood Organization, http://www.tlc-brotherhood.org/Assistance/Laos%20Assistance%20Reports/May%205%20may%202008.htm.
14. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 337.
15. William Leary, “The Death of a Legend,” http://www.air-america.org/In
