44. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 361. Trento writes that Colby had earlier sent emissaries to Khun Sa “to see if he would join with the other armies in fighting the Pathet Lao. After he refused, Shackley orchestrated a media attack . . . and painted the Burmese warlord as the biggest heroin dealer in the world” (Trento, Prelude to Terror, 32).
45. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 427. As redacted in his new book, The Strength of the Pack, Valentine’s paragraph, with no additional evidence, ends more tendentiously: “The battle ended with Khun Sa and the KMT in retreat and the CIA in control of the opium trade, as it was conducted by Vang Pao and numerous Laotian political and military officials” (333). A more sympathetic account would acknowledge that the CIA was trying to foster a capitalist Laos with a capitalist ruling class, where the only obvious source of capital was, inevitably, opium.
46. Shackley, Spymaster, 208–9.
47. Prados, Lost Crusader, 168.
48. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 318, citing interviews with the president of Xieng Khouang Air Transport, a former USAID official, and high-ranking Hmong officials, 1971. Cf. Shackley, Spymaster, 182: “Lair also had visions of the Hmong having their own civil air transport. I supported that endeavor, and it resulted in our helping Vang Pao to set up Xieng Khouang Air Transport with an old DC-3.”
49. Curtis Peebles, Twilight Warriors: Covert Air Operations against the USSR (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2005), 255.
50. See, e.g., William J. Chambliss, On the Take: From Petty Crooks to Presidents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 186–89.
51. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 15.
52. Trento, Prelude to Terror, 38.
53. Trento, Prelude to Terror, 33.
54. Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 130; U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas, United States of America vs. Edwin Paul Wilson, Criminal Case H-82-139. Interestingly, Wilson, in 1968, while still a CIA staff agent under commercial cover, filed a report outlining his “limited” contacts with Edward K. Moss, a CIA–mob go-between to be discussed in chapter 7 (Memo of 14 May 1973 from Jerry G. Brown to Deputy Chief, Security Research Staff, CIA, NARA Record #104-10122-10376).
55. Scott Armstrong and Jeff Nason, Mother Jones, November–December 1991, quoted in Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 130.
56. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin (1991), 471–72, 477. Cf. Corn, Blond Ghost, 328, 356; Christopher Robbins, The Ravens: The Men Who Flew in the CIA’s Secret War in Laos (New York: Crown, 1987), 131. The complex Shackley–Wilson story lends credibility to the thesis of Joe Trento that, when Jimmy Carter was elected with the promise to rein in the CIA, Shackley took steps to “create a totally private intelligence network using CIA assets” (Trento, Prelude to Terror, 113–14).
57. Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots (New York: Norton, 1987), 291–92, 317, 385. In 1983 the Australian Joint Task Force on Drug Trafficking released a report on Nugan Hand’s activities to Parliament that said that Shackley, Secord, Clines, [Rafael] Quintero, and Wilson were people whose background “is relevant to a proper understanding of the activities of the Nugan Hand group and the people associated with that group” (Joel Bainerman, The Crimes of a President [New York: S.P.I. Books, 1992], 75).
58. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 476, citing Australia-New South Wales Joint Task Force, Report, Volume 4: Nugan Hand, 747–48.
59. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran/Contra Affair, 50, 74, 164. Cf. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 134, 139.
