60. Thomas Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter’s Adventures in an Oil-Rich, War-Torn, Post-Soviet Republic (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 272–75. Richard Secord was allegedly attempting also to sell Israeli arms with the assistance of Israeli agent David Kimche, another associate of Oliver North. The mujahideen were recruited in Afghanistan by the drug trafficker Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leading recipient of CIA assistance in Afghanistan in the 1980s and most recently a leader of the al-Qaeda–Taliban resistance to the United States and its client there, Hamid Karzai. See Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 7, 8, 20.
61. John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism (London: Pluto, 1999), 180–81.
62. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 163–65.
63. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 305; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 363. Khun Sa died in 2007, but American tourists now flock to the hotel and casino run by his son near the Thai–Burmese–Laotian border (Bertil Lintner, Asia Times, November 1, 2007).
64. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 304. Lintner also reports that after the fierce battle, “soldiers from both sides were treated at hospitals in Chiang Rai [Thailand], where they often ended up in the same wards, chatting with each other and sharing cigarettes.”
65. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 382–83.
66. Lintner writes of a second Thai road built with USAID assistance that directly benefited Khun Sa (Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 179). Cf. William Stevenson, The Revolutionary King: The True-Life Sequel to The King and I (London: Constable and Robinson, 2001), 218–19.
Chapter 6: The War on Drugs in Asia
1. Alfred McCoy, Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organised Crime in Australia (Harper and Row, 1980), 30.
2. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), x–xi. Dayle made this statement during a videotaped teleconference in the presence of Marshall and myself.
3. Michael Levine, “Mainstream Media: The Drug War’s Shills,” in Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, ed. Christine Borjesson (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), 258.
4. In addition, the DEA spends millions each year on an education program, the first of whose priorities, according to its own Budget Summary, is “Anti-Legalization Education” (Office of National Drug Control Policy, http://www.ncjrs.gov/ond
cppubs/publications/policy/budget98/agency-09f.html).
5. Levine, “Mainstream Media,” 265.
6. Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Pack: The People, Politics and Espionage Intrigues That Shaped the DEA (Springfield, OR: TrineDay, 2009), xi–xii. Full disclosure: Both Levine and Valentine are friends, and I blurbed Valentine’s important book.
7. Richard Lawrence Miller, Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 158–59; Edward J. Epstein, Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1977), 165–66.
8. Valentine, Strength of the Pack, 6–8, 32–36. Cf. the stories of James Ludlum and John Cusack later in this chapter.
9. Epstein, Agency of Fear, 83.
