28. Epstein, Agency of Fear, 92, cf. 310–11. Cf. also Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 46, quoting James Ludlum: Turkish “enforcement was weak, and the whole Turkish program eventually failed.” This foreseeable failure raises the possibility that the $35 million was at least partly with some other goal in mind. Kissinger was simultaneously working out a deal to use Turkey as a third party to evade congressional prohibitions on aid to Pakistan (Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect, 181). Negotiations with the Turks began in 1970, at a time of political chaos in Turkey resembling that in Paris two years earlier. In this crisis the CIA station chief was Duane (“Dewey”) Clarridge, who worked closely with Counter-Guerrilla (the Turkish version of Gladio), and through Counter-Guerrilla, Martin Lee has associated Clarridge with the “armed bands of Grey Wolves [who] unleashed a wave of bombings and political assassinations that culminated in a coup in [March 1971]. . . . At the same time, members of the Grey Wolves were immersed in the international drug trade” (Martin A. Lee, The Beast Reawakens [Boston: Little, Brown, 1997], 202). Years later Turkish Defense Minister Hasan Esat Isik “harshly criticized the subversion of Turkish sovereignty through the U.S.-sponsored Counter-Guerrilla: ‘The idea came from the United States. The financing as well’” (Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe [London: Frank Cass, 2005], 233).
29. One of Liddy’s assistants on heroin matters, Gordon Minnick, toured the Golden Triangle and came back (according to Howard Hunt) “with a report that the White House found very disturbing” (E. Howard Hunt deposition, House Select Committee on Assassinations, November 3, 1978, RIF#180-10131-10342, http://www
.aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/hsca/secclass/pdf/Hunt_11-3-78.pdf, 35).
30. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 284–85, citing interview with BNDD agent, November 18, 1971.
31. New York Times, June 6, 1971; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 288.
32. New York Times, July 8, 1971.
33. For the case of Puttaporn Khramkhruan, see Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 254–56; David Corn, Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA’s Crusades (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 300.
34. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 410–14.
35. Egil Krogh, the White House liaison with the BNDD, later went to jail for his role in overseeing the break-in by the so-called White House Plumbers into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Krogh is described by Len Colodny as “a lawyer with a CIA background. . . . Krogh . . . had worked for Ehrlichman’s firm in Seattle before joining the White House, but he had previously been involved with the CIA in Vietnam. Krogh bragged to Ehrlichman that he had hand-carried gold for the CIA to Vietnam. Ehrlichman and Haldeman later came to believe that Krogh maintained ties to the Agency even during his time at the White House. Neither allegation was ever proven” (Colodny and Schachtman, The Forty Years’ War, 101, 113).
36. Jeremy Kuzmarov, “From Counter-Insurgency to Narco-Insurgency: Vietnam and the International War on Drugs,” Journal of Policy History 20, no. 3 (2008): 358–59, citing many sources, including Southeast Asian Narcotics, Hearings before the Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, House of Representatives, 95th Cong., 1st sess., July 12–13, 1977 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1978), 2–3. See also Surachert Bamrungsuk, U.S. Foreign Policy and Thai Military Rule, 1947–1977 (Bangkok: Editions Duangkamol, 1988).
37. I have read but have not been able to verify that often the tribes selected for this treatment were those not paying off the Thai police and BPP.
38. Jim Glassman, Thailand at the Margins: Internationalization of the State and the Transformation of Labour (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 67–68: “Red Gaur groups were controlled by General Withoon Yasawat, a former leader of CIA-hired Thai mercenary forces in Laos, and General Chatchai Choonhavan, son of Phin, brother-in-law of Phao, and later Prime Minister.”
39. William Shawcross, “How Tyranny Returned to Thailand,” New York Review of Books, December 9, 1976.
