Red Cocaine by Joseph Douglass part 19

Sejna further reported that in the fall of 1967, the Soviets called a meeting of the Warsaw Pact intelligence chiefs in Moscow to discuss expanding the drug and narcotics offensive to take advantage of the Vietnam War and disaffection of American youth. This meeting was especially noteworthy, because it may have been the same meeting on which a Bulgarian intelligence officer reported following his defection to the West in 1970. There has been considerable data from Bulgaria, all of which, in essence, confirms Sejna's testimony. This particular source was Stefan Sverdlev, a colonel in the Bulgarian Committee for State Security (secret police), the Komitet Darzhavna Sigurnost (KDS). Sverdlev had been directly involved in Bulgarian drug-trafficking. He described the role of KINTEX, a 'private' concern formed as a covert subsidiary of Bulgarian intelligence to handle parts of the drug operation. He stated that in 1967, the heads of the Warsaw Pact security services met in Moscow to 'exploit and hasten the inherent 'corruption' of Western society'.

A subsequent meeting of Bulgarian State Security officers in Sofia, Bulgaria, was held to devise a three-year plan for the implementation of the strategy. This plan led to a State Security directive issued in July 1970, the subject of which was 'the destabilisation of Western society through, among other tools, the narcotics trade'9. When he defected, Sverdlev brought with him KDS directive M-120/00-0050, which dealt with the movement of narcotics from the Middle East through Bulgaria to Western Europe and North America10. Further, in December 1969, West Germany captured 200 kilograms of morphine base in Frankfurt. Through chemical analysis, the West Germans were able to conclude that the base had been produced in Sofia, Bulgaria11.

By the early 1970s, discipline had been eroded in the US Army in Europe to the extent that serious questions of command had arisen. Even the mail service, which was used to distribute drugs, was corrupted12. A major clampdown ensued. Many soldiers were dishonourably discharged or reassigned. During the crackdown, the trafficking trail which was uncovered led back from American servicemen to Eastern Europe, with East Berlin, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary and Bulgaria prominently identified'3.

Robin Bruce Lockhart, the son of the well-known (in intelligence circles) British diplomatic agent, R. H. Bruce Lockhart, has also reported on the movement of drugs across Europe to the US armed forces. The finest and most powerful heroin', he writes,

'comes from East Germany and is marketed in West Germany, where the West German police estimate that the US armed forces account for no less than sixty-five percent of its consumption and at a price one-thirtieth of that obtaining in the streets of New York'14.

What was especially noteworthy, again, was the low price. The objective is political warfare, not the simple lure of high profits, and the targets, in this case, are members of the US armed forces. As a further example of the tactics employed, opium was secretly added to

marijuana - which was widely touted as being non-addictive and rather harmless at the

time - to generate addiction covertly, without the user's knowledge. Similar tactics were also employed against US servicemen in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. High quality (white) heroin was sold to US servicemen as cocaine, which, at the

time, many people believed was a harmless, non-addictive drug.

It is particularly important that these kinds of tactics should be kept in mind when

assessing what happened during the 1980s in the United States. Trafficking is not a simple case of demand stimulating supply. More often it is the reverse situation, with the suppli- ers working hard to create demand. This helps to explain the failures of the interdiction programs of the 1980s. Notwithstanding attempts to crack down on trafficking and the seizure each year of ever higher quantities of cocaine, the purity of cocaine on the market

has steadily increased and the price has decreased - which is exactly the opposite of what US

authorities had expected.

The casual explanation is increased supply and competition. The more informed observer might question this explanation and consider other possibilities; for example, political warfare and measures calculated to defeat the so-called war on drugs.

The last event in 1967 of significance that General Sejna recalled was the completion of an important study, the report on which was entitled Minorities and Immigrants in the United States. The study was prepared for the Czechoslovak Defence Council. The study had been triggered by a talk given by the Soviet Ambassador, Stepan Cervoneiko, to the Czechoslovak Defence Council. His message was simple. 'The minorities will help us change the white to the red'. 'White' referred to cocaine and 'red' referred to the Red Revolution. The report formalised the role of drugging the minorities in the revolutionary process. The two key minorities to be targeted were Black people and Hispanics.

The importance of minorities had long been recognised in Soviet strategy, but the previous focus had been on the East European minorities and on their use in espionage. After Brezhnev became General Secretary, policies under Khrushchev were reviewed and new priorities were established. During this review, Khrushchev was criticised for not placing more focus on the use of non-European minorities, particularly Black people.

The need to make greater use of Black people in drug-trafficking first surfaced as a major topic of discussion during a visit by Raul Castro to the Soviet Union and Czechoslo- vakia in 1965. In preparation for that visit, the Soviets instructed Czechoslovak officials on the need to criticise Castro for his anti-Black bias and to convince him of the importance of bringing more Black people into the drug-distribution and sales business. While in Moscow, Castro met General Savinkin (head of the Administrative Organs Department: see above), who took the Soviet lead in the education of Raul Castro.

Castro stopped off in Czechoslovakia after leaving Moscow, and the 'education' continued. Raul persisted in complaining that the problem with Black people was that they were more Black than Communist. In response, the Soviet General who advised Czechoslovak military intelligence told Castro that business was business, and that not all spies were Communist. Indeed, he pointed out, most spies were not Communist.

During private conversations with General Sejna, Castro criticised Savinkin and the Soviets in general. Obviously, we cannot exist without the Soviets, Raul told Sejna, but they are stupid and need to listen to us. The Soviets do not understand the psychology of the Caribbean. Raul was referring to Savinkin's push to have Cuba use both Cuban and Caribbean Black people in the drug distribution process. This was bad strategy, Raul argued. Cuban Black people should not be used for several reasons.

First, he would have to infiltrate them through Mexico, and he believed this would upset the Mexicans. Secondly, Cuban Black people would be readily identified as Cubans because of their accent. Thirdly, it was a good idea to use just Caribbean Black people in the

drug business, because the United States did not watch the Jamaicans, Haitians, Dominicans and other Caribbean nationals the way they watched the Cubans. Fourthly, many Black people in the United States were from other parts of the Caribbean and Blacks from those other parts of the Caribbean would have an easier job fitting in and selling drugs.

And in the fifth place, Castro was concerned about the reliability of Cuban Blacks. Here, Raul was implicitly recognising the anti-Black bias of many of Fidel Castro's policies, which he believed militated against their use in such a sensitive operation. Raul was not adverse to setting up a training program, which would include the resettlement of Cuban Black people on other Caribbean Islands for several years, until they had mastered local dialects. But for the immediate future, he was strongly opposed to using Cuban Black

people in the drug program.

In the end, Castro agreed to use Cuban Blacks in intelligence operations that were not as sensitive as the drug business, and to begin training and using Caribbean Black people in the drug business. 'If you want more Black people, you will have more Blacks', Sejna recalls Castro finally agreeing, 'there is an inexhaustible supply in the Caribbean. But Caribbean Black people, not Cuban Blacks'15.

This strategy reached its maturity with the 1967 report on the use of minorities. The

specific objectives in targeting the minorities set forth in the report, as recalled by General

Sejna, were as follows:

•  To speed up the revolutionary process,

•  To create political instabilities,

•  To force the United States to pay more attention to domestic issues and less to international problems, and:

•  To create eco-racism.

The concept of eco-racism was a product of several years' research and study. The Soviet idea was that in the United States, it is money that is most important. This was especially true among the Black people whom the Soviets believed were more motivated by material (economic) factors than by political ideals.

That is, they thought in economic terms rather than in political terms. Moreover, their anger was directed more at economic issues than at perceived political inadequacies. As a Czechoslovak delegation reported after visiting the United States in September 1967, the minorities, mostly Black people, did not understand that freedom for them meant socialism (Communism).

When we spoke to them about Communism, we were met with hostility and anger, the delegation explained. But, when we discussed economics, the anger of representatives

from the minorities immediately focused on the inequities of the capitalist system. Accordingly, the delegates recommended that propaganda work should indeed focus on economic inequities - rather than on Communism and its 'benefits'.

The 1967 report, which was completed in December, addressed the importance of using minorities to 'speed the revolutionary process'. With respect to Black people,

numerous tactics were identified. Racism was to be promoted because it was a destabilis-

ing factor. Operatives were to be directed at youth, since older Black people were believed to be too intimidated by the White establishment. Narcotics and propaganda were to be employed to 'revolutionise' the Black people. Black unemployment was to be promoted. Emphasis was to be placed on the concept of 'taking' or making the Whites 'give', in opposition to the concept of Black people working for a living.

This report also emphasised the need to bring Hispanic and Black minorities

together. Hispanics were believed to be already well into drugs and by bringing them into closer contact with the US Black people, the use of drugs in the Black communities would be accelerated. The principal target of drugs would be the 'lumpen proletariaf -that is, the unemployed who were concentrated in the inner city ghettos. By pushing drugs into this group, crime and the general erosion of Western moral values would be stimulated because the use of drugs destroyed judgment and led people into crime, homosexuality, and other activities conventionally considered immoral.

The drug distribution chain or sequence in the United States was analysed in the report. The problem with the chain was that the majority of top bosses were White, while most of those who made up the base of the sales pyramid were Black. Two changes were therefore required. First, it was necessary to promote more Black people from street level into the organisation and management level. Secondly, it was necessary to bring Hispanics into the organisation. This was deemed advisable to avoid upsetting the Hispanics and also to avoid the undesirable problem of Black people being the only minority in control.

The report recommended making these changes as operations expanded, by pro- moting and training Black people and by bringing in Hispanics as new markets were

opened. The combination of Black people and Hispanics would then be more effective in pushing drugs into the lumpen proletariat, which the Soviets believed was dominated by Black people and Hispanics. Together, Black people and Hispanics would form a 'spojena obcanska ohrana fronta' or united citizen's defence front.

The thesis of the report was that drugs pushed into the minorities would create

'incurable political destruction'. The estimate presented in the report was that by the year

2000, people with a lack of morals created mainly through drugs, people who were willing to take whatever measures were necessary to support the revolution, would have expanded to encompass an estimated forty-two percent of the population.

In its 1989 report on the crack epidemic, the US Drug Enforcement Agency [DEA] concluded that: 'Large-scale, interstate trafficking networks controlled by Jamaicans, Haitians and Black street gangs dominate the manufacture and distribution of crack'16. The distribution of crack, which grew so rapidly in 1986, appears to be much more of an organised operation than a simple 'natural' phenomenon17.

Crack rapidly became recognised as the most dangerous drug to hit America. As

William Bennett, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, explained on CBS's

'Face the Nation' on August 13, 1989, drug crime is up, drug-trafficking is up, drug deaths are up, drug emergencies in US hospitals are up. The reason for all this is crack.

Two appendices to the DEA report on crack18 contained data provided by field agents on individual cities. Throughout these brief city summaries, the groups dominat-ing the manufacture and distribution were shown to be Haitians, Jamaicans, Dominicans and US Black people. Trafficking was most prominent within the lower income inner-city areas,

particularly in Black and Hispanic neighbourhoods19. While little was  said  about the

wholesalers, two groups were identified: Cubans and Colombians.

The entire discussion of the nature of distribution and sales suggested a well-organ-ised and managed operation - an operation designed to use Black people against Black people. The reality in 1989 thus wholly matched Soviet strategy, operations, and the underlying rationale laid down more than twenty years previously.

Could this really have been just mere coincidence?

References to Chapter 7:

1. The fall 1959 meeting was preceded by a May 1959 KGB meeting which resulted in a decision to increase the number of KGB agents targeted against Western technology by a factor of ten, according to the recollection of a former CIA counter-intelligence official.

2. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times, op. cit., page 504.

3. Under Brezhnev, the banks and financial institutions became the third highest priority targets for intelligence infiltration.

4. Seymour M. Hersch, 'US Aides in 72 Weighed Killing Officer Who Now Leads Panama', New York

Times, June 13,1986, page 1.

5. See,  for  example,  Michael  Abramowitz,  'Pregnant  Cocaine  Users  Reduce  Risk  by  Stopping', Washington Post, March 24,1989, page A10.

6. 'There is something of a consensus that the present serious drug crisis in the high schools -primarily marijuana, LSD, mescaline, and a few others such as amphetamines and barbiturates - began about 1967'. Psycho-Chemical Warfare: The Chinese Communist Drug Offensive Against the West (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1973), op. cit., page 63. It is also interesting to note that in 1967, the Scholastic Aptitude Test scores used as college entrance exams began a decline which reached a low of 890 in 1980, down from the previous normal range of 965-975. Given the intensity of Castro's argument and his tendency to act without awaiting Soviet approval, it is logical to assume that Cuba had already begun the process of pushing drugs into US high schools at the time of the meeting in Moscow.

7. In a speech on international terrorism at the Congress of the European Christian Democratic Union

held in Madrid in June 1986, Llaminio Piccoli, President of the Italian National Council of Christian Democracy, dwelt at some length on collusion between terrorists and the international narcotics trade. He also quoted Raul Castro as stating towards the end of the 1960s that drugs would be a decisive weapon to disrupt the fabric of Western democracies. He also mentioned the narcotics trade organised by Cuba and certain countries of Central America, under the dominant influence of Cuba and the USSR.

8. See also, Merrill Collett, 'Colombia's Drug Cartel Said to Aim at Military', Washington Post, April 11,

1988, page A17.

9. Drugs and Terrorism, 1984, op. cit, page 58.

10. Nathan M. Adams, 'Drugs for Guns: The Bulgarian Connection', Reader's Digest, November 1983.

11. Drugs and Terrorism, 1984, op. cit, page 59.

12. Times have not changed. In 1988, investigations of drug-trafficking by Panama-based US soldiers uncovered the use of the military mail system to ship cocaine. Michael Isikoff, 'Drugs Allegedly Shipped in Army Planes, Mail', Washington Post, June 2,1988, page A3.

13. Additional details are available in Joseph D. Douglass, Jr. and Neil C. Livingstone, America the Vulnerable: The Threat of Chemical/Biological Warfare (Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Books, D.C Heath and Company, 1987), pages 113-144.

14. Robin Bruce Lockhart, Reilly: The First Man (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), page 99.

15. In 1980, a Jamaican, Mr. Earlston Spencer, participated in a hearing held by the National Committee To Restore Internal Security. He explained how in 1974, the year after Michael Manley became Prime Minister of Jamaica, young people were openly recruited to go to Cuba for training, which included training in guerrilla warfare. The first Jamaican gangs or posses are believed by the US Justice Department to have appeared in the United States around 1974. These Jamaican posses subsequently became some of the main distributors of crack cocaine in the mid-1980s.

16. US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Agency, Crack Cocaine Review 1989 (Washington D.C:

US Department of Justice, 1989), page 13.

17. Observations in the 1989 National Drug Control Strategy are quite interesting in this respect. 'Crack is an innovation in cocaine retailing that takes uncanny advantage of the nation's changing drug use patterns'. The White House, National Drug Control Strategy (Washington, D.C: US Government Printing Office, September

1989), page 4.

18. Crack Cocaine Overview 1989, op. cit.

19. Consider, for example, the following extracts taken from the city and state summaries in Appendix A

and B of Crack Cocaine Overview 1989, op. cit:

x Amarillo: Crack houses are run by American Black people who sell the majority of their product to

Black buyers.

x Atlanta: Crack cocaine has literally taken over the lower income drug market throughout the State of

Georgia.

x Baltimore: Haitians and Black people are the main traffickers.

x Boston: Crack rapidly spread through the major cities in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire, confined to the Black inner-city areas. Subsequent intelligence disclosed that out- of-state Black gangs were vying for control. Availability of crack... is principally controlled by Dominican and Puerto Rican groups.

x Bridgeport: Black people are still the main sources for crack. High-level Hispanic cocaine traffickers import cocaine and convert it into crack.

CHAPTER 7: The Soviets Intensify the Drag War in the Late 1960s 75

X Cape Cod: In 1988, Black violators surfaced as key suppliers of cocaine to the Mid-Cape area.

X Dallas: Crack distribution is controlled by a 500-700 member Jamaican-controlled cartel. Crack

cocaine trafficking is primarily centred around the lower income, urban Black and Hispanic population.

X Denver: Crack houses are run by Jamaicans with the assistance of locally recruited Black females.

X Fort Myers: The cooks and distributors of the crack are mostly Black and the buyers cross all ethnic

boundaries.

X Hartford: Black and Hispanic traffickers controlled the crack distribution to the Hartford area when it

first surfaced.

X Houston: The crack problem is essentially situated in predominantly Black neighbourhoods.

X Kansas City: Reports substantial involvement of Jamaican traffickers.

X Los Angeles: Crack cocaine manufacture and distribution are primarily controlled by Black street

gangs (the Bloods or the Crips) who have distribution networks throughout the northwestern  and

southwestern United States.

X Lubbock: Crack houses are typically motel rooms or empty houses run by American Black people who

are supplied by Cuban wholesalers.

X Miami: Haitian and Jamaican illegal aliens are, for the most part, responsible for this phase [import and manufacture] of the operation. Local Black violators are responsible for local distribution, with some White assistance.

X New Orleans: A Black street gang (Crips) from Los Angeles has emerged as the main source of crack.

X New York: Primary crack traffickers are Dominicans and Black people. Dominicans are most active in

upper Manhattan and the Bronx. Black traffickers control large areas of crack trafficking in middle-class and inner-city sections of Brooklyn, Queens and parts of the Bronx. Jamaicans and Haitian crack groups are not as large as the Dominican and Black groups, but they are involved in significant activity.

X Newark: Black and Jamaican gangs are the principal groups involved in street sales and distribution. Caucasians and Hispanics (predominately Dominicans) are active, but to a lesser degree.

X Orlando: The problem is located in poor Black neighbourhoods and Haitians are directly involved in

many of the areas.

X Philadelphia: Crack cocaine houses, under control of Jamaican trafficking organisation,are beginning to surface.

X Phoenix: Crack cocaine is available in the public housing areas and is dealt entirely by Black people. Crack is supplied by the Crips and Bloods gangs of Los Angeles.

X Providence: Dominicans and out-of-state Black people control the distribution of crack. Most defendants are Dominican or US Black people.

X San Diego: Crack remains a serious problem in minority enclaves.

X San Francisco: Crack is an overwhelming problem in urban, lower class Black neighbourhoods.

X Seattle: Widespread availability of crack cocaine among all ethnic groups.

X Tallahassee: The majority of the crack cocaine clientele are from the Black community. Suppliers are

primarily Black traffickers in the Miami area, many of whom are either Jamaican or closely connected to

Jamaican traffickers.

X Tulsa: Crack cocaine is readily available within the Black community.

X Tyler: Crack houses are managed by American Black people. Trafficking is primarily concentrated in

Black communities.

X Washington D.C.: Utilisation of juvenile couriers, primarily Black teenagers, is a noted trend. A growing

number of Jamaican distributors has entered the cocaine trade.

X Wilmington: Haitian crack distribution has grown from a limited market confined to Black Americans

to open street selling in at least ten small communities. Most of the distributors are connected to the Haitian community located in the Fort Pierce, Florida, area.