Red Cocaine by Joseph Douglass part 33

Certainly, there are numerous non-Communist drug-traffick- ers. Even some apparently non-Marxist 'freedom-fighter' resistance movements, notably the Contras in Nicaragua, were evidently tempted to use drugs as a weapon or source of money, as well. There is no denying that; but this seems to be a rather minor element of the problem and should not be allowed to detract attention from the role of China, the Soviet Bloc countries, and the Marxist and Maoist guerrillas and terrorists. On the con- trary, the participation of such groups serves the Communists just fine, since it confuses the overall picture, enhances 'deniability' and helps to divert attention from their far more intensive activities, while providing a ready source of propaganda ammunition for disinformation purposes.

An interesting example of one Soviet recruitment technique using drugs was con- tained in an affidavit by Nelson Mantilla-Rey, filed in support of his application for political asylum. Mantilla is a Colombian who was awarded a scholarship to study medicine in the Soviet Union. He described how he and a classmate, Rafay Mehdi, gradually came under the watchful eye of a counsellor, who introduced them to black market activities to earn extra money, and who also used them to collect information on various individuals and situations during vacations. The counsellor further displayed considerable power when Mantilla or Mehdi got into trouble with the police or college authorities - a revelation which led Mantilla and Mehdi to give him the nickname 'Angel'. They eventually concluded that Angel was in reality a KGB officer and that they were being recruited. One of the paragraphs in the affidavit is significant:

'32. In the summer of 1982, Rafay came with me to Colombia. Angel suggested that we should buy drugs in Colombia, telling us that he had contacts in the Colombian airport and could set something up. He suggested that we could sell the drugs to the American soldiers we had seen on the bases in West Germany and that we could make a lot of money for ourselves. This was the first time we refused to do what Angel asked of us. We said selling jeans was commerce, but selling drugs was causing harm, and that we were doctors and could not participate in such a thing. He did not get angry and dropped the subject. He then asked us to contact some of the former Colombian students who had studied in the Soviet Union, to find out what they were doing and to check on their addresses, explaining that it would be interesting to know what had happened to all these students after they left the Soviet Union. We agreed to do that'21.

He also reported on his attempts to interest the US Embassy in the way in which Third World students were brainwashed and recruited, and was told that US officials were not interested in what he had to say. They were only interested in military secrets, not in long-term indoctrination [recruitment] programs. Upon his return to Colombia after graduation, he began receiving phone calls from other students who had studied in the Soviet Union and who encouraged him to join their political group.

One advised him not to worry about the trouble he was having finding a job; 'former students who were Soviet sympathisers were getting into positions of power and the net- work was spreading', he was told.

The purpose of this book is not, of course, to go to the extreme of placing 100% of the blame for the global drugs pandemic upon the Chinese or Soviet Bloc intelligence services. Nor can anyone say how effective their operation has been. If those services controlled 31 to

37 percent of the North American market in 1967, which was what the Soviet

estimate of their market share was at that time, what percentage might they control today?

The problem of assigning responsibility is especially difficult in the case of 'crack'.

Crack is a highly potent form of cocaine which is smoked. It enters the blood-stream through the lungs and proceeds immediately to the brain. It can be almost instantly addictive, gives the user a sense of self-confidence and superiority, and is closely linked with violent behaviour. At the start of 1985, crack usage was virtually unheard of. Exactly when crack first appeared is not precisely known; but it seems to have made its primary debut in late 1985, just in time for the holidays. By January 1986, crack use was reported in California, New York, Iowa, Maryland, Michigan, Florida, Alabama and Washington State. By June 1986, it was reported throughout the United States22 and by September it had been reported in Canada, United Kingdom, Finland, Hong Kong, Spain, South Africa, Egypt, India, Mexico, Belize and Brazil23.

The spread of crack seems best explained as a consequence of coordinated mass marketing. So, too, is its design. As analysed by M. M. Kirsch24, crack was designed for the consumer with $5 to $15 to spend. It was designed for the user who is wholly unaware of its devastating effects: 'The market push has been directed at the young and the ignorant'25. As the Drug Enforcement Administration reported in 1989, almost four years after crack began its rapid spread, the interstate networks, manufacture and distribution were dominated by Jamaicans, Haitians and US Blacks, and the primary targets were the ethnic minorities in the inner cities, principally the Black people and Hispanics26.

Where did crack come from? Who orchestrated its development and its marketing? The drug was priced to match perfectly an unexploited marketing opportunity - people who could not afford an expensive cocaine or heroin habit. It is also interesting to recognise that the characteristics of crack correspond in all important respects to the objectives of the Soviet Bloc's drug development program as it existed in the 1960s (described in Chapter 7). The rapid spread of its use did not match the 'normal' pattern associated with the introduction of a 'new' drug, such as the California designer drugs of the early 1980s.

Even more significantly, however, the marketing of the drug by Caribbean and US Black people to the inner-city poor, particularly Black people and Hispanics, matches identically the Soviet marketing and distribution strategy developed in the mid-1960s and then placed in operation. Following the development of crack, which evidently took place in the late 1970s or early 1980s, it would then have been a simple task clandestinely to insert instructions for its manufacture into the Latin American trafficking networks over which the Soviets exercise influence, to ensure that there would be nothing linking the new drug with the Soviets. The operation would have been 100 percent effective but with no apparent links (from a US perspective) to the Soviet Union or even to any of its satellite intelligence services, most notably Cuba's intelligence services.

Or, consider the role of the majority of the Latin American and North American traf-

fickers. To suggest that they are all Communists, or obeying Communist orders, would be silly. It is a fair assumption that most of the traffickers and their collaborators are not Com- munists. For the most part, they are only pursuing profits without any regard for the con- sequences of their actions. But, how many of them were trained in a drug-trafficking camp located in the Soviet Bloc? Is there a connection between these training schools and the drug-trafficking schools in Colombia27? And how many of the traffickers are simply pawns in a larger game whose dimensions they do not understand? In drug-trafficking, many people are used - and being used without asking questions is accepted as part of the cost of doing business. Curiosity is known to be a fatal disease.

CHAPTER 11: Fixing the Responsibility                       14:

How they are being used and by whom, most of the traffickers do not know, nor nec- essarily care. Very few people really know, as few as possible, which is very few. This is the whole objective of narcotics operational security as developed by the Soviets in the late

1950s, and as described in Chapters 3 and 4 of this book. This is also why the testimony of the few people who did know what was happening is so important.

The bottom line is that there is no way to measure the extent or effectiveness of the Soviet and Chinese drug operations, nor is any method of measurement about to be con- cocted. But, as indicated earlier, the actual extent of the Soviet or Chinese involvement in drug-trafficking is not a primary issue.

The real issue is: Why is the US Government ignoring this dimension of the drug

problem? Why, especially when it could turn out to be the most important dimension, for the reasons which have been described in previous chapters? Why is the US Government unable or unwilling to recognise political warfare or the continuing duplicity of the Soviet Union? Why is the US Government unable to face up to the role of Cuba, Nicaragua and Bulgaria? Why have all Western governments avoided the mass of multi-source data on the Soviet operations to train, equip and finance international terrorists - and then, to make matters worse, have perversely adopted projects to join forces with the worst criminal regime of all, the Soviet Union, to fight terrorism and share intelligence data on terrorism in the process28? Why join forces with a nation which organised training camps for terrorists in half a dozen different countries? The issue goes well beyond the Soviet and Chinese involvement in drug-trafficking chronicled in this book.

'Why'? is a hard question to answer with any degree of confidence. Part of the problem

may be the manner in which US intelligence is organised, or rather divided; and part may relate to the manner in which the Soviet Union is viewed from Washington. Overseas intelligence generally falls within the purview of the CIA, the State Department and the Department of Defense - and US domestic intelligence, within that of the FBI.

Most Soviet Bloc and Chinese drug operations are located overseas, while the US drug problem is perceived as a domestic issue. Also, overseas drug production and trafficking organisations are not an obvious threat against the United States, so why should the CIA concern itself with drug operations in Haiti, Indonesia, or North Vietnam, or with the TIR customs-facilitating operation in Europe? Drugs are the DEA's responsibility, not the CIA's. Nor could the CIA be anxious to share sensitive source information with the State Department, the DEA, or Customs, when these agencies are negotiating arrangements for

sharing intelligence information with the Soviets.

More basic, however, is the fact that the CIA does not collect data for law enforce- ment; that is, data that can be used as evidence in a court of law. Its role is national security, but drug-trafficking is viewed as a law enforcement problem. Moreover, as previously explained, Soviet drug operations are handled mainly by surrogates, which further com- plicates the situation. Law enforcement agencies often do not understand or have access to the data describing the relationships that exist between foreign intelligence services. Nor has it been at all evident, until recently, what has been happening.

Yet, while these considerations are all valid, they are not satisfying because they still do not answer why intelligence priorities and drug-trafficking data collection did not change when data on the Soviet Bloc operations began appearing in the open literature, beginning in December 198629. None of the above factors explains the failure to debrief Jan Sejna and the efforts, which continue today [and continued until his death in August 1997 - Ed.], to discredit him and what he had to say. Why do the US authorities not want to know?

Another part of the problem is Washington's 'detente view' of the Soviet Union and the world Communist system as a whole. The prevailing [1989 - Ed.] view of the 'threat' is that which supports detente politics. Only minor recognition is given to the nature of Com- munism, its goals and objectives, and especially its strategy. At times it almost seems as though the US Government has a death wish30. There has been tremendous reluctance to face the nature of the Soviet military threat. People who have described this threat as it is -a war-planning, war-fighting and war-winning capability - have been subjected to ridicule and derision. There has been and still is an official reluctance to face the threat of international terrorism and its primary sponsor, the Soviet Union. The intelligence community has avoided the whole concept of a long-range Soviet strategic plan for world domination, even to the extent of not collecting known data that describes the plan, its strategy, tactics and the responsibilities of the various Soviet satellite nations within it.

An especially perceptive description of the general problem Westerners have in understanding the Soviets comes from one of the most famous US-UK spies who provided information on Soviet military activities in the early 1960s, Colonel Oleg Penkov-skiy. As explained in The Penkovskiy Papers, a work prepared by the CIA based on his information and debriefings:

'One thing must be clearly understood. If someone were to hand to an American general, an English general and a Soviet general the same set of objective facts and scien- tific data, with instructions that these facts and data must be accepted as unimpeachable, and an analysis made and conclusions drawn on the basis of them, it is possible that the American and the Englishman would reach similar conclusions - I don't know. But the Soviet general would arrive at conclusions which would be radically different from the other two. This is because, first of all, he begins from a completely different set of basic premises and preconceived ideas, namely, the Marxian concepts of the structure of society and the course of history. Second, the logical process in his mind is totally unlike that of his Western counterparts, because he uses Marxist dialectics, whereas they will use some form of deductive reasoning. Third, a different set of moral laws governs and restricts the behaviour of the Soviets. Fourth, the Soviet general's aims will be radically different from those of the American and the Englishman'31.

Westerners have an immensely difficult time in coming to grips with Soviet logic and morality, which, being based on the Leninist dialectic, are totally different from and inconsistent with, counterpart pragmatic Western concepts.

A critical example of the operational problem is the field of deception, disinformation and propaganda, which is one of the primary Soviet weapons used against the West -their first strategic echelon, as Khrushchev himself referred to it. Deception is as natural a Russian national characteristic as is freedom in the United States32. The Soviets were spending over $3 billion each year in the late 1970s on deception, disinformation and propaganda, according to CIA estimates33. Yet the best that a US interagency study could conclude in 1982 was:

'The fact that the Soviet leadership continues to use active measures Iwhich includes disinformation and political influence operations] on a large scale and apparently funds them generously, suggests a positive assessment of their value as a foreign policy instrument'34.

The FBI carried this bland assessment still further: 'We do not see Soviet active measures in the United States as having a significant impact on US decisionmakers....

The American media is sophisticated and generally recognises Soviet influence attempts.... The FBI has uncovered no evidence that suggests American policymakers have been induced to adopt policies against America's interests through KGB influence operations in the United States'35. This is contrary to the view of numerous defectors with expertise in that area36. It is also contrary to the view of many non-government experts*37.