Red Cocaine by Joseph Douglass part 6

The Second Administration centre was of similar size. Additionally, similar drug- trafficker training centres that Sejna was aware of were established in Bulgaria, East Ger- many and the Soviet Union. And in 1962-63, Czechoslovakia was directed by the Soviets to assist North Korea, North Vietnam and Cuba to establish training centres. On the unre- liable assumption that each training centre was the minimum size, each operated at or near its capacity, and no other centres existed or were added after Sejna left, the number of graduates today would exceed 25,000.

The students who attended the course in the Czechoslovak centres were mainly from Latin America, Western Europe, parts of the Middle East, Canada and the United States. Bulgaria's focus was on the Middle East and Southwest Asia - Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon and Syria. East Germany handled West Europeans and Scandinavians, and all countries assisted with nationals from the Far East.

The course was free, all expenses paid. Graduates returned to their respective countries and applied their skills. Some built independent operations, others cooperated with ongoing operations. Those who deviated and attempted to 'change sides' were killed14. All returned a percentage of their earnings to the Soviet Union directly, which would then reimburse the intelligence services of the satellites that had performed the training. In the case of Czechoslovakia, their cut was 30% of the fees the Soviets received back 15.

The establishment of these training centres completed the preparations for the drug strategy. These activities - strategy development, training, research, espionage, and market analysis - were the principal activities of the early Soviet drugs offensive in the late 1950s. Where there were intelligence operations involving actual trafficking, these were more in the nature of limited probes, tests and continuations of prior intelligence practices. The real trafficking, from Sejna's perspective, did not begin until 1960, by which time the marketing strategy had been worked out, strategic intelligence agents had been trained, and training schools were turning out indigenous graduate drug-traffickers.

References to Chapter 2:

1. Jan Sejna, We Will Bury You (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1982).

2. The Administrative Organs Department is one of the two or three most important departments of the Central Committee. This department has responsibility for the Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Interior (KGB), and the Ministry of Justice. It is the most important department insofar as defence, intelligence, and deception are concerned.

3. In Congressional testimony and in official reports of the Narcotics Division of the US Treasury Department, the Korean War is described as having 'been financed solely from the sale of illicit narcotics'. Lasky, Red China's Secret Weapon, op.cit, page A2176.

4. The most significant briefing, which took place in 1956, included Dr Dufek, Colonel-General Miroslav Hemalla of the Military Health Administration, who later became a general and head of the Military Health Administration, Colonel Dr Plzak, whose specialty was the central nervous system and who

practiced at the experimental hospital in North Korea, and several other medical specialists.

There was scattered intelligence on certain of the experiments which had given rise to serious concern within US intelligence and within the US Army. See, for example, John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), page 215, and US Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Foreign and Military Intelligence: Book 1 (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, April 26, 1976), pages 392-393.

5. CIA concern about Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of LSD and other drugs in mind-bend-ing experiments became real during the Korean War. The concern was apparently valid and justified but there was a lack of understanding of the dimensions and objectives of the Communist programs. Unfortunately, this concern led to the tragically aberrant experimentation by US intelligence which surfaced during the Congressional hearings of 1975-76. See, for example, US Senate, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Foreign Intelligence, Book 1

(Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1976), pages 392-420.

6. Soviet interest in the use of drugs goes back to the mid-1930s, when the Soviets were experi-

meriting with drugs as a revolutionary tool. One particularly interesting example of the use of drugs in this respect is reported by A. H. Stanton Candlin. He states that in 1934, the Comintern experimented with the use of marijuana in New York City to stimulate student radicals against the New York police. The behaviour of both drugged and undrugged youths were compared.

'During the melee that resulted it was obvious to the observers that the drugged group were far more effective than the undrugged one.The former were insensible to pain and also continued to struggle and resist vigorously after they had been arrested. As soon as they were in the police station, the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] appeared on the scene and bailed them out. All rioters were then taken to the Rand School of Social Science (listed as a Communist-run organisation by the Federal Government) where they underwent medical and psychiatric examination .... Two days later a conference was held

having as its subject the use of marijuana as a conditioning medium for riots and revolutionary violence. It met at the headquarters of the League for Industrial Democracy.... Leading personalities of the Communist Party... participated'.

The principal speaker, Rosito Carrillo (an alias), explained that Mexico had been the proving ground for a new mental-conditioning technique, using marijuana, which heightened revolutionary spirit. The emotions and states of fear, apprehension, and indecision could be inhibited and the senses partially anaesthetised against pain and even the irritation caused by teargas.

Marijuana, or hashish, could be made concentrated enough, Carrillo said, to bring about uncon- sciousness and even permanent brain damage. He explained that it was a valued weapon in the Com- munist arsenal to help undermine and topple the capitalist system. Speakers arose and propounded a long-range campaign to win legal acceptance of marijuana and other similar drugs, using as an argument the right to freedom of individual choice. A. H. Stanton Candlin, Psycho-Chemical Warfare: The Chinese

Communist Drug Offensive Against the West (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1973), pages 45-

47.

Additionally, the use of drugs to subdue societies in the same sense that the drugs were used by Mao Tse-tung is reported to have been first examined by the Comintern in the mid-1930s. Furthermore, the use of drugs as intelligence weapons by Soviet intelligence services to corrupt and extort foreign offi- cials predates the Korean War.

It seems reasonable to hypothesise that this history of Soviet interest in the use of drugs as weapons and revolutionary tools stimulated the Soviets to watch with considerable care and study the impact of Chinese trafficking on the fighting efficiency of the US and South Korean forces, which then led to the decision that drugs were indeed a valuable weapon the use of which should be exploited.

[The use of drugs by the North Vietnamese and Chinese Communists to intensify the attacking spirit has also been reported in recent years. In an article recapturing personal experiences in Vietnam, two

examples are presented: The way the teargas didn't affect the NVA at all leads me to believe they were hopped up on drugs'. And: 'Quite a few of the NVA we killed inside our wire were bandaged -that night. It was obvious that they had sent their wounded back up to fight the battle. That scared me - to the point that I could not believe that people who had already been wounded and messed up still wanted to fight. I figured they had a lot more drive than I had. Those people were scary, like they were almost superhuman. We found drugs - syringes and chemicals'. Eric Hammel, 'Khe Sanh: Attack on Hill 861 A, Marine Corps Gazette, February 1989, pages 48,49.

Furthermore, on June 4,1989, a Cable News Network broadcast on the fighting in Beijing in which the Chinese soldiers were especially brutal in their attack on students who were revolting against the Communist regime, reported that the presence of drugs was identified in the blood and urine of soldiers who were hospitalised. The soldiers said they had been given injections or 'vaccinations' prior to engaging the students because Tienanmen Square was dirty. Subsequent reports out of Europe stated, in addition,

that the soldiers had been given psychological hate conditioning in conjunction with the administration of drugs prior to their assault on the students.

The first use of synthetic drugs to stimulate attacking soldiers may have been undertaken by the Germans in the Second World War. Consider: When the German armies waged the 'blitzkrieg' or 'Light- ning war' through France and the Lowlands in 1940, the Allied forces were no match for their stamina and ferocity. The Germans fought like men possessed, and they were. Their pharmacists had synthesised methedrine, a cheap but powerful energising drug that allowed their soldiers to fight vigorously for weeks at a time with no sleep and little food'. William Glasser, M.D., Take Effective Control of Your Life (New York: Harper &: Row, 1984, page 138).

Another related finding is reported by Michael Isikoff in 'Users of Crack Cocaine Link Violence to Drug's Influence', Washington Post, March 24, 1989, page A10. Isikoff reports on studies that have clearly linked violent behaviour with crack cocaine. Nearly half of the callers to a cocaine hotline reported that

they had perpetrated violent crimes, most while under the influence of the drug. There was no perceptible difference between female and male users].

7. The use of drugs during the Korean War, while serious, was not as widespread as it was during the

Vietnam War. Indeed, many people who served in the war were not aware of the problem, which

CHAPTER 2: The Soviets Decide to 'Compete'                 23

tended to be more marked in specific locations than in others. For example, one area identified by a former counter-intelligence specialist where the use of hard drugs was especially noticeable was among the stevedore battalions in Pusan.

8. US medical personnel also identified cardiovascular damage among young US servicemen. Thev

attributed the cause to diet. The Soviet doctors, too, recognised the possible contribution of diet, hut additionally noted the equally possible contribution of drug usage among the US servicemen. It was this latter possibility that captured Khrushchev's imagination. While reports on the adverse medical effects of drugs appeared in the

1970s in Western medical literature, these effects did not really receive medical attention until the 1980s. Recent research has tied cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and other drugs to both cardiovascular damage and brain damage. See, for example, Louis L. Cregler, M.D. and Herbert Mark, M.D., 'Medical Complications of Cocaine Abuse', New England Journal of Medicine, December 4, 1986. In many respects, Soviet science, as it pertains to military and intelligence operations, is far ahead of Western science. Take the crucial issue of the consequence of drug use over successive generations. In 1990, the Wall Street Journal reports that 'multi- generation use is one of the great unexplored areas in the war against drugs, in part because the phenomenon is so recent'. David Shribman, The '60s Generation, Once High on Drugs, Warns Its Children. Wall Street Journal, January 26,1990, page 1. Soviet scientists were studying this phenomenon in the mid-1950s.

9. How much the Soviets knew about the effects of drugs in the mid-1950s is not known. It does appear that because of their interest in, for example, mind-control and the use of drugs to stimulate revolutionary activity, they might well have known much more than was known in the free world. The Soviet identification of the harmful effects of drugs on the cardiovascular system appears to predate similar recognition in the West by many years. The question of the effects of drugs over successive generations has only recently received attention in the United States; note growing concern over the permanent disabilities and reduced mental capacities of children born to women who are on drugs, even on marijuana. See, for example, Michael Abramowitz, 'Pregnant Cocaine Users Reduce Risk by Stopping', Washington Post, March 24,1989, page A10.

10. This would probably refer to Soviet experience in using drugs to stimulate and otherwise further revolutionary activity and to the experience of their intelligence services in using drugs to extort and bribe foreign officials. Considerable expertise had also been gained from extensive experimentation with drugs for mind-control purposes. Additionally, the Soviets were experimenting with and promoting the use of drugs such as LSD to create mental incapacities. This work is described in a Communist textbook, Communist Manual of Instructions of Psychological Warfare, used in the United States to 'capture the minds of a nation through brain- washing and fake mental health', as described by Kenneth Goff, a former Communist turned anti-Communist crusader [see also the Introduction to this book, the Second Edition of the present work]. The textbook contains an introductory address on psychopolitics by Lavren-tiy Beria of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs in which he states that 'Psychopolitics is a solemn charge. With it you can erase our enemies as insects. You can cripple the efficiency of leaders by striking insanity into their families through the use of drugs'. The text itself states that

'by making readily available drugs of various kinds, by giving the teenager alcohol, by praising his wildness, by stimulating him with sex literature and advertising to him or her practices as taught at the Sexpol, the psychopolitical operator can create the necessary attitude of chaos, idleness and worthlessness into which can then be cast the solution which will give the teenager complete freedom everywhere - Communism'. Brain- Washing: A Synthesis of the Communist Textbook on Psychopolitics, published by Goff, 1956.

11. A good description of Khrushchev's peaceful coexistence strategy is contained in Sejna, We Will Bury You, op. cit., pages 22-36. See also Raymond S. Sleeper, editor, Mesmerized by the Bear (New York: Dodd Mead & Company, 1987), pages 216-219.

12. Since 1973, at the initiative of US Customs and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, the United States has been sharing US narcotics trafficking control techniques and intelligence on trafficking organisations with various Soviet Bloc customs (intelligence) agencies. In 1988, the US State Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration reported that they were negotiating to share drug-trafficking intelligence with the Soviet Union, including drug samples possibly keyed to different production and distribution networks. This is discussed in detail in Chapter 9.

13. There was considerable confusion in the West (and in the East, for that matter) about the structure of Soviet Bloc intelligence services. This was only natural, because intelligence is highly classified, and classification includes the structure and organisation of the intelligence services themselves.

In Czechoslovakia, probably the best known component of the intelligence service was the StB or State Security (Statni Bezpecnosti, which prior to 1967 was known as the StB or State Secret Security (Statni Tajna Bezpecnost). Its name was changed in 1967 to remove the 'secret', in an attempt to improve its image. Notwithstanding the publicity attached to the StB, there are few people, even in Czechoslovakia, and even within the Czechoslovak intelligence service, who understood what the StB was, and how it fitted into the overall Czechoslovak intelligence system. Quite often, StB was used generically to describe any activity within the entire civilian intelligence system. But this was incorrect and was where the confu-

sion began. [The Author further explained, in the first Edition of the present work]:

The civilian intelligence service is organised within the Ministry of Interior. The Ministry is functionally

organised into separate administrations. The First Administration is civilian counter-intelligence. This is the StB. This is the organisation that is responsible for keeping track of Czechoslovak civilians and for rooting out traitors and other enemies of the state. The Second Administration is civilian intelligence (as distinct from military intelligence, which is organised within the Military Intelligence Administration of the General Staff). This is the organisation responsible for intelligence operations outside Czechoslovakia; that is, foreign intelligence operations such as espionage, political sabotage, deception and disinformation, and technology theft.

A prime example of the confusion that exists is an article on the 'dread secret police' published during the upheavals in Eastern Europe [1989-90). The StB has been regarded by Western diplomats as the most ruthless and efficient of all the East European security services.... Internationally, the Soviet Union's KGB has often used the StB as a surrogate for doing its dirty work. The StB's connection to international terrorist organisations - through the manufacture of the deadly plastic explosive Semtex [a plastic

explosive favoured by terrorists because it emits few telltale vapours and is very hard to detect] - is another mystery'. Dan Morgan, 'Amateurs Probe Dread Secret Police', Washington Post, December 14, 1989, page 41.

Here, the author is mixing up, or combining, the first and Second Administrations. Both are ruthless and efficient. Western diplomats in Czechoslovakia will have more contact with the StB or First Administration than with the Second Administration, although without their knowledge. The First Admin- istration will contact them to learn about spies in Czechoslovakia. The Second Administration will try to recruit them to spy for Czechoslovakia. Outside Czechoslovakia, almost all contact will be by the Second Administration. And while both administrations are used as surrogates by the KGB, internationally it is the Second Administration which is the surrogate for KGB intelligence operations, and it is in the Second Administration and military intelligence where terrorist operations and the support provided for them - such as the production of Semtex - are organised. Also, drug-trafficking is organised within the Second

Administration and within military intelligence, not in the StB, although the StB does have a counter- intelligence task, which is shared with the Third Administration, military counter-intelligence.

There is also often a confusion as to the importance and role of military intelligence. This is probably due to the preponderant number of sources (defectors) from civilian intelligence and the relative scarcity of military intelligence sources. Most civilian intelligence officials do not know much about military intelligence operations and, accordingly, tend to play down the importance of military intelligence.

Another confusion is the notion that the StB 'operates as a state within a state, uncontrolled by its alleged superiors at the Interior Ministry of the Communist Party Central Committee'. Control is the essence of the overt Communist system. Everything and everybody is controlled. It is the First Secretary who wields most control. Beneath him, there are numerous committees and commissions also exerting control, many of which are, in turn, controlled by the First Secretary. Additionally, within the satellites, the Soviet Union has its own control mechanisms. To think that organisations, including the StB, run rampant

without control is to overlook one of the most important characteristics of the internal structure of the

Communist system.

In addition to civilian intelligence and counter-intelligence, there are a variety of other major subdivisions or administrations within the Ministry of Interior that are important components of the intel- ligence and security system. These are: military counter-intelligence, public security (police), passport control, investigations, jails, interior troops, border troops, customs service, censorship, support for foreign diplomats and embassies, and finance. In comparing the Czechoslovak and Soviet intelligence services, the Czechoslovak Ministry of Interior is roughly comparable to the Soviet KGB (Komitet Gosu-darstvennoy Bezopasnosti or Committee for State Security). The principal difference is that the public security (police) in the Soviet Union do not come under the KGB. The Czechoslovak Second Administration is comparable to that portion of the KGB that handles intelligence, as distinct from counter-intelligence, investigations, customs, and so forth.

14. When the intelligence plan was reviewed in 1965 or 1966 by the Czechoslovak Defence Council, one of the members asked how effective the program had been. At that time, the chief of military intelli- gence explained, only seven graduates had not been successful. Of this number, two had been killed by Czechoslovak intelligence when they had attempted to switch sides.

15. General Sejna was present at a discussion with the First Secretary of the Communist Party of El Salvador, who was told directly that in return for weapons and military supplies, it was his Party's responsibility to help the Czechoslovaks pay for the weapons through drugs. The First Secretary res- ponded that the market in El Salvador was limited, but if it was expanded to include the United States and Canada, none of us would have a money problem. The Czechoslovak official who was in charge then advised him that the United States and Canada were the primary targets