Empire of Crime

by Tim Newark

  ‘Nevertheless, in view of the extreme sensitiveness here at present of the China trade question,’ said a note from the embassy to the Foreign Office in London, ‘there is a danger that anything Anslinger says may be misinterpreted in malevolent quarters as evidence that the Hong Kong authorities are conniving in the traffic. We should make it quite clear that this is not so. State Department suggest that our rebuttals would be strengthened if our member of the commission could give some support to Anslinger.’

  A few days later, the British Embassy reported that Anslinger was being very helpful and had shown them the draft of the speech he was intending to make on the illicit narcotics trade in the Far East. The bulk of the speech was a strong attack on the Chinese communists but included a paragraph designed to mollify the British:

  While movements of heroin through Hong Kong, because of its geographical location and commercial shipping activity, continued despite efforts of local police who acted vigorously, there has been a noticeable trend towards bypassing this area whenever possible with shipments to other free countries. [Hong Kong] enforcement officials and the courts have taken a positive attitude to thwart the traffickers.

  The British Embassy was so delighted with this statement from Anslinger, and accompanying evidence of Hong Kong judicial efforts, that it advised drawing it to the attention of newspaper editors. What is astonishing, however, is that the British government did not feel confident enough in their own intelligence on the drugs trade to robustly refute it themselves. Weirdly, it appears there was even some evidence that British customs officers in Hong Kong may have connived to supply the FBN with faulty data by saying that they had seized opium from communist Chinese suppliers when in fact it had come from traffickers in Bangkok. All this seems to have been accepted as the price Britain had to pay to be seen as a good Cold War ally of the USA.

  In reality, other US government departments had their doubts about Anslinger’s claims. In November 1956, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) produced its own examination of FBN charges of Chinese communist involvement in the illicit opium trade.

  ‘There is no reliable evidence to indicate that the government of Communist China either officially permits or actively engages in the illicit export of opium or its derivatives to the Free World,’ the CIA concluded. ‘There is also no reliable evidence of Chinese Communist control over the lucrative opium trade of South-East Asia and adjacent markets.’ It couldn’t be blunter than that in its rebuke of Anslinger and the FBN.

  What emerged instead was a more subtle and complex network. There was evidence that small quantities of raw opium were being produced by tribespeople living in Yunnan Province, under communist rule, who then sold it across the border into Burma. It was suggested that Chinese communists tolerated this trade in order not to alienate the tribesmen. Otherwise they maintained a strict anti-opium policy.

  ‘The principal opium-producing areas in the Far East are in Burma and Laos,’ said the CIA. ‘The production of opium in these countries, in addition to production in Thailand, is sufficient to supply the great mass markets of Burma, Thailand, and Indochina and to provide a further export potential of the equivalent of 150 metric tons of raw opium a year. This export moves principally through Thailand and to a lesser extent through Burma to markets in Malaya, Hong Kong, and Macao.’

  The governments of Burma, Thailand and Laos were said, like China, to tolerate the production of opium by minority tribes in order to keep them content, otherwise any attempts to suppress opium production might provoke violent resistance, as the tribes depended on it as their main cash crop.

  The big profits from opium, as always, accrued to the opium traders and corruptible government officials. Burmese farmers earned less than $1.5 million for the 90 tons of Burmese opium sold through Thailand each year. In Bangkok, the same quantity of opium was worth $9.5 million. By the time it arrived in foreign markets, such as Singapore, its value had increased to almost $25 million.

  ‘This large increase in value illustrates the lucrative profits earned by the traders, the middlemen, and the opium runners,’ said the CIA, ‘as well as the bribed government officials involved in the opium trade. This trade is substantially in the hands of private traders motivated by considerations of profit and not by ideological factors.’ So much for Anslinger’s Cold War narcotics weapon.

  Refineries for processing opium into heroin and morphine were mainly located in Thailand, near the Thai–Burmese border. Other clandestine refineries operated in Macao and Hong Kong. Outside South-East Asia, the traditional suppliers of raw opium, who had dominated the market before the war, remained. In 1955, it was estimated that Malaya received 50 tons of opium from Iran and 12 tons from India, but both these regions consumed more opium than they exported. The CIA noted that ‘the North American market appears to be supplied principally with opium from Lebanon and Mexico’– not communist China.

  ‘In view of the extremely limited foreign exchange which Communist China might earn from the production of opium,’ declared the CIA, ‘appreciable official Chinese Communist participation in such production is unlikely. Trade and refinery processing appear to be in the hands of non-Communists, and Communist China does not appear to have any effective control over individuals engaged in these activities.’ This from an American organisation at the very forefront of the Cold War.

  Several FBN agents were embarrassed by Anslinger’s bluster and one of them later went public, saying, ‘It destroyed our credibility and now nobody believes us. There was no evidence for Anslinger’s accusations, but that never stopped him.’

  That said, it was recognised that other communist groups might well benefit from the opium trade. ‘It is reported that Communist groups peripheral to Communist China engage in the trade,’ said the CIA. ‘Their activity may furnish indications of the possible ways in which the Chinese Communists may be involved.’ It was suggested that raids by the South Vietnamese government on opium dens were intended to remove them as a source of funds for agents from North Vietnam. It was also reported that a Japanese Communist Party group sold narcotics to finance their political activities.

  The Malayan communists appear not to have profited enormously from the drugs trade, as the majority of opium was not trafficked by them but came by ship into the British colony directly from Iran, both because of already established smuggling links and because Iranian opium was considered to have a higher morphine content than Chinese ‘Yunnan’ opium. There was, however, a smaller trade from Thailand handled by communist guerrillas that included Burmese drugs alongside the weapons and explosives that were bought from Thai arms dealers.

  Although under strict post-imperial government control, more than 5 per cent of India’s annual crop of 334 tons of legally farmed opium leaked out via smugglers to Singapore and Malaya. Other cargoes of illicit Indian opium made their way to Hong Kong, the Netherlands and Britain. In the Middle East, Iranian opium continued to be smuggled out of the Persian Gulf via the ports of Bahrain, Dubai, Yemen and Kuwait, showing the resilience of criminal highways stretching back to the beginning of the century.

  Far from going soft on drugs traffickers, British colonial authorities throughout Asia continued to demonstrate a detailed understanding of illicit narcotics networks and a willingness to do something about them. In the Persian Gulf, several incidents indicated the vigilance of individual Britons.

  Before dawn on 20 October 1952, the chief officer of the British tanker Silverdale docked in Kuwait, where he caught a Chinese member of his crew and an Arab hauling up a basket from a small boat tied up to the side of the ship. He tried to arrest them, but after a struggle in which other Arabs joined in, the basket was thrown overboard and picked up by the small boat, which speedily made off. The only man the chief officer managed to hold denied complicity and was released, owing to lack of evidence. It was later reported that as the Silverdale was nearing Philadelphia, its captain was forced to radio for help, as his opium-smoking crew was on the point of
mutiny. US Treasury agents boarded the ship and uncovered 60 lb of opium. Forty-five members of the crew were questioned, three being charged with conspiring to smuggle opium into the United States.

  A few days later, a Kuwait oil company security officer spotted a local boat lying alongside a Norwegian tanker. He boarded the ship with his head watchman and saw two men leaning over the rail, each pulling on a rope. They tried to seize the men, observing as they did so two local boats, each containing about five small sacks. One of the men escaped, while the other explained his presence on board by saying, helpfully, that he was not a smuggler. After failing to catch the two boats, the officer organised a patrol along the coastline, but with no success. Returning to the tanker, he had much better luck, finding under a coil of rope two sacks containing a total of 33 lb of opium. The bars of opium were wrapped in pieces of Persian newspaper. The next day the ship was thoroughly searched, but no more drugs were found. The Arab caught on the ship was imprisoned for 33 days by the Kuwaiti authorities.

  ‘The main centre for drug smuggling in the Persian Gulf States is Kuwait,’ said a British Foreign Office report. ‘Kuwait is convenient for the persons engaged in this illicit trade because a very large number of tankers leave each year for parts of the world and can be used to convey the drugs to their destinations.’ High-level communications with the ruler of Kuwait and the sheikh in charge of oil installations at the port had borne fruit, both of them having ‘repeatedly expressed their determination to stamp out this traffic’, having ‘sought the help of HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] in doing so’.

  Among the measures to be taken was the establishment of a special unit of the sheikh’s security forces to search the oil jetty and its ships, as well as a night patrol to stop local craft approaching moored tankers. A revised Dangerous Drugs Queen’s Regulation was introduced to give police officers under HM’s jurisdiction the power to search ships and suspicious persons.

  From another part of the empire, the Deputy Director of the Singapore Narcotics Bureau was called in to Kuwait to give his advice on their drug-smuggling problem. The sheik even visited London, where he asked for help in training his anti-drugs squad. Subsequently, another officer from the anti-narcotics department of the Singapore government was seconded to Kuwait for a few months to assist his men before going on to Borneo to undertake similar work.

  ‘We hope, therefore, that the activities of the drug-smuggling groups who have used Kuwait in the past will have been checked,’ concluded the upbeat report.

  ‘The Royal Afghan Embassy presents its compliments to Her Majesty’s Foreign Office,’ began a letter sent in April 1957, following up on a request to the UN the previous year. ‘This Embassy would like to bring to the notice of Her Majesty’s Foreign Office that Afghanistan has put forward her claim to be recognised as an opium exporting country to the twentieth session of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.’ It was a momentous announcement. Afghanistan, until then a persistent irritant on the fringe of the British Empire – noted more for producing bandits and arms smugglers – wanted to join the big boys of opium production and export.

  The CIA had already been alerted to its aspirations in this field. Since early 1955, the Afghan government had been asking the UN for permission to sell 40 tons of opium on the world market. The CIA believed this was an overestimate of what it could produce and was merely being put forward for bargaining purposes. ‘It is also believed,’ the agency noted darkly, ‘that part of Afghan production is exported clandestinely.’ It was the very beginning of what would become one of the great narco-states of the late twentieth century.

  It was bad news as well for their closest rival in the region, as was made clear in the letter from the Afghan embassy: ‘The eleventh session of the United Nations Assembly was also in favour of the Afghan claim to export opium, but in the last session of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, due to the disagreement of the Iranian delegation, this case was referred to the Commission of Opium and Narcotics for rediscussion.’

  It was hardly surprising that Iran should object to the competition. Having exploited the opportunity provided by the sudden reduction of opium exports from British India, it was earning too much money from selling the product directly to its former colonial markets in South-East Asia, both legally and illegally.

  Indeed, Iran turned to the British for help in stalling the UN application of the Afghans. Sir John Russell, a senior diplomat at the British Embassy in Tehran, was coming under pressure to offer his support. He was an old-fashioned imperial figure who was once invited on a hunt by some Persian tribal leaders. He told them he was only a moderate shot but ending up shooting every bird he aimed at, bagging more than his host, who prided himself on his marksmanship. That evening, the tribal chief challenged the diplomat to a bout of stickdancing, with the intention of breaking his legs. Luckily, a fellow guest intervened to prevent the diplomatic incident.

  Russell was a man not easily cowed and he revealed his true feeling on the opium matter in a letter to the Foreign Office in London. ‘We fully appreciate the need to go carefully in this matter,’ he wrote, ‘and not to give any firm assurances about our voting intentions – We also of course realise that there is nothing the United Nations or anybody else can do to stop the Afghans growing the stuff if they want to.’

  The reason for his defeatism was explained later in the letter.

  ‘Unfortunately there is no doubt that illicit Afghan opium is now coming in large quantities,’ he wrote. ‘Khozaimeh Alam, who is a cousin of the Minister of the Interior and occupies himself mainly with running the family’s large estates over in Birjand, told me a couple of days ago that if he had been with me in Meshed [Masshad, the second-largest city in Iran, near the Afghan border] he could have taken me to any one of a dozen merchants and helped me buy a ton of the stuff over the counter!’

  The Iranian went on to blame the existence of a flourishing black market on his Minister of Health, who, he said, had done nothing effective to provide a substitute for the opium traditionally used by peasants as the one and only medicine to cure all their ills. As opium addiction amongst the working classes sprang almost entirely from this, the Iranian argued that it could not be cured until an adequate rural health service was established.

  In the meantime, illicit Afghan-produced opium was making its way into Iran, undercutting its own home-grown opium, destined for more lucrative overseas markets. It was just the beginning of a major new supply of narcotics.

  Anslinger and the FBN should have been focusing on this new source, but instead, as late as 1961, a year before his retirement from the FBN, Anslinger was still going on about the communist narcotics menace – even after everyone else had dismissed it. Weirdly, he shut his eyes to the role of the Kuomintang in the drugs trade, saying, ‘When Chiang Kai-shek ruled over mainland China, the Nationalist government for several years conducted a campaign against dope that included the suppression of the traffic.’ This was, in fact, the golden age of the nationalists’ partnership with the Green Gang and Du Yue-sheng.

  To prove the continuing threat of Red China and the decadence of the West that made it so easy for them to ply their trade, Anslinger fabricated a story about a meeting in Hong Kong between a high-level Chinese communist and an American airline pilot. The communist proposed a deal to the pilot in which he would fly $250,000 of morphine from Hong Kong to Bangkok and on to the US in return for a oneeighth stake in an opium-processing factory inside Red China.

  Over a gin sling, the American pilot considered the offer.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘but the fact is I already own two opium dives, a house of prostitution and a gambling pad in Hoboken, New Jersey. I don’t have a moment to myself any more.’

  ‘The Communist walked away,’ claimed Anslinger, ‘shaking his head about the ways of American bourgeoisie capitalists.’

  From being a fearless campaigner against early drugs trafficking, Anslinger had been seduced
by the patriotic demands of the Cold War and the bureaucratic need to please his government. His wrong-headed campaigns severely downgraded the FBN.

  Following his retirement in 1962, after 32 years at the top of his department, the FBN was merged with the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control to form the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in 1968. Five years later, this was incorporated into the present Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) – the USA’s main weapon against drug lords in the twenty-first century. Anslinger witnessed all these changes. He died from a heart attack in 1975 at the age of 83.

  In contrast, imperial drugs warrior Russell Pasha offered more level-headed advice in his retirement. World war had interrupted the far-flung imperial trade routes that brought heroin to Egypt and, as a result, hashish had become more popular on the streets of Cairo and Alexandria.

  ‘All hashish imported [into] Egypt is the result of cultivation in the Lebanon and Syria,’ he warned. ‘And it is there that the campaign of prevention must begin.’

  Russell Pasha also knew that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, which had erupted after the war, meant there were new organised criminal gangs that needed to fund their arms smuggling with drugs deals. It was a trend picked up on by the organisation he had founded in Cairo, the Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau. In their report of 1948, they warned that ‘post-war gangs are better organised, take great security precautions, and rarely hesitate to use firearms if in danger’. In particular, they pointed the finger at Palestinian terrorists, who were alleged to have ‘obtained arms from Egypt in exchange for narcotics’.