Endnotes

1. Rees, L., Auschwitz, BBC Books, 2005.

2. McCoy, A.W., The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Lawrence Hill Books, 1991, pp. 24–39.

3. Ibid., p. 28.

4. Block, A.A., East Side, West Side: Organizing Crime in New York, 1930–1950. Transaction Publishers, 1980.

5. Block; and many others.

6. Jacobs, J.B., Mobsters, Unions, and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement. NYU Press, 2007.

7. McCoy, pp. 31–8; and many others.

8. Ibid., pp. 31–8.

9. Campbell, R., The Luciano Project: The Secret Wartime Collaboration of the Mafia and the US Navy. McGraw-Hill Companies, 1977; Newark, T., Mafia Allies: The True Story of America’s Secret Alliance with the Mob in World War II. MBI Publishing Company, 2007; and many others.

10. Saunders, F.S., Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Granta Books, 2000.

11. Pieri, J., The Octopus: The Rise and Rise of the Sicilian Mafia. Birlinn, 2012.

12. Ibid.; and many others.

13. Ibid.

14. McCoy, pp. 31–8.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., pp. 38–41.

17. Rees.

18. Hagen, Louis, The Secret War for Europe, Macdonald, 1968, pp. 21–48.

19. McCoy, p. 167. See also, for instance: New York Times 11/12/2010, ‘Declassified Papers Show US Recruited Ex-Nazis’; and many others.

20. McCoy, pp. 51–3.

21. Ibid., p. 60.

22. Ibid., p. 62. In his memoire of the period, future CIA head William Colby says that in supporting Corsican gangsters of the day his organisation’s personnel were, ‘operating in the atmosphere of an order of Knights Templar, to save Western freedom from Communist darkness.’ [William Colby, Honourable Men: My Life in the CIA, Simon and Schuster, 1978, p. 73.]

23. McCoy, p. 62.

24. Ibid., pp. 60–63. Following his victory against the radical wing of the Marseilles Resistance, Defferre goes on to become a stalwart of post-war French politics for decades, oscillating between being a member of the National Assembly and Mayor of Marseilles until his death in 1986, including spells as Minster for Overseas France (1956–7) and Minister of Interior (1983–4). Defferre’s protection of the Corsican underworld continues at least until 1967.

25. Ibid., pp. 46–76.

26. Ibid.

27. Trinquier, R., Modern Warfare, Frederick Praeger, 1964; Kitson, F., Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, Peace-keeping, Faber & Faber, 1964.

28. Trinquier.

29. McCoy, p. 132 (equivalent calculations by Ed Edwards).

30. By 1915, as much as 25% of royal government taxes in Thailand (or Siam as it is then known) are raised from the distribution of opium to addicts smoking the drug in hundreds of Bangkok opium dens. [Virginia Thompson, Thailand: The New Siam, Macmillan, 1941, pp. 728–30.]

31. McCoy, p. 131.

32. Ibid., p. 157.

33. Gravel, Mike, ed., The Pentagon Papers: The Defence Department History of US Decision Making in Vietnam, 5 vols. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).

34. McCoy, p. 251.

35. Ibid., p. 161.

36. Kitson.

37. Snow, E., Red Star Over China: The Classic Account of the Birth of Chinese Communism, Atlantic Books, 2017.

38. Following the humiliation of the failed re-invasion of China, the CIA as we know it today was born through a merger of the various US wartime intelligence agencies, the biggest of which were the OSS and the new, more bureaucratic – and more stodgily conservative – CIA. The China fiasco and a number of embarrassing scandals caused by swashbuckling OSS officers, used to dealing with assorted ex-Gestapo officers and Corsican and Italian gangsters in Europe, made the merger a matter of national importance. The thing was, though, that in the newly consolidated organisation (all now under the umbrella name of the CIA), all the most important and influential positions were filled by the very reckless and swaggering old OSS hands like William Colby, who had been responsible for the previous humiliations. [John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, Simon and Schuster, 1986, pp. 134–35; William Colby, Honourable Men: My Life in the CIA, Simon and Schuster, 1978, p. 96.]

39. McCoy.

40. Ibid.

41. CNN Library, 27/3/18; and many others.

42. McCoy, pp. 222–6; and many others.

43. Ibid., pp. 259–61.

44. Scott, P.D. and Marshall, J., Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America. University of California Press, 1998, p. 69.

45. McCoy, p. 451.

46. Ibid., p. 449.

47. Ibid., p. 454.

48. New York Times Magazine, 4/2/1990.

49. McCoy, p. 453.

50. Ibid., p. 454.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid., p. 457.

54. It’s often assumed that the Soviet invasion was the cause of the US and therefore the CIA’s involvement in the covert war against the Afghan regime that gave rise to worldwide heroin explosion of the 1980s. However, the truth is the US/CIA support for the terroristic narcotic-dealing Islamic fundamentalist gangs (that later became known as the mujahideen) came first. In the words of Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski:

According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention. [‘Le Nouvel Observateur’ (France), Jan 15-–1, 1998, p. 76.]

55. Scott and Marshall; and Webb, G., Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Cocaine Explosion, Seven Stories Press, 2011.

56. Washington Post, 31/3/86.

57. The difficulties faced by the US military in raising funds for the Sandinistas are one of the major factors leading to what became known as ‘The War on Drugs’. The policy was conceived at least in part because, each time the US military faced a threat from popular revolutionary forces in Latin America (or indeed elsewhere in the world), they had to build a separate case in front of Congress to raise money for their often brutal and unpopular proxy counter-forces. In each case, the US military met with similar resistance from liberals, or left, or church and human-rights activists. The situation in Colombia provided US military strategists with a golden opportunity to overturn this whole process. In Colombia, popular support for the opposition guerrilla movement, the largest faction of which was the FARC, was found mainly among the poorest peasants. A large number of the poorest peasants of Colombia were and still are forced by economic necessity to grow the coca leaves necessary to feed the crack explosion in North America. These poor peasants benefitted not one jot from the super-profits being generated at the international level by the gangsters and right-wing militia who were buying the leaves from them for refining and distribution. The peasants themselves remained wretchedly poor, and very often supported the resistance movements fighting the central power. The central power itself, of course, is supported by the USA and often by the very right-wing militia who are refining and exporting the cocaine. US military strategists realised that, if they could label the guerrilla wings of the people’s resistance movements of the region ‘Narcoterrorists’, because in part they represented the poor coca-leaf growers, it would be more difficult for Congress/liberal/left/church people to support them. US Special Forces commander, Col. John D. Waghelstein, argued in a well-respected security journal that if this connection could be made,

…in the public’s mind and in Congress […] Congress would find it difficult to stand in the way of supporting our allies [like the contras] […] Those church and academic groups that have slavishly supported insurgency in Latin America would find themselves on the wrong side of the moral issue. Above all, we would have the unassailable moral position from which to launch a concerted effort using Department of Defence (DOD) assets [US military forces] and non-DOD assets [mercenary militias] Instead of wading through the legislative snarl and financial constraints […] we could act with alacrity. [Waghelstein quoted in Dale and Scott Cocaine Politics]

Put more honestly: we can use international drug-dealing as an excuse to support international drug-dealers.

58. For an in-depth analysis of the political association in USA of black people with drug use – despite their being statistically less likely than whites to either use or deal drugs – see Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [The New Press, 2012]. Alexander traces the origins of the modern politicisation of hard drugs in USA to Nixon’s declaration of a war on drugs in 1974. Nixon’s advisors later admitted that the idea was a ploy to win the racist vote in the south, where it was well understood that ‘War on Drugs’ meant war on black people. Such a ploy was required by 1974 because, in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, open racism was no longer publicly acceptable. Michelle Alexander is the main contributor to the must-see Netflix documentary, 13th.

59. McCoy, p. 130, and many others.

60. Parker, H., ‘Use of Illegal Drugs in Northern Ireland’, in Strang, A. & Gossop, M. (eds), Heroin, Routledge, 2005.

61. Even as late as 1991, with the Taliban carrying out opium-eradication programmes in Afghanistan, Tony Blair et al order the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan using the Northern Alliance, a proxy army of known drug-dealers, gangsters and terrorists. Interestingly, Blair cites two main war aims: to crush the heroin trade, and to improve the lot of women. Over the next six years to 2007, Afghanistan’s opium production grows by 4,500% to become approximately 53% of the nation’s GDP (NB At the height of the Colombian cartels’ supremacy, cocaine production only ever reaches about 3% of Colombia’s GDP). On the other front, the British-backed president of the country, Hamid Karzai (an ex-oil exec) introduces a law legalising rape within marriage and preventing women from leaving the house without permission. [For more on Northern Alliance drug-dealing see: Guardian 9/1/18 ‘How the heroin trade explains the UK-US Failure in Afghanistan’, and Huffington Post 15/11/08, ‘How Deeply is the US involved in the Afghan Drug Trade?’ For the GDP and opium production figures see: Tom Dispatch 30/03/2010 ‘Afghanistan as a Drug War’, by Alfred W. McCoy. For the law about rape see: Daily Telegraph 26/6/18, ‘Hamid Karzai signs law ‘legalising rape in marriage’].

62. It’s worth saying in this context that the thirty-year-long war in Ireland was mostly fought by fractions of the populations of Belfast and Derry, only the seventeenth and eightieth largest population centres of the UK. The 1981 uprisings took place in six or seven of the top ten.