According to Poshepny, CIA officers who worked with Vang Pao directly oversaw and profited from the drug trade. Laotian CIA Station Chief Ted Shackley’s “pet from Miami,” David Morales, for example, “built a castle in Pakse from drug money.”^[5]

Poshepny also told Valentine that the huge campaign to publicize the search for American prisoners of war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia after the war was a “CIA psychological warfare operation that provided a cover for CIA efforts to track and try [to] assassinate 55 U.S. deserters who had escaped from military prisons, mostly Negroes and Hispanics guilty of fraggings, and had gone into tunnels and onto farms with the Vietcong.”

The CIA used the MIA-POW mission, Poshepny said, “as a cover to gather intelligence and conduct its manhunt [in Indochina].”

American Pisces

Valentine’s interview with Poshepny is one of the highlights from his new memoir, Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2023).

[…]

In the 2000s, Valentine published a two-part history of the CIA’s complicity in the drug trade—The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack—and another book entitled The CIA as Organized Crime.

[…]

When asked to assess the drug war, Young said that the U.S. effort in Laos was implemented through Thai military intelligence, which put the Thais in position to act as middlemen in the drug trade. Young also mentioned Robert “Dutch” Brongersma as the pilot who oversaw CIA involvement.

When Valentine asked Young about Corsicans, Young said that Corsican brothers at Le Concorde Restaurant in Vientiane ran drugs with General Ouane Rattikone, Royal Lao Army chief and a CIA asset, until the 1967 opium war and the start of the Cultural Revolution in China, after which Rattikone consolidated the business.

The CIA gave Rattikone free passage because he was in contact with people in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and because PRC agents had penetrated the KMT. Rattikone’s Chinese commercial agent in the drug (and thus spy) business, Mr. Heng, was instrumental in this arrangement.^[6]

Vang Pao was meanwhile given his own private airline so he could ferry opium from the CIA secret base at Long Tieng on the Plain of Jars to South Vietnam where it was cooked into heroin by a Chinese chemist operating under Rattikone’s protection.

The Biggest Untold Story of the Secret War

Yet another interesting interview that Valentine conducted was with Dr. Charles Weldon, a country doctor from Louisiana and World War II veteran who worked for the CIA in Laos under cover as a USAID administrator, serving as chief of the Ministry of Public Health in Vientiane.

Dr. Weldon had worked in Laos with Dr. Tom Dooley, another CIA doctor whose book, Deliver Us From Evil (1956), falsely claimed that the Viet Minh had disemboweled thousands of Vietnamese women.^[7]

Dr. Weldon blew Valentine away when he told him the big untold story of the secret war in Laos was the venereal disease infestation within the over-sexed CIA colony, the result of officers having unprotected sex with tribal women and then with each other’s wives. The wives would come to him for penicillin, begging for secrecy.

In the Company of Monsters

[…]

Valentine notes that the U.S. support for the regional drug trade went back to the 1920s when the Coolidge and Hoover administrations began supporting Guomindang commander Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) in China’s civil war with the Communists, despite Chiang’s alliance with Chinese Green Gang operatives Dai Li, the chief of Guomindang intelligence, and Du Yuesheng, the Asian Al Capone.

[…]

When the KMT lost the Chinese civil war in 1949, the CIA helped set up Chiang and his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, as powerbrokers in Taiwan, which provided a regional base for CIA subversion. Journalist Sterling Seagrave identified Chiang Ching-kuo, who oversaw the KMT’s intelligence service in Taiwan, as a key man in the drug trade.

Additionally, remnants of the KMT army established a base in northern Burma, where the CIA oversaw the drug traffic and ran KMT agent networks into China in an attempt to sabotage and destabilize the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Valentine writes that the “CIA was like a godfather, it provided for the earthly needs [of the KMT soldiers led by Generals Li Mi and Li Wenhuan and their families] and covered up its central role in the Golden Triangle drug trade.”

Valentine writes that KMT and U.S. mercenary pilots working for Civil Air Transport—the airline set up by Clare Chennault to ferry supplies to Chiang’s forces in the Chinese civil war that became known as Air America—flew opium back to Taiwan, from where it was sold on the world market.

Thailand also became a major center of CIA drug trafficking and anti-communist subversion after the CIA aided in the overthrow of nationalist Pridi Phanomyong, and imposed a mafia clique run by a collection of right-wing drug traffickers closely allied with the CIA.

Some of the key dirty work in fortifying the new regime was carried out by a renegade CIA officer, Willis Bird, and Paul Helliwell, who had set up a private military supply company (Sea Supply) that served as a cover for clandestine arms and drug smuggling by the CIA and its local friends.