CIA Drug And Narcotic Trade And Trafficking In Burma: PART 5

 

CIA Drug And Narcotic Trade And Trafficking in Burma PART 5

CIA Drug And Narcotic Trade And Trafficking In Burma. PART 5

CIA ran covert operations in the Golden Triangle heroin complex since the early 1950s.  CIA had close relationship with the drug lords and was enmeshed with the region's opium-heroin trade CIA and the US agency for International Development  ( USAID ) supplied the region's opium and heroin dealers with arms, ammunition and transportation of food supplies in exchange for mercenary forces or political leverage. CIA support included in the collection, manuafacture and transport of opium and heroin.

CIA activities in Burma transformed the Shan states into the largest opium growing region in the world.

As part of its growing operations against communist China in the 1950s and 1960s CIA established a large narcotic cover organisation  in Taiwan known as Western Enterprises. CIA agency airlines provided cover for the CIA to drop teams of Chinese Nationalist soldiers on mainland China to contact dissidents and build a viable resistance to Mao Tsetung's government .

CIA also sent commandos from the offshore island of Quemoy as it planned a covert invasion of China. Its covert airline ferried tens of thousands of KMT troops into Shan States to inflitrate into Yunnan. Kweichow and Kwangsi. It also recruited thousands of indigenuous hill tribes to help KMT soldiers to fight against Mao in China.

In August 1952 CIA secretly despatched KMT soldiers to invade Yunnan and dropped rebellious pamphlets to instigate the peasants to rise up against Mao's government. The CIA's hope for a peasant uprising failed and the KMT soldiers were driven out of Yunnan into the Shan states of Burma.

The CIA alliance with the opium lords lasted almost two decades. CIA delivered arms to KMT forces in Burma and then loaded opium aboard its civil air transport planes for the return flight to Bangkok. CIA commandos also used its infiltration routes into southern China as drug smuggling routes for traffickers in Burma and Thailand. CIA set up five secret training camps and two illicit radio stations in the Shan states protected by KMT troops and local tribesmen who were on CIA payroll . All the money spent by CIA on the clandestine activities was derived from trafficking in opium and heroin..

Southernglory 1

Sunday, 31st August, 2025

 First published on Friday, 18th November, 2016