Opium (49 page)

Pakistani drug barons, based in Karachi or Lahore, finance export consignments and act as middlemen for international crime syndicates, their couriers often illiterate Pakistanis who are dispensable. For the courier, who is often ignorant of the penalties he may face, arrest can mean years in a foreign gaol or even the death penalty in certain countries. So brazen are some Pakistani barons, they export heroin or morphine base in loads as large as a ton in weight, shipping through the Suez Canal to Turkey, Turkish-controlled Cyprus and other Mediterranean countries, with some going via Mauritius and Madagascar.

There is another danger from the heroin trade in Pakistan: the country is on the verge of becoming so powerful as a heroin producer, refiner and trader that it threatens to destabilise an already insecure political and geographical region. For this reason, intense international pressure is being put on Pakistan to stamp out the heroin trade and enforce existing laws, seven or eight Pakistani narco-barons allegedly being secretly extradited to the USA over the winter of 1994—95.

Even in India, where the opium industry has for many years been well regulated, licit opium is being diverted into the illegal market and illicit opium produced. According to some estimates, up to 30 per cent of the legal product may be ‘disappearing', caused by corruption amongst lower-paid officials who aid poppy farmers in selling to traffickers. The incentives for the farmer are tempting for he can earn up to forty times more from traffickers than from government buyers. Most of the illegal growing is done in the north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh and those bordering Burma, where the opium may be taken over the frontier. In the same area of India, pro-independence guerrillas of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland traffic in heroin along the Burmese border: indeed, it seems as if all the separatist groups in India and Sri Lanka are establishing common trafficking networks to raise finance.

Although India clamped down on any domestic use of opium forty years ago, there remain a small number of opium addicts in the rural north who are provided with supplies by the government. They do not pose a problem: what does is the increasing rate of heroin manufacture in India. According to suppressed official reports, India has anything between one and five million heroin addicts. The native product is No. 3 heroin made in primitive, mobile laboratories. Some is exported to Bangladesh and Nepal, where addiction rates are rising, but most exportation is handled by Muslim middlemen in Bombay or New Delhi who deal in heroin from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Burma. Drugs not only pass through in transit but are warehoused in enclaves such as the Muslim quarter of Old Delhi where up to 500 kilograms are held at any one time, waiting to be couriered out.

The last of the Golden Crescent ‘opium states' is Iran. Reliable information is hard to come by: the official line is Iran is opium-free. Certainly, poppy farming was officially banned in 1980 but it continues close to the frontiers with Pakistan and Afghanistan and, according to American intelligence, in the Kurdish areas on the Turkish border where morphine base and heroin laboratories exist, the revenue aiding the Kurdish separatist movement. Inside Iran, there are thought to be about two million heroin addicts, the worsening economic and social climate and repressive government policies claimed as underlying reasons. Iran, along with Burma, Afghanistan, Syria and Nigeria, was listed in March 1995 as being ‘uncertified' by the USA. This means these countries are not deemed by the USA to be making serious efforts to tackle narcotics, resulting in USA opposition to all but humanitarian aid intended for them from such international agencies as the World Bank. Some believe certification arbitrary. President Hashemi Rafsanjani of Iran has criticised the certification as politically motivated: certainly, Iran has been attempting to halt opiate traffic from the Golden Crescent.

Outside the two ‘golden' opium areas, there are also other countries engaged in opiates. In 1991, it was estimated over 3000 hectares of land in Lebanon were used for poppy cultivation, producing 34 tonnes of opium. Lebanon has been cited as the best example of what has become known as ‘narco-terrorism', the use of drug trafficking to further the objectives of governments and terrorist organisations. However, from such a definition it is obvious this is not a new phenomena: one is reminded of pre-war Japanese drug involvement in China and CIA use of drugs in South-east Asia, not to mention the Shan states groups who use opium to fund themselves. There have long been connections between international drug traffickers and international terrorists but over the last few decades they have become significantly interdependent.

Heroin has become a terrorist currency and this is especially true in the purchase of arms. Some governments or terror groups also use drugs to undermine their enemies, which for many has often been the USA, accepting they demoralise a nation and introduce criminal activity to society. Terrorists, seeking to cause chaos and disorder, have seen drugs as a powerful strategic weapon.

There had traditionally been a drug trade in the Lebanon: it is famous for growing a particularly potent hashish known by dope-heads as Lebanese Gold, which was marketed especially in the Near East. In the 1960s, some of the religious and political factions in Lebanon began to earn large sums of money from hashish. As internecine tension rose in the 1970s, hashish production mushroomed, the drug farmed in the Bekaa Valley. When the Lebanese civil war commenced in 1975, the country's economy was devastated, drugs becoming its mainstay.

As the fighting escalated hashish, which was sold comparatively cheaply, failed to earn sufficient foreign currency so, in 1982, Turkish poppy growers were brought in to the Bekaa Valley. Under their guidance, poppies were raised and heroin produced. Weight for weight, opiates were at least ten times more profitable than hashish. The trade expanded until it embraced all the fighting factions, much of the conflict centring on the control of narcotics – not just the poppy fields but also the roads, ports and airstrips from which drugs could be shipped.

Heroin (and, to a lesser extent, hashish) also financed troops and armaments. An indication of its relevance to terrorist organisations may be gained from the intelligence that, as early as 1982, it was estimated the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) earned $300 million from the narcotics trade, three times what it was given in political subsidy by friendly Arab regimes.

In 1975, Syrian forces seized the Bekaa Valley and began to extort money from the drug merchants, corruption in the Syrian occupation forces aiding hashish and poppy cultivation and heroin manufacture from which Syria took a large cut of the profits. Ties were established by highly placed Syrian officials with the Sicilian Mafia who, it is believed, administered some Syrian trafficking operations.

There were possibly up to 100 mobile heroin laboratories in the Bekaa Valley in 1991, with more sophisticated, permanent facilities existing over the Syrian border. Although, the next year, production was negligible due to poor weather substantially damaging the poppy crop, it was thought by DEA analysts at the time that it could return to normal in 1993. This did not happen. It now appears most poppy crops have been eradicated, the cultivation of poppies limited and local production considerably reduced. With the ending of the civil war, however, the Lebanon has assumed its traditional role as a trafficking hub, with new dealer networks quickly establishing themselves. Imported morphine is refined into heroin whilst Russian operators and Sicilian
mafiosi
use Lebanese ports to export drugs and launder related earnings. It has also been alleged that several Lebanese parliamentary deputies and government officials are involved in the business.

Future poppy production in the Lebanon relies on how long peace there lasts and how effectively the economy is rebuilt. Yet poppy growing in the region is not restricted to Lebanon for it is going on in the Gaza Strip where Palestinians, displaced by Israeli politics and lacking any substantial form of local industry, regard it as a viable means of income. Palestinian police seized opium to the value of $1.5 million in just a few days of raids in 1994.

It has been suggested narcotics were to blame for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in December 1988 over Lockerbie, in Scotland, when 259 passengers and 11 people on the ground were killed. The official view of the American and British governments is that the blame lies with Libya but it is now thought by many observers that the bombing was carried out in retaliation for the shooting down of an Iranian Airbus five months previously by an American warship. It is believed that Iran put out a $10 million contract for the bringing down of an American aircraft and it has been alleged that this was accepted by Ahmed Jibril, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

The suggested scenario is that the CIA was trying to gain influence with Middle East power-brokers, such as PFLP and Hezbollah, to obtain a bargaining advantage in freeing Western hostages in Lebanon. The terrorist groups relied on cash raised through trafficking and they were involved in heroin production in the Bekaa Valley. The DEA and other intelligence agencies were impotent to act against the heroin producers, left merely to monitor the situation. As part of their influence-building strategy, the CIA was covertly permitting – even aiding – specified trafficking shipments (known as ‘controlled runs') from the Middle East to the USA. At the same time, it is suggested the CIA was using these controlled runs as part of a ‘sting' operation to identify and apprehend big-time, American-based narcotics importers.

Couriers carried heroin through airport security as part of these controlled runs, being allowed through without let or hindrance. It is suggested Ahmed Jibril saw this as a means of not only earning risk-free drugs money but also of getting a bomb on an American aircraft. If a bomb could be placed in a container used on a controlled run, it would go undetected through security checks and on to the aircraft. A young Lebanese courier, Khaled Jaafar, is said to have taken a Toshiba radio-cassette player on board flight 103, thinking it contained heroin: instead, the Toshiba was the bomb.

More recently, drugs are being used in the buying of favours against Iraq which is itself now dealing in heroin to keep its currency afloat in the face of UN sanctions. Western intelligence agencies (particularly the CIA) are reputed to be purchasing Arab anti-Iraqi attitudes either with hard cash or by turning a blind eye to narcotics smuggling. It is even suggested the CIA has reverted to its South-east Asian practices of the 1960s and is itself dealing in heroin as a part of its Middle East strategy.

This stratagem is not restricted to the Americans: drugs featured in the game plan of the former Communist bloc as well. As late as 1979, the Soviet
Military Encyclopaedia
provided a list of measures to be used to promote Soviet foreign policy objectives: it included the use of poisons and narcotics. Reports appeared in 1990 showing how East Germany's premier, Erich Honecker, had encouraged trafficking for twenty years as his contribution towards the Soviet undermining of NATO, his government assisting in the laundering of drug and terrorist money.

Bulgaria was similarly active in the narcotics trade, its geographic position making it an ideal transit centre between Asia and Europe. As early as the 1950s, it had put in place money laundering capabilities, providing a safe haven for criminals who deposited foreign currency in Bulgarian banks. A decade later, Bulgaria was making a profit from imported Turkish morphine base and heroin which was transhipped to the rest of Europe. Then it started to deal in arms. By the early 1970s, the Bulgarian secret service (the KDS) was purchasing drugs from the Palestinians and Middle Eastern terrorists in exchange for weapons. The drugs were sent on to Europe and the USA. Money earned from the transactions was laundered through Swiss banks and subsequently used to buy arms for international – especially Middle Eastern – terrorist organisations.

The transactions were processed by Kintex, a Bulgarian state-owned export company formed in 1968 and fully staffed by KDS operatives. Kintex acted as a middleman, providing cover for criminal associates and linking itself to Lebanese traffickers, the Sicilian Mafia and bent Swiss bankers. By 1980, the trade was worth several billion dollars per annum to Bulgaria.

Kintex also directly financed heroin processing. When Italian police discovered a Mafia-owned heroin laboratory in the Sicilian province of Trapani in the early 1980s, they found it was fitted out with Bulgarian equipment. The annual production of this one plant was said to be 4.5 tonnes of No. 4 heroin. By 1985, another fifteen Bulgarian-backed heroin refineries were unearthed in Italy.

The CIA compiled a dossier on Kintex's activities and, in January 1983, the US government made an official complaint to the Bulgarians, attacking them for their involvement in narcotics and terror. Under US pressure, Kintex was closed down but within months another Bulgarian state-owned company, Globus, took up where Kintex left off: Kintex, today renamed KoKintex (the
o
being shaped like the cross-hairs in a telescopic gunsight) is suspected of being a major illegal arms dealing company.

The passing of Communism has not led to the eradication of the drugs trade in former Eastern bloc nations. There is a new storm blowing over the horizon. The CIS, the former USSR, has been an opium producer for decades but, because of the hermetically sealed Communist borders, the trade was contained. Between 1986 and 1991, Soviet authorities conducted regular poppy field eradication programmes. Thousands of hectares were destroyed with many arrests and the confiscation of drugs, weapons and money but in the political turmoil since the end of Communist rule, inter-republican co-operation has all but ceased whilst former law enforcement agencies have virtually collapsed.

The main CIS poppy-growing regions are the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan where cultivation has been going on for centuries. To date, it seems the opium has not been refined into heroin on a large scale but it surely will be. In January 1992, Kazakhstan declared its intention to legalise poppy farming. Although it later rescinded the decision, Kazakhstan indicated what might happen in such republics which are eager for hard currencies to build up trade or finance separatist armies.