On August
2, 1971, Nelson Gross, of Saddle River, New Jersey,
was chosen to lead a worldwide attack on illicit drugs.
As A New Jersey politician, Gross had been successful
in staging a quiet revolt against the older wing of
the Republican party in New Jersey, thus gaining a modicum
of power for himself in 1968. He failed to win elected
office as a congressman or senator, even though he ran
loyally on President Nixon's law-and-order theme. After
his defeat for the Senate in 1970, Gross asked Nixon
for a position in foreign policy, and Nixon appointed
him senior advisor and coordinator for international
narcotics matters at the Department of State. In theory,
the "global war against drugs was to be coordinated
by the newly created (September, 1971) Cabinet Committee
on International Narcotics Control, which held its first
meeting on network television and included such illustrious
figures as Secretary of State William Rogers, who nominally
chaired the new committee, Attorney General John Mitchell,
Secretary of the Treasury John Connally, Secretary of
Defense Melvin Laird, newly appointed Secretary of Agriculture
Earl Butz, and CIA director Richard Helms. The committee
met on only three other occasions before it was phased
out after the 1972 election, and most of the day-to-day
tactical decisions were left to Gross and Egil Krogh,
who was, in addition to his other duties, executive
director of the cabinet committee.
Although a battle had temporarily
been won in Turkey, the war against heroin was anything
but over-at least as far as Gross and Krogh were concerned.
The 1972 election was little more than a year away,
and there was the dramatic possibility for further victories
in the war against heroin. The rapidly expanding BNDD
(its budget had trebled in four years) advanced the
theory that there still remained a large Turkish stockpile
of opium, which would explain the need for drug agents
in the foreseeable future. According to the convenient
stockpile theory, every Turkish poppy farmer had squirreled
away a hoard of opium as a dowry for his daughter's
marriage and for other future emergencies. Even though
they were now being forced by their government to plow
under their opium crops, they could reach into this
presumed hoard and sell it to traffickers for the American
market.
President Nixon had already
publicly demanded the eradication of the poppy flower
from the entire world, and Gross concluded that America
could not wait for the screw worm to be developed. The
Golden Triangle was not only producing ten times as
much illicit opium as Turkey ever produced but supplying
about 20 percent of the American soldiers in Vietnam
with pure heroin. Gross foresaw that it was only a matter
of time before this Golden Triangle heroin found its
way into the American market, and he decided to consult
Graham Martin, who had been ambassador to Thailand and
to Italy before becoming ambassador to South Vietnam.
Much to Gross's surprise, but not necessarily to the
White House staffs, Ambassador Martin, in a state of
exasperation, reported in no uncertain terms that the
only way of disrupting the supply of opium from the
Golden Triangle was to organize assassination teams
to kill the few key traffickers that controlled the
trade. Though New Jersey politics in Gross's day were
fairly tough, assassinations seemed extreme.
Instead,
Gross decided to -make heroin a primary foreign-policy
objective of the United States. He ordered fifty-odd
American embassies around the world to draw up action
plans which specified how American diplomats in those
countries could stimulate interest in the heroin problem
to persuade the host government to conform to American
narcotics objectives, and to detail ways in which the
CIA and State Department intelligence could be used
to discover and intercept heroin traffic. Gross further
wanted American diplomats to threaten any country that
refused to cooperate in the effort with an immediate
cutoff of economic and military aid. He even suggested
the use of the American veto to prevent the World Bank
and other international financial organizations from
extending credit to such countries. There was considerable
concern in the higher councils of the State Department
that such "heroin diplomacy," as Gross called
it, would lose more friends for the United States than
it would net traffickers, and might endanger what they
considered more long-term foreign-policy objectives,
such as the safety of the United States. Henry Kissinger's
National Security Council also had its doubts about
heroin diplomacy, especially since less than two months
before Gross assumed his command in the new global war,
the secret report of a White House task force with representatives
from both the National Security Council and the State
Department concluded, "application of aid sanctions
would be ineffective and counterproductive except where
degrees of U.S. support establish overwhelming diplomatic
dependence (Vietnam)." The White House task force
recognized that aid sanctions might result in favorable
publicity for the president, but listed against this
advantage six drawbacks.
1. would exasperate relations
and make cooperation even less likely.
2. may create internal political
repercussions making it difficult for governments to
cooperate (Turkey, Pakistan, India).
3. Would be counterproductive
to other major U.S. security and foreign policy needs
(Southeast Asia, Turkey).
4. Cannot be applied to countries
where we provide no aid (France, Burma, Lebanon, Bulgaria).
5. Could not be applied easily
within international financing institutions ... unless
we invoke extreme action of veto.
6. A11 threats subject to our
bluff being called
When Gross read the "international
working group report," as it was called, he knew
he was playing with fire in threatening to cut off American
aid, but he also believed that " our bluff wouldn't
be called. He thus began the main counterinsurgency
effort against heroin by inducing Laos and Thailand,
which were militarily dependent on the United States,
to form mobile strike forces with American advisors.
These strike forces could then be employed against narcotics
traffickers in the Golden Triangle. In Laos, "irregular"
narcotics police, as the State Department put it, burned
a group of huts suspected of being used for converting
opium into heroin, before a more formalized groupe social
dinvestigation was created to enforce the newly promulgated
narcotics laws (written by the American embassy in September,
1971).
In Thailand, U.S. aid financed
the creation of a task force known as SNO (or, less
acronymously, the Special Narcotics Organization), which
attempted to intercept opium caravans in northern Thailand
and to intimidate Thai officials involved in the traffic.
For example, one SNO colonel, recruited by the CIA,
simply went to leading Thai officials and told them
in a quiet voice that they would be killed if they continued
in the opium business. (Many withdrew, and others were
killed, according to the unverified claims of CIA officials.)
Among the traffickers in the Golden Triangle were private
armies of Nationalist Chinese. Gross and his CIA advisor
on the working committee believed that it would be more
effective to buy them out of the opium business than
to threaten them. Despite the cabinet committee's stated
policy against preemptive buying of opium, which Eugene
Rossides and John Connally in the Treasury Department
insisted on, a deal was struck in March, 1972, with
a band of Chinese in northern Thailand. In return for
land in Thailand for "farming" and "assistance,"
which was to be financed mainly through the United States,
though laundered through the United Nations, they delivered
twenty-six tons of brownish material that supposedly
constituted their entire opium stockpile, and pledged
to remain out of the opium business for several years.
The deal subsequently appeared somewhat embarrassing
when unevaluated CIA reports were leaked to columnist
Jack Anderson by some American missionaries interested
in arranging opium purchases for competing Nationalist
troops. These reports said that the brownish material
which was delivered and incinerated in front of news
cameras was in fact heavily weighted with cow fodder.
The BNDD, which had sampled the narcotics randomly and
found a "high content" of opium, disputed
Anderson's charges. (If the bureau's samples were indeed
random and accurate, it would seem that the CIA reports
which emanated from the missionaries were inaccurate.)
In any case, the possibility for counterinsurgency warfare
was ultimately limited by the always-present danger
of embarrassing leaks about the United States government's
buying opium or arranging the intimidation (or assassination)
of our allies in Southeast Asia.
Gross also attempted to spread
the American heroin crusade to the rest of the world
by convincing underdeveloped nations that narcotics
was a major problem for them as well as for America,
and that they should immediately create a special narcotics
police force modeled on the American Bureau of Narcotics
and Dangerous Drugs. The United States would provide
the equipment, propaganda, and necessary narcotics agents
to train the local forces. Cambodia, for example, was
given $20,000 to create the Kharnir Narcotics Unit and
received "technical guidance provided through bimonthly
visits of Bureau of Narcotics personnel from Saigon."
Afghanistan received training for one Afghani police
officer and $60,000 for "an aerial survey of opium
poppy cultivation areas." The number of narcotics
advisors in American embassies abroad proliferated at
such a rate that Daniel Patrick Moynihan complained
in a telex, when he was ambassador to India, "One
can scarcely enter an American embassy in some parts
of the world without being surrounded by narks. The
cable traffic that crosses an American ambassador's
desk concerns drugs more than any other single issue
of domestic importance. Visiting bureaucrats are more
likely-on a statistical basis-to be concerned with drug
matters than any other subject."
In the midst of his far-flung
global war against heroin, Gross became the target of
a grand jury in New Jersey investigating corruption
in his former bailiwick. As his own indictment grew
nearer, he reluctantly had to return from his peripatetic
travels to Afghanistan (where he helped arrange the
return of Timothy Leary from Kabul) and other opium-producing
regions, to prepare his own defense. In early 1973 Gross
was indicted and convicted of several felonies, including
conspiracy to bribe and evasion of taxes. Without his
irrepressible enthusiasm, the global war was quietly
disassembled by the State Department, which now returned
to its more traditional role.
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