The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
By Alfred W. McCoy with
Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P.Adams II
5.
South Vietnam: Narcotics in
the Nation's Service
Thieu Takes Command
In the wake of
Air ViceMarshal
Ky's
precipitous
political
decline,
ranking
military
officers
responsible to
President Thieu
appear to have
emerged as the
dominant
narcotics
traffickers in
South Vietnam.
Like his
predecessors,
President Diem
and Premier
Ky, President
Thieu has
studiously
avoided
involving
himself
personally in
political
corruption.
However, his
power broker,
presidential
intelligence
adviser Gen.Dang Van Quang, is heavily involved in these unsavory activities. Working through
high ranking army and navy officers personally loyal to himself or President Thieu,
General Quang has built up a formidable power base.
Although General Quang's international network appears to be weaker than Ky's, General
Ouang does control the Vietnamese navy, which houses an elaborate smuggling
organization that imports large quantities of narcotics either by protecting Chinese
maritime smugglers or by actually using Vietnamese naval vessels. Ky's influence among
high ranking army officers has weakened considerably, and control over the army has
now shifted to General Quang. The army now manages most of the distribution and sale
of heroin to American G.I's. In addition, a bloc of pro-Thieu deputies in the lower house of
the National Assembly have been publicly exposed as being actively engaged in heroin
smuggling, but they appear to operate somewhat more independently of General Quang
than the army and navy.
On the July 15, 1971, edition of the NBC Nightly News, the network's Saigon
correspondent, Phil Brady, told a nationwide viewing audience that both President Thieu
and Vice-President Ky were financing their election campaigns from the narcotics traffic.
Brady quoted "extremely reliable sources" (121) as saying that President Thieu's chief
intelligence adviser, Gen. Dang Van Quang, was "the biggest pusher" in South Vietnam.
(122) Although Thieu's press secretary issued a flat denial and accused Brady of
"spreading falsehoods and slanders against leaders in the government, thereby providing
help and comfort to the Communist enemy, (123) he did not try to defend General
Quang, renowned as one of the most dishonest generals in South Vietnam when he was
commander of IV Corps in the Mekong Delta.
In July 1969 Time magazine's Saigon correspondent cabled the New York office this
report on Gen. Quang's activities in IV Corps:
While there he reportedly made millions by selling offices and taking a rake off on rice
production. There was the famous incident, described in past corruption files, when Col.
Nguyen Van Minh was being invested as a 21st Division commander. He had been
Quang's deputy corps commander. At the ceremony the wife of the outgoing commander
stood up and shouted to the assembled that Minh had paid Quang 2 million piasters
[$7,300] for the position.... Quang was finally removed from Four Corps at the insistence
of the Americans. (124)
General Quang was transferred to Saigon in early 1967 and became minister of planning
and development, a face-saving sinecure. (125) Soon after President Thieu's election in
September 1967, he was appointed special assistant for military and security affairs.
(126) General Quang quickly emerged as President Thieu's power broker, and now does
the same kind of illicit fund raising for Thieu's political machine that the heavy-handed
General Loan did for Ky's. (127)
President Thieu, however, is much less sure of Quang than Premier Ky had been of
General Loan. Loan had enjoyed Ky's absolute confidence and was entrusted with almost unlimited personal power. Thieu, on the other hand, took care to build up competing
centers of power inside his political machine to keep General Quang from gaining too
much power. As a result, Quang has never had the same control over the various pro Thieu
mini-factions as Loan had over Ky's apparatus. As the Ky apparatus's control over
Saigon's rackets weakened after June 1968, various pro-Thieu factions moved in. In the
political shift, General Quang gained control of the special forces, the navy and the army,
but one of the pro-Thieu cliques, that headed by Gen. Tran Thien Khiem, gained enough
power so that it gradually emerged as an independent faction itself. (128) However, at the
very beginning most of the power and influence gained from Ky's downfall seemed to be
securely lodged in the Thieu camp under General Quang's supervision.
There is evidence that one of the first new groups which began smuggling opium into South Vietnam was the Vietnamese special forces contingents operating in southern Laos. In August 1971 The New York Times reported that many of the aircraft flying narcotics into South Vietnam "are connected with secret South Vietnamese special forces operating along the Ho Chi Minh Trail network in Laos. (129) Based in Konturn Province, north of Pleiku, the special forces "assault task force" has a small fleet of helicopters, transports, and light aircraft that fly into southern Laos on regular sabotage and long-range reconnaissance forays. Some special forces officers claim that the commander of this unit was transferred to another post in mid 1971 because his extensive involvement in the narcotics traffic risked exposure. (130)
But clandestine forays were a relatively inefficient method of smuggling, and it appears that General Quang's apparatus did not become heavily involved in the narcotics trade until the Cambodian invasion of May 1970. For the first time in years the Vietnamese army operated inside Cambodia; Vietnamese troops guarded key Cambodian communication routes, the army assigned liaison officers to Phnom Penh, and intelligence officers were allowed to work inside the former neutralist kingdom. More importantly, the Vietnamese navy began permanent patrols along the Cambodian stretches of the Mekong and set up bases in Phnom Penh.
An associate of General Quang's, former navy commander Rear Admiral Chung Tan Cang, rose to prominence during the Cambodian invasion. Admiral Cang had been a good friend of President Thieu's since their student days together at Saigon's Merchant Marine Academy (class of '47). (134) When Admiral Cang was removed from command of the navy in 1965, after being charged with selling badly needed flood relief supplies on the black market instead of delivering them to the starving refugees, (135) Thieu had intervened to prevent him from being prosecuted and had him appointed to a face-saving sinecure. (136)
Sources inside the Vietnamese navy say that a smuggling network which shipped heroin and opium from Cambodia back to South Vietnam was set up among high-ranking naval officers shortly after the Vietnamese navy docked at Phnom Penh. The shipments were passed from protector to protector until they reached Saigon: the first relay was from Phnom Penh to Neak Luong; the next, from Neak Luong to Tan Chau, just inside South Vietnam; the next, from Tan Chan to Binh Thuy. From there the narcotics were shipped to Saigon on a variety of naval and civilian vessels. (137)
As the Cambodian military operation drew to a close in the middle of 1970, the navy's smuggling organization (which had been bringing limited quantities of gold, opium, and dutiable goods into Vietnam since 1968) expanded.
Commo. Lam Nguon Thanh was appointed vice-chief of naval operations in August of 1970. Also a member of Thieu's class at the Merchant Marine Academy (class of '47) Commodore Thanh had been abruptly removed from his post as navy chief of staff in 1966. (138) Sources inside the navy allege that high ranking naval officials used three of the Mekong Delta naval bases under Commodore Thanh's command-Rach Soi, Long Xuyen, and Tan Chau-as drop points for narcotics smuggled into Vietnam on Thai fishing boats or Cambodian river sampans. From these three bases, the narcotics were smuggled to Saigon on naval vessels or on "swift boats" (officially known as P.C.F's, or Patrol Craft Fast). When, as often happened, the narcotics were shipped to Saigon on ordinary civilian sampans or fishing junks, their movements were protected by these naval units. (139)
Some of these smuggling operations within the Vietnamese navy were exposed in the summer of 1971. Shortly before this happened, the U.S. government had finally begun pressuring the South Vietnamese to crack down on the drug smuggling. According to sources inside the navy, the American demands were a cause of some concern for General Quang and Admiral Cang. General Quang thoughtfully had Admiral Cang appointed as chairman of the National Anti Narcotics Committee and his associate, Commodore Thanh, installed as chairman of the Navy Anti-Narcotics Committee. (140)
Although these precautions should have proved adequate, events and decisions beyond General Quang's control nearly resulted in a humiliating public expose. On July 25, 1971, Vietnamese narcotics police, assisted by Thai and American agents, broke up a major chiu chau Chinese syndicate based in Cholon, arrested 60 drug traffickers, and made one of the largest narcotics seizures in Vietnam's recent history,51 kilos of heroin and 334 kilos of opium. Hailed in the press as a great victory for the Thieu government's war on drugs, these raids were actually something of a major embarrassment, since they partially exposed the navy smuggling ring. (141)
This Cholon chiu chau syndicate was organized in mid 1970 when "Mr. Big" in Bangkok, a chiu chau Chinese reputed to be one of the largest drug financiers in Southeast Asia, decided to start dealing in South Vietnam. He contacted a respectable chiu chau plastics manufacturer in Cholon, Mr. Tran Minh, and the two soon came to an agreement. The Vietnamese navy, of course, was to provide protection (see Map 5, page 155). Sometime in mid 1970 a Thai fishing vessel arrived off the coast of Puolo Dama, a tiny Vietnamese island in the Gulf of Siam, with the first shipment. Waiting for the boat was a Vietnamese fishing boat under the command of a chiu chau captain named Tang Hai. Hired by Mr. Tran Minh, Tang Hai was the link between the Bangkok and Cholon syndicates. After two hundred kilos of opium had been transferred in mid-ocean, the Vietnamese boat chugged off toward its home port, Rach Gia, about fifty-five miles to the northeast. In Rach Gia, the bundles of opium were loaded onto a river sampan for the voyage to Saigon. Concealed under a layer of coconut shells, the opium appeared to be just another commercial cargo as it wound its way through the maze of canals that led to the docks of Cholon. Once the sampan docked at a wharf in Cholon's seventh district, the cargo was transferred to a microbus, driven to Tran Minh's warehouse in Cholon's sixth district, and eventually dispensed to the opium dens of Saigon-Cholon. All the traffic on these waterways was policed and protected by the Vietnamese navy. Tran Minh's business prospered and the smuggling continued.
By the third shipment Mr. Tran Minh had decided to expand into the GI market, and ordered ten kilos of Double U-0 Globe brand heroin as well as the usual two hundred kilos of opium. For the fourth shipment, Tran Minh was afraid the deliveries might start attracting notice and changed the transfer point to Hon Panjang, an island 115 miles southwest of Rach Gia. By mid 1971 business was going so well that the Cholon syndicate boss ordered a double shipment four hundred kilos of opium and sixty kilos of heroin. The heroin alone was worth more than $720,000 retail, and for the fishing captain Tang Hai and his military protectors at the Rach Soi Naval Base it turned out to be an irresistible temptation.
In early July 1971 Tang Hai kept his appointment with the Thai fishing boat and picked up the cargo near Hon Panjang Island. But instead of returning to Rach Gia, he then proceeded to sail sixty miles north to Phu Quoc Island, where he buried the opium and hid the heroin in some underbrush. Then he returned to Rach Gia and told Mr. Tran Minh's contact man that the shipment had been stolen by the Vietnamese navy. Apparently this was a convincing explanation, and the contact man relayed the news to Cholon. When Mr. Tran Minh agreed to buy back half of the shipment from the navy for $25,000, Tang Hai returned to Phu Quoc Island, dug up most of the cache, and delivered half of the original shipment to the contact man in Rach Gia after burying the difference near his home. The contact man hired the usual sampan owner to smuggle the drugs to Cholon, but he was robbed, this time for real, by three A.R.V.N corporals only ten miles up the canal from Rach Gia.
The boatman returned to Rach Gia and reported his bad luck to the beleaguered contact man, who dutifully passed the word along to ChoIon. Now $25,000 poorer, Mr. Tran Minh informed Bangkok that he had been robbed twice and could not pay for the shipment. The Bangkok financier, however, immediately assumed that he was being cheated and decided to wipe out the entire Vietnamese syndicate. The Thai fishing captain was selected as the informer, and he approached Col. Pramual Vangibandhu of the Thai Central Narcotics Bureau with a proposition: in exchange for a guarantee of complete immunity and anonymity for the Bangkok syndicate, he would name the two key men in the Saigon operation (which were, in fact, the only names the Bangkok syndicate knew).
Colonel Pramual accepted the offer and contacted U.S. narcotics agent William Wanzeck, asking him to arrange a meeting with the Vietnamese. The two men flew to Saigon, where they met with the head of the Vietnamese Narcotics Police, Redactor Ly Ky Hoang, and U.S. narcotics agent Fred Dick. It was agreed that there should be two simultaneous raids; the Vietnamese National Police would bust the Saigon syndicate while Redactor Hoang, Colonel Pramual, and Fred Dick flew to Rach Gia to arrest Tang Hai and his cohorts.
The two raids were planned for 9:30 A.M. on July 25, less than three weeks after the drugs first arrived off Hon Panjang Island. The Saigon raid came off perfectly, but at Rach Gia, Redactor Hoang found that Tang Hai was not at home. Hoang, who was not in uniform, explained to Tang Hai's sister that the boss, Mr. Tran Minh, had sent him to negotiate for the missing drugs. After fifty minutes of skillful explanations, the sister finally agreed to take Redactor Hoang to a restaurant where her brother was "at a party drinking with some friends." The two of them clambered aboard a sputtering Lambretta taxi and disembarked about thirty minutes later in front of a restaurant in Rach Soi, a small fishing port four miles south of Rach Gia. Inside, Tang Hai was the guest of honor at a boisterous drinking party hosted by the commander of nearby Rach Soi Naval Base, Captain Hai, and attended by twenty well-armed navy officers and sailors.
Explaining that Mr. Tran Minh himself was waiting at Rach Gia, Redactor Hoang suggested that he and Tang Hai go there to discuss buying back the drugs. When the chiu chau smuggler replied that he would rather stay at the party, Redactor Hoang elaborated on his story, explaining that the boss was willing to pay $25,000 for the remaining half of the shipment. At this the navy commander insisted that Hoang use his personal jeep and driver to bring Mr. Tran Minh to the party for negotiations.
An hour later Redactor Hoang returned in a police car, accompanied by Colonel Pramual and Fred Dick. While the others waited outside, Redactor Hoang entered the restaurant alone. After suggesting that they step outside for a private word with the boss, he arrested Tang Hai, threw him into the waiting police car, and raced off for Rach Gia. Minutes later the navy officers realized their guest had been arrested, grabbed their guns, and sped off in hot pursuit.
Even though they suspected that the navy posse was not far behind, the multinational police squad stopped en-route to Rach Gia at a house belonging to Tang Hai's cousin to search for a suspected drugs cache. While Dick and Colonel Pramual took Tang Hai inside and proceeded to ransack the house, Redactor Hoang remained in the car a hundred yards down the street, radioing desperately for police assistance. Before he finally realized that the radio was out of order navy jeeps screeched to a halt in front of the house and the officers began spreading out along the opposite side of the street with their guns drawn and aimed at the house.
Hoang was pinned down in the police car, cut off from his friends and feeling rather frightened. Suddenly he spotted a Lambretta minibus coming down the road. He cocked his gun and waited. When the minibus was just abreast of his car, Hoang jumped out, raced alongside the minibus until it was parallel with the house, and then dove through the front door. When he told the others what was happening, Fred Dick started to break out a window with his pistol butt for a shoot-out, but Hoang, who had not seen as many cowboy movies, stopped him.
Fortunately for our heroes, a plainclothes policeman just happened to enter the adjoining iron shop. After Hoang explained the situation, the policeman jumped on his Honda motor bike and puttered off for help. When a well-armed squad of local police arrived ten minutes later, the naval officers, realizing they were outgunned, reluctantly climbed back in their jeeps and retreated to Rach Soi.
When search of the house turned up nothing, Hoang and the others drove Tang Hai to the Rach Gia police station for interrogation. At first the smuggler refused to talk, but after Hoang, who has considerable ability in these arcane arts, finished with a few minutes of skillful interrogation, he confessed everything-including the location of the drug cache on Phu Quoc Island. While Colonel Pramual and Fred Dick flew Tang Hai out to the island to dig up the cache ( 112.0 kilos of opium and 3.9 kilos of heroin), Hoang himself arrested the three A.R.V.N corporals who had actually stolen half the shipment and turned them over to the Military Security Service (M.S.S) for questioning. Sensing that M.S.S would learn nothing, Hoang ordered the Rach Gia police commander to send a car around to his hotel when the M.S.S gave up. The military finished six hours of fruitless questioning at 2:00 A.M.; Hoang arrived at police headquarters an hour later and had his answers in only fifteen minutes. The next morning a police squad unearthed 32.7 kilos of heroin and 35.0 kilos of opium near a canal about two hours from Rach Gia. A search of Tang Hai's yard later that day uncovered an additional 7.0 kilos of Double U-0 Globe brand heroin and 88.0 kilos of opium. Meanwhile, back in Bangkok the Thai police held a press conference on July 29, only four days after the first spectacular raids. Nervous over rumors of their involvement in the international traffic, the Thai police were eager to grab credit and add a little luster to their otherwise tawdry reputation. Gen. Nitya Bhanumas, secretary general of the Thai Narcotics Board, reportedly claimed that the information that led to the seizures came from "informants he developed in an investigation he directed last month. (142)
When the Vietnamese police picked up their newspapers the next morning, they were outraged. (143) Not only had the Thais claimed credit for what they felt was their work, but the investigation was still continuing and the Vietnamese police feared that the headlines might drive many of the syndicate's members into hiding. The Thai police had only given their Vietnamese counterparts the two names known to Bangkok's "Mr. Big"- Tang Hai and Mr. Tran Minh. Working from the top of the syndicate down, the Vietnamese were just beginning a roundup that eventually netted over sixty middle- and upper-level distributors and scores of street pushers.
According to sources inside the Vietnamese navy, these raids created a near panic in the navy smuggling ring as its leaders scrambled frantically to salvage the situation. Two of the officers involved in the Cambodia invasion command structure were speedily removed about the time that the smuggling ring was exposed. Capt. Nguyen Van Thong was removed from his command of Riverine Task Force 211 and reassigned to a command training course only a few days before the police raids took place. The commander of the coastal patrol force, Capt. Nguyen Huu Chi, was transferred to a staff college for advanced training a scarce two weeks later. (144) Although M.S.S has arrested the navy officers at Rach Soi directly implicated in the affair, (145) there are reports that high ranking military officers are doing their best to protect them, and have managed to make sure that their arrest received almost no mention in the press. (146)
"HEADQUARTERS UNITED STATES MILITARY COMMAND, VIETNAM APO SAN FRANCISCO 96222 Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, CORDS MACCORDS-PS 10 June 1971
MEMORANDUM FOR RECORD SUBJECT: Alleged Trafficking in Heroin (U)
1. A confidential source has advised this Directorate that the father of General Dzu, MR2 Commanding General, is trafficking in heroin with Mr. Chanh, an ethnic Chinese from Cholon. (Other identification not available.)
2. General Dzu's father lives in Qui Nhon. Mr. Chanh makes regular trips to Qui Nhon from Saigon usually via Air Vietnam, but sometimes by General Dzu's private aircraft. Mr. Chanh either travels to Qui Nhon alone, or with other ethnic Chinese. Upon his arrival at the Qui Nhon Airport he is met by an escort normally composed of MSS and/or QC's [military police]; Mr. Chanh is then allegedly escorted to General Dzu's father, where he turns over kilogram quantities of heroin for U.S. currency. Mr. Chanh usually spends several days in Qui Nhon, and stays at the Hoa Binh Hotel, Gia Long Street, Qui Nhon. When Chanh returns to Saigon he is allegedly also given an escort from TSN Airport.
3. The National Police in Qui Nhon especially those police assigned to the airport, are reportedly aware of *the activity between General Dzu's father and Mr. Chanh, but are afraid to either report or investigate these alleged violations fearing that they will only be made the scapegoat should they act.
4. Mr. Chanh (AKA: Red Nose) is an ethnic Chinese from Cholon about 40 years of age,
[signed] Michael G. McCann, Director Public Safety Directorate CORDS
After bulk shipments of heroin have been delivered to cities or ARVN bases near U.S. installations it is sold to GIs through a network of civilian pushers (barracks' maids, street vendors, pimps, and street urchins) or by low-ranking ARVN officers. In Saigon and surrounding 11 Corps most of the heroin marketing is managed by ordinary civilian networks, but as GI addicts move away from the capital to the isolated firebases along the Laotian border and the DMZ, the ARVN pushers become more and more predominant. "How do we get the stuff?" said one GI stationed at a desolate fire base near the DMZ, "just go over to the fence and rap with an ARVN. If he's got it you can make a purchase .
Even at Long Binh, the massive U.S. army installation on the outskirts of Saigon, Vietnamese officers work as pushers. As one GI addict based at Long Binh put it, "You can always get some from an ARVN; not a Pfc., but the officers. I've gotten it from as high as Captain." (152)
The outrageous behavior of its representatives on the floor of the house, where insults of every order are freely and openly traded, has cost the lower house any semblance of popular respect among the essentially honest, puritanical South Vietnamese peasants. It is widely regarded as the longest-running comedy show in Saigon. Votes on crucial issues are sold to the highest bidder, and the Saigon press cheerfully keeps a running tally of the going price. In addition to regular monthly stipends and special New Year's bonuses of $350, (155) pro-Thieu representatives have earned up to $1,800 apiece for voting the right way on crucial government measures. (156) In fact, even staunch opposition members vote the right way to pick up a little extra cash when defeat for their side looks inevitable. (157)
In the lower house, President Thieu relies on members of the Independence Bloc to do the bargaining and make the payments, rather than negotiating personally or working through his military advisers. Consisting almost entirely of North Vietnamese Catholic refugees, this bloc has maintained a militantly anti-Communist position since it was formed in 1967. Although the bloc is nominally independent, its leader, Rep. Nguyen Quang Luyen, met with President Thieu soon after it was formed and "verbally agreed" to support the president in exchange for unspecified favors. (158) The bloc has influence far beyond its numerical strength, and all its members occupy key positions as committee chairmen, fund raisers, or whips; with only nineteen members, the Independence Bloc controls six out of the lower house's sixteen committee chairmanships. (159) During the debates over the 1971 election law, for example, it was an Independence Bloc member, Rep. Pliam Huu Giao, who floor managed the passage of article 10. This controversial clause required a minimum of forty Congressional signatures on every nominating petition for the upcoming presidential election and made it possible for President Thieu to eliminate Ky from the running. Early in the debates, Rep. Pham Huu Giao reportedly tied down a few hill tribe votes for as little as $350 apiece and most of the Cambodian minority's ballots for a mere $700 each. (160) However, in the three days of intense bargaining preceding the final balloting, the price jumped from $1,000 to $1,800 for the final handful that completed the proposal's winning tally of seventy-five votes. (161)
Loyalty to Thieu seems to have its benefits. No opposition members have even been implicated in a serious smuggling case. All lower house representatives implicated in the heroin and gold traffic are either present or past members of the Independence Bloc. The reason for this is simple; opposition deputies often lack the necessary capital to finance such trips, and are not guaranteed "courtesy of the port" when they return. However, pro government deputies who are bankrolled by an official travel grant or savings from months of voting the right way are able to take advantage of their four exit visas per year, a privilege guaranteed to deputies for foreign travel during the legislative holidays. The result has been an orgy of foreign junketeering on the part of pro-government deputies. In 1969-1970 junketeering representatives purchased $821,000 worth of foreign currency for their travels. One prominent pro government representative was abroad for 119 days in 1969, 98 days in 1970 , and 75 days during the first three months of 1971. (162)
Although most pro-government deputies had usually returned with some form of contraband or undeclared dutiable item, they passed through customs without being checked. (163) Even if a representative was caught, customs officers merely imposed a "fine" and allowed the illegal items to pass through. For example, in August and December 1970 Vietnamese customs officers at Tan Son Nhut Airport discovered gold and dutiable goods in the luggage of Rep. Pham Huu Giao, one of the Thieu regime's most important lower house whips. The representative paid a rather nominal fine, and the whole matter was hushed up until it was revealed during the height of the smuggling controversy several months later. (164)
The tempo of parliamentary smuggling seems to have been intensified by the eruption of the GI heroin epidemic and the liberalization of the assembly's travel laws. In December 1970 a group of pro-Thieu deputies who control the lower house administrative office decided to allow representatives four foreign trips each year instead of two. (165) When the annual January-March legislative holiday started a few weeks later, one Saigon daily reported that a record 140 out of the National Assembly's 190 members would soon be going abroad. (166)
The smuggling bonanza that followed resulted in three sensational customs seizures within ten days of each other in March as the legislators returned one by one to prepare for the upcoming session of the National Assembly.
The first deputy implicated was Rep. Vo Van Mau, a Catholic refugee from North Vietnam and a member of the pro-Thieu Independence Bloc. During Air Vietnam's regular Vientiane-Saigon flight on March 10, a Chinese smuggler transferred a suitcase to one of the stewardesses, Mrs. Nguyen Ngoc Qui. (167) But instead of being waved through customs at Tan Son Nhut, as Air Vietnam stewardesses usually were, Mrs. Qui was subjected to a thorough search, which turned up 9.6 kilos of Laos's most popular export-Double U-0 Globe brand heroin-and a letter addressed to Rep. Vo Van Mau. Showing unusual insensitivity to Representative Mau's high official status, officers of customs' Fraud Repression Division followed up the lead. A search of Representative Mau's offices turned up the Chinese smuggler's identity card. (168) Although a spokesman for Prime Minister Khiem's office later announced that this seizure was being thoroughly investigated "because it appears to implicate directly" a deputy, (169) Representative Mau was never officially charged and quietly faded from view when he failed to stand for reelection several months later.
On March 17 another pro-Thieu representative, Pham Chi Thien, landed at Tan Son Nhut Airport on the 4:30 P.m. flight from Bangkok. Much to Representative Thien's surprise, a customs officer insisted on giving his luggage a thorough search and opened a gift wrapped box he found in the legislator's suitcase, which turned out to contain four kilos of Double U-0 Globe brand heroin. (170) Announcing his resignation from the lower house a week later, Representative Thien denied that he was "actually" a smuggler and claimed that he had simply agreed to carry a package to Saigon as a favor to "a softspoken lady I met in Vientiane." (171) He admitted to accepting money for carrying the package, but denied any knowledge of its contents. (172)
While the charges against Vo Van Mau and Pham Chi Thien, both rather unimportant legislators, caused a certain amount of dismay, the arrest of a third pro-Thieu legislator, Rep. Nguyen Ouang Luyen, for gold smuggling was a major scandal. Representative Luyen was second deputy chairman of the lower house, chairman of the Asian Parliamentary Union, and had been chairman of the pro-Thieu Independence Bloc from 1967 to 1970 (he, too, was a North Vietnamese refugee). As he was boarding a flight for Saigon at the Bangkok Airport on March 18, Thai customs searched his luggage and discovered fifteen kilos of pure gold, worth about $26,000 on Saigon's black market. (173) However, the Vietnamese Embassy intervened and secured his immediate release after another legislator traveling with Representative Luyen raced into downtown Bangkok to plead for assistance. (174)
Four days later one Saigon newspaper reported that Thai customs had suspected Representative Luyen of being part of an international smuggling ring for several years but had been maintaining a discreet surveillance because of the sensitive nature of Thai-Vietnamese relations. The fifteen kilos seized in Rep. Luyen's luggage were reportedly part of a larger shipment of ninety kilos of gold (worth $158,000 on the Saigon black market) being smuggled piecemeal into Saigon by this ring. (175) Reliable sources inside the lower house report that other members of the Independence Bloc had helped finance this shipment.
By all accounts, lower house representatives had been smuggling narcotics, gold, and dutiable goods into South Vietnam for over three years without such sensational exposes. Arrests were rare, and when they occurred the legislator almost always settled the matter quietly by just paying a "fine." Why had Vietnamese customs officials suddenly become so aggressive, or more pointedly, why was the Thieu faction suddenly subjected to the humiliating indignity of having three of its staunchest legislative supporters implicated in contraband smuggling within ten days of one another? The answer, as usual in South Vietnam, was political. Ironically, President Thieu's gadfly was his own handpicked prime minister, Tran Thien Khiem.
One of the most important men in Khiem's apparatus was his brother, Tran Thien Khoi, chief of customs' Fraud Repression Division. Soon after U.S. customs advisers began working at Tan Son Nhut Airport in 1968, they filed detailed reports on the abysmal conditions and urged their South Vietnamese counterparts to crack down. However, as one U.S. official put it, "They were just beginning to clean it up when Khiem's brother arrived, and then it all went right out the window. (177) Fraud Repression Chief Tran Thien Khoi relegated much of the dirty work to his deputy chief, and together the two men brought any effective enforcement work to a halt. (178) Chief Khoi's partner was vividly described in a 1971 U.S. provost marshal's report:
He has an opium habit that costs approximately 10,000 piasters a day [$35] and visits a local opium den on a predictable schedule. He was charged with serious irregularities approximately two years ago but by payoffs and political influence, managed to have the charges dropped. When he took up his present position he was known to be nearly destitute, but is now wealthy and supporting two or three wives. (179)
The report described Chief Khoi himself as "a principal in the opium traffic" who had sabotaged efforts to set up a narcotics squad within the Fraud Repression Division. (180) Under Chief Khoi's inspired leadership, gold and opium smuggling at Tan Son Nhut became so blatant that in February 1971 a U.S. customs adviser reported that ". . . after three years of these meetings and countless directives being issued at all levels, the Customs operation at the airport has . . . reached a point to where the Customs personnel of Vietnam are little more than lackeys to the smugglers . . ." (181) The report went on to describe the partnership between customs officials and a group of professional smugglers who seem to run the airport:
Actually, the Customs Officers seem extremely anxious to please these smugglers and not only escort them past the examination counters but even accompany them out to the waiting taxis. This lends an air of legitimacy to the transaction so that there could be no interference on the part of an over zealous Customs Officer or Policeman who might be new on the job and not yet know what is expected of him. (182)
The most important smuggler at Tan Son Nhut Airport was a woman with impressive political connections:
"One of the biggest problems at the airport since the Advisers first arrived there and the subject of one of the first reports is Mrs. Chin, or Ba Chin or Chin Map which in Vietnamese is literally translated as "Fat Nine." This description fits her well as she is stout enough to be easily identified in any group.... This person heads a ring of 10 or 12 women who are present at every arrival of every aircraft from Laos and Singapore and these women are the recipients of most of the cargo that arrives on these flights as unaccompanied baggage. . . . When Mrs. Chin leaves the Customs area, she is like a mother duck with her brood as she leads the procession and is obediently followed by 8 to 10 porters who are carrying her goods to be loaded into the waiting taxis....
I recall an occasion . . . in July 1968 when an aircraft arrived from Laos.... I expressed an interest in the same type of Chinese medicine that this woman had received and already left with. One of the newer Customs officers opened up one of the packages and it was found to contain not medicine but thin strips of gold.... This incident was brought to the attention of the Director General but the Chief of Zone 2. . . . said that I was only guessing and that I could not accuse Mrs. Chin of any wrong doing. I bring this out to show that this woman is protected by every level in the GVN Customs Service." (183)
Although almost every functionary in the customs service receives payoffs from the smugglers, U.S. customs advisers believe that Chief Khoi's job is the most financially rewarding. While most division chiefs only receive payoffs from their immediate underlings, his enforcement powers enable him to receive kickbacks from every division of the customs service. Since even so minor an official as the chief collections officer at Tan Son Nhut cargo warehouse kicked back $22,000 a month to his superiors, Chief Khoi's income must have been enormous. (184)
In early 1971 U.S. customs advisers mounted a "strenuous effort" to have the deputy chief transferred, but Chief Khoi was extremely adept at protecting his associate. In March American officials in Vientiane learned that Rep. Pham Chi Thien would be boarding a flight for Saigon carrying four kilos of heroin and relayed the information to Saigon. When U.S. customs advisers asked the Fraud Repression Division to make the arrest (U.S. customs officials have no right to make arrests), Chief Khoi entrusted the seizure to his opium-smoking assistant. The "hero" was later decorated for this "accomplishment," and U.S. customs advisers, who were still trying to get him fired, or at least transferred, had to grit their teeth and attend a banquet in his honor. (185)
Frustrated by months of inaction by the U.S. mission and outright duplicity from the Vietnamese, members of the U.S. customs advisory team evidently decided to take their case to the American public. Copies of the unflattering customs advisory reports quoted above were leaked to the press and became the basis of an article that appeared on the front page of The New York Times on April 22, 1971, under the headline, "Saigon Airport a Smuggler's Paradise." (186)
The American response was immediate. Washington dispatched more customs advisers for duty at Tan Son Nhut, and the U.S. Embassy finally demanded action from the Thieu regime. Initially, however, the Saigon government was cool to the Embassy's demands for a cleanup of the customs' Fraud Repression Division. It was not until the smuggling issue became a political football between the Khiem and Thieu factions that the Vietnamese showed any interest in dealing with the problem.
As relations between the Thieu and Khiem factions soured, the smuggling issue became just another club to use against the competition. As one frank U.S. Embassy official in Saigon put it, "Our role essentially ends up allowing one faction to use U.S. pressure to force the other faction out of business. And," he added rather glumly, "the way these guys jump on each other so gleefully makes it look like they are really eager to cut themselves in on . . . an enormously lucrative traffic." (187)
When the Air Vietnam stewardess was arrested with 9.6 kilos of heroin, it was Prime Minister Khiem's office that issued an official statement confirming rumors that a proThieu representative was involved. (188) Furthermore, reliable lower house sources claim that the aggressiveness shown by Chief Khoi's Fraud Repression Division in investigating the case was politically motivated. President Thieu later retaliated. According to one Saigon press report, members of Prime Minister Khiem's cabinet "protested . . . President Thieu's remark that the smuggling involved many high ranking officials who smuggled through the Tan Son Nhut Airport where one of the Prime Minister's brothers was in control." (189) Despite the cabinet's protest, the director-general of customs was dismissed, and in late June Tran Thien Khoi left for a short vacation in Paris. On his return several weeks later, he was transferred to a less lucrative post in the Cholon Customs House. (190) His opium-smoking assistant was likewise transferred, and wound up in the Customs Library, a traditional dumping ground for those in disgrace. (191)
Three months later, the director-general of the National Police, one of Mrs. Khiem's relatives, resigned under pressure. The Saigon press reported that the director-general had been involved in the heroin traffic and was being dismissed as a part of the anti narcotics campaign. Prophetically, one Saigon daily had earlier reported that President Thieu was "taking advantage of the anti narcotics smuggling drive" to force officials out of office and to replace them with his own supporters. (192)Interestingly enough, the new police director-general is Col. Nguyen Khac Binh, a nephew of Mrs. Thieu. (193)
Despite all this political agitation over the narcotics traffic, heroin smuggling continues unabated. U.S. customs advisers have pointed out that commercial air flights have been only one of several routes used to bring narcotics into South Vietnam. Now that airport security has tightened up, smugglers have simply diverted narcotics shipment to other routes, particularly military air bases and coastal and river shipping. (194) Throughout 1971 unlimited quantities of heroin were readily available near every U.S. installation in Vietnam, and there was no appreciable rise in price.
The Corsican narcotics syndicates based in Saigon and Vientiane had been supplying European drug factories with Southeast Asian morphine base for several years, and links with Marseilles were already well established. During the First Indochina War (1946- 1954) Corsican gangsters in Marseilles and Saigon cooperated closely in smuggling gold, currency, and narcotics between the two ports. In 1962 Corsican gangsters in Saigon reported that Paul Louis Levet, a Bangkok based syndicate leader, was supplying European heroin laboratories with morphine base from northern Thailand. (196) Furthermore, at least four Corsican charter airlines had played a key role in Southeast Asia's regional opium traffic from 1955 to 1965. Although they were forced out of business when the Laotian generals decided to cut themselves in for a bigger share of the profits in 1965, most of the Corsican's had remained in Southeast Asia. They had opened up businesses or taken jobs in Vientiane and Saigon to tide themselves over until something new opened up. (197)
When Gen. Edward G. Lansdale of the CIA returned to Saigon as a special assistant to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in 1965, he quickly learned that his old enemies, the Corsican's, were still in town. During the fighting between the French 2eme Bureau and the CIA back in 1955, the Corsican gangsters had been involved in several attempts on his life. "So I wouldn't have to look behind my back every time I walked down the street," Lansdale explained in a June 1971 interview, "I decided to have a meeting with the Corsican leaders. I told them I wasn't interested in doing any criminal investigations; I wasn't in Vietnam for that. And they agreed to leave me alone. We had some kind of a truce." General Lansdale can no longer recall much of what transpired at that meeting. He remembers that a large-busted French-Vietnamese named Helene took an active role in the proceedings, that the affair was amicable enough, but not much else. Lansdale later learned that the Corsican's were still heavily involved in the narcotics traffic, but since this was not his responsibility, he took no action. (198)
Most of what Lansdale knew about the Corsican's came from his old friend Lt. Col.
Lucien Conein, the CIA agent who had helped engineer President Diem's overthrow in
1963. As a former O.S.S liaison officer with the French Resistance during World War II,
Conein had some experiences in common with many of Saigon's Corsican gangsters.
During his long tours of duty in Saigon, Conein spent much of his time in fashionable
Corsican-owned bars and restaurants and was on intimate terms with many of Saigon's
most important underworld figures. When Conein left Vietnam several years later, the
Corsican's presented him with a heavy gold medallion embossed with the Napoleonic
Eagle and the Corsican crest. Engraved on the back of it is Per Tu Amicu Conein ("For
your friendship, Conein"). Conein proudly explains that this medallion is worn by
powerful Corsican syndicate leaders around the world and serves as an identification
badge for secret meetings, narcotics drops, and the like. (199)
Through his friendship with the Corsican's, Conein has gained a healthy respect for them. "The Corsicans are smarter, tougher, and better organized that the Sicilians," says Conein. "They are absolutely ruthless and are the equal of anything we know about the Sicilians, but they hide their internal fighting better." Conein also learned that many Saigon syndicate leaders had relatives in the Marseilles underworld. These family relations play an important role in the international drug traffic, Conein feels, because much of the morphine base used in Marseilles's heroin laboratories comes from Saigon. Corsican smugglers in Saigon purchase morphine base through Corsican contacts in Vientiane and ship it on French merchant vessels to relatives and friends in Marseilles, where it is processed into heroin. (200) "From what I know of them," says Conein, "it will be absolutely impossible to cut off the dope traffic. You can cut it down, but you can never stop it, unless you can get to the growers in the hills." (201)
This pessimism may explain why Conein and Lansdale did not pass on this information
to the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics. It is particularly unfortunate that General Lansdale
decided to arrange "some kind of a truce" with the Corsican's during the very period when
Marseille's heroin laboratories were probably beginning the changeover from Turkish to
Southeast Asian morphine base. In a mid-1971 interview, Lieutenant Colonel Conein said
that power brokers in Premier Ky's apparatus contacted the leaders of Saigon's- Corsican
underworld in 1965-1966 and agreed to let them start making large drug shipments to
Europe in exchange for a fixed percentage of the profits. By October 1969 these
shipments had become so important to Marseilles's heroin laboratories that, according to
Conein, there was a summit meeting of Corsican syndicate bosses from around the world
at Saigon's Continental Palace Hotel. Syndicate leaders from Marseilles, Bangkok,
Vientiane, and Phnom Penh flew in for the meeting, which discussed a wide range of
international rackets but probably focused on reorganizing the narcotics traffic. (202)
According to one well-informed U.S. diplomat in Saigon, the U.S. Embassy has a reliable
Corsican informant who claims that similar meetings were also held in 1968 and 1970 at the Continental Palace. Most significantly, American Mafia boss Santo Trafficante, Jr.,
visited Saigon in 1968 and is believed to have contacted Corsican syndicate leaders there.
Vietnamese police officials report that the current owner of the Continental Palace is
Philippe Franchini, the heir of Mathieu Franchini, the reputed organizer of currency- and
opium-smuggling rackets between Saigon and Marseilles during the First Indochina War.
Police officials also point out that one of Ky's strongest supporters in the Air Force, Transport Division Commander Col. Phan Phung Tien, is close to many Corsican gangsters and has been implicated in the smuggling of drugs between Laos and Vietnam.
From 1965 to 1967 Gen. Lansdale's Senior Liaison Office worked closely with Premier Ky's administration, and the general himself was identified as one of the young premier's stronger supporters among U.S. mission personnel. (203) One can only wonder whether Conein's and Lansdale's willingness to grant the Corsicans a "truce" and overlook their growing involvement in the American heroin traffic might not have been motivated by political considerations, i.e., their fear of embarrassing Premier Ky.
Just as most of the Corsican gangsters now still active in Saigon and Vientiane came to Indochina for the first time as camp followers of the French Expeditionary Corps in the late 1940's and early 1950's, the American Mafia followed the U.S. army to Vietnam in 1965. Like any group of intelligent investors, the Mafia is always looking for new financial "frontiers," and when the Vietnam war began to heat up, many of its more entrepreneurial young members were bankrolled by the organization and left for Saigon. Attracted to Vietnam by lucrative construction and service contracts, the mafiosi concentrated on ordinary graft and kickbacks at first, but later branched out into narcotics smuggling as they built up their contacts in Hong Kong and Indochina.
Probably the most important of these pioneers was Frank Carmen Furci, a young mafioso from Tampa, Florida. Although any ordinary businessman would try to hide this kind of family background from his staid corporate associates, Frank Furci found that it impressed the corrupt sergeants, shady profiteers, and Corsican gangsters who were his friends and associates in Saigon. He told them all proudly, "My father is the Mafia boss of Tampa, Florida." (204) (Actually, Frank's father, Dominick Furci, is only a middle ranking lieutenant in the powerful Florida-based family. Santo Trafficante, Jr., is, of course, the Mafia boss of Tampa. (205) Furci arrived in Vietnam in 1965 with good financial backing and soon became a key figure in the systematic graft and corruption that began to plague U.S. military clubs in Vietnam as hundreds of thousands of G.I's poured into the war zone. (206) A lengthy U.S. Senate investigation later exposed the network of graft, bribes, and kickbacks that Furci and his fellow profiteers employed to cheat military clubs and their G.I customers out of millions of dollars. At the bottom of the system were 500,000 bored and homesick G.I's who found Vietnamese rice too sticky and the strong fish sauce repugnant.
The clubs were managed by senior N.C.O's, usually sergeant majors, who had made the army their career and were considered dedicated, trustworthy men. While the officers were preoccupied with giving orders and running a war, the sergeants were left with responsibility for all of the minor details involved in managing one of the largest restaurant and night club chains in the world-ordering refrigerators, hiring bands, selecting liquor brands, and negotiating purchasing orders for everything from slot machines to peanuts. Accounting systems were shoddy, and the entire system was pathetically vulnerable to well-organized graft. Seven sergeants who had served together in the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division at Augsburg, Germany, during the early 1960's had discovered this weakness and exploited it fully, stealing up to $40,000 a month from N.C.O clubs. (207)
In 1965 these seven sergeants started showing up in Vietnam as mess custodians and club
managers at the First Infantry Division, the Americal Division, and U.S. army
headquarters at Long Binh. (208) Most important of all, the group's ringleader, Sgt
William O. Wooldridge, was appointed sergeant major of the army in July 1966. As the
army's highest-ranking enlisted man, he served directly under the army chief of staff at
the Pentagon, where he was in an ideal position to manipulate personnel transfers and
cover up the group's activities. (209)
At the top of the system were the civilian entrepreneurs-Frank Furci and his competitor, William J. Crum-who worked as agents for a host of American companies and paid the sergeants lavish kickbacks on huge Army purchase orders for kitchen equipment, snacks, liquor , etc.
Furci was also heavily involved in the currency black market. A U.S. Senate investigation of illegal currency manipulations in Vietnam later showed that he had exchanged $99,200 through a single unauthorized money changer at the black market rate of 300 or 400 piasters to the dollar, considerably more than the official rate of 118 piasters. (210)
Unfortunately for Furci, his competitor, William J. Crum, was also aware of these illegal transactions, and he decided to use this knowledge to force Furci out of business. Frank Furci was simply outclassed by the crippled, half-blind William Crum, an old China hand who has made a profit on almost every war in Asia since 1941. Attracted by the economic potential of the growing Southeast Asia conflict, Crum came out of his million dollar retirement in Hong Kong and moved to Saigon in 1962. (211)
While the massive U.S. military buildup in 1965 had attracted other commercial agents as well, Crum seemed particularly resentful of Furci, whose competing line of liquor brands, slot machines, and kitchen equipment had "stolen" $2.5 million worth of his business. (212) Crum passed on information about Furci's illegal currency transactions to the Fraud Repression Division of the Vietnamese customs service through a U.S. army general whom Crum was paying $1,000 a month for protection. (213) Vietnamese customs raided Furci's offices in July 1967, found evidence to support the accusations, and later fined him $45,000. (214) Unable to pay such a large fine, Furci left Saigon. Crum later bragged that he had "paid for" the raid that had eliminated his competitor. (215)
Furci moved to Hong Kong and in August opened a restaurant named the San Francisco Steak House with nominal capital of $100,000. (216) More importantly, Furci was instrumental in the formation of Maradern Ltd., a company that the Augsburg sergeants who managed N.C.O clubs in Vietnam used to increase illegal profits from the military clubs. Although Furci's name does not appear on any of the incorporation papers, it seems that he was the "silent partner" in the classic Mafia sense of the term. (217)
Maradem Ltd, was not a wholesale supplier or retail outlet, but a broker that used its control over N.C.O clubs and base mess halls to force legitimate wholesalers to pay a fixed percentage of their profits in order to do business. (218) Maradem's competitors were gradually "squeezed out" of business, and in its first year of operation the company did $1,210,000 worth of business with NCO clubs in Vietnam. (219)
By 1968 Frank Furci had gained three years of valuable experience in the shadow world of Hong Kong and Indochina; he was friendly with powerful Corsican syndicate leaders in Saigon and had the opportunity to form similar relationships with chiu chau bosses in Hong Kong. (220) Thus, perhaps it is not too surprising that the boss himself, Santo Trafficante, Jr., did Furci the honor of visiting him in Hong Kong in 1968. Accompanied by Frank's father, Dominick Furci, Trafficante was questioned by Hong Kong authorities regarding the purpose of his visit, and according to a U.S. Senate investigation, he explained that "They were traveling around the world together at the time. They stopped to visit Furci, Frank Furci in Hong Kong and to visit his restaurant" (221)
After a leisurely stopover, Trafficante proceeded to Saigon, (222) where, according to U.S. Embassy sources, he met with some prominent Corsican gangsters. (223) Trafficante was not the first of Lansky's chief lieutenants to visit Hong Kong. In April 1965 John Pullman, Lansky's courier and financial expert, paid an extended visit to Hong Kong, where he reportedly investigated the narcotics and gambling rackets. (224)
Although the few Mafia watchers who are aware of Trafficante's journey to Asia have always been mystified by it, there is good reason to believe that it was a response to the crisis in the Mediterranean drug traffic and an attempt to secure new sources of heroin for Mafia distributors inside the United States. With almost 70 Percent of the world's illicit opium supply in the Golden Triangle, skilled heroin chemists in Hong Kong, and entrenched Corsican syndicates in Indochina, Southeast Asia was a logical choice.
Soon after Trafficante's visit to Hong Kong, a Filipino courier ring started delivering Hong Kong heroin to Mafia distributors in the United States. In 1970 U.S. narcotics agents arrested many of these couriers. Subsequent interrogation revealed that the ring had successfully smuggled one thousand kilos of pure heroin into the United States-the equivalent of 10 to 20 percent of America's annual consumption.
Current U.S. Bureau of Narcotics intelligence reports indicate that another courier ring is
bringing Hong Kong heroin into the United States through the Caribbean, Trafficante's
territory. From Hong Kong heroin is usually flown to Chile on regular flights and then
smuggled across the border into Paraguay in light, private aircraft. (225) In the la e 1960's
Paraguay became the major transit point for heroin entering the United States from Latin
America; both Hong Kong and Southeast Asian heroin smuggled across the Pacific into Chile and European heroin smuggled across the Atlantic into Argentina are shipped to
Paraguay before being forwarded to the United States. Argentina and Paraguay are
popular refuges for Marseilles gangsters wanted in France for serious crimes. The most
prominent of these is Auguste Joseph Ricord, a Marseilles-born gangster who worked with
the Gestapo during World War II. Using a variety of means ranging from private aircraft
to stuffed artifacts, Ricord is believed to have smuggled some 2.5 billion dollars' worth of
heroin into the United States from Argentina and Paraguay in the last five years. (226)
Although law enforcement officials have always assumed that Ricord and his associates
were being supplied from Marseilles, current reports of shipments from Hong Kong and
Southeast
Asia to Paraguay have raised the possibility that their sources may have shifted to Asia in
recent years. (227) (For heroin routes to the United States through Latin America, see
Map 1, page 10.)
In the early years of the Diem administration, American pronouncements about its goals in Vietnam had an almost naively innocent quality about them. President Diem was seen as a middle path of virtuous democracy between the Viet Minh's brutal "Communist dictatorship" on the left and the corrupt, dope dealing Binh Xuyen pirates on the right. When Diem refused to fire his corrupt brother, who had revived the endemic corruption so characteristic of the Binh Xuyen, the U.S. mission helped engineer Diem's downfall in the hope that an honest, efficient government would emerge from the confusion. But as Vietnam's politics proceeded to plunge into chaos and Saigon's security reached the critical level, the U.S. mission saw the light and prayed for the return of another "strong man."
The answer to the American prayer was the Thieu-Ky administration. Although Thieu and Ky devoted too much of their time to fighting each other, the Americans have generally been pleased with their ability to govern with a firm, if despotic, hand. Having learned that this type of heavy-handed government is the only kind compatible with American interests, U.S. officials were hardly going to protest when the close associates of both leaders were involved in systematic corruption, including the narcotics traffic. As long as the narcotics traffic was directed exclusively at Chinese and Vietnamese opium smokers, U.S. congressional complaints about corruption were muted. When in 1968 Senator Albert Gruening accused Air Vice-Marshal Ky of smuggling opium, the U.S. Embassy in Saigon issued a firm, if inaccurate, denial, and the matter was forgotten. (228)But when South Vietnam's narcotics syndicates started cultivating the GI heroin market, the problem was not dismissed so cavalierly. After NBC's Saigon correspondent accused President Thieu's chief adviser, General Quang, of being "the biggest pusher" of heroin to G.I's in Vietnam (229) the U.S. Embassy "filed a top level report to Washington saying it can find no evidence to support recent charges that President Nguyen Van Thieu and Vice-President Nguyen Cao Ky were involved in or profiting from the drug trade." Simultaneously, U.S. officials defended Thieu and Ky publicly by leaking the Embassy report to members of the Saigon press corps in an off the-record background briefing. (230)
According to a U.S. Embassy official assigned to the drug problem, the U.S. mission "can find no evidence" because it studiously avoids looking for any. It is an unwritten rule among Embassy officials that nobody can mention the names of high-ranking Vietnamese during discussions of the heroin traffic. The CIA avoids gathering information on high-level involvement, and even in its closed-door sessions with high Embassy officials discusses only minor pushers and addicts.
The U.S. mission's handling of the accusations concerning Gen. Ngo Dzu's involvement in the heroin trade is another case in point. Beginning in January 1971, the U.S. army's Criminal Investigation Division (C.I.D) began gathering detailed information on Gen. Ngo Dzu's involvement in GI heroin traffic. Although these reports were sent to the U.S. Embassy through the proper channels, the U.S. mission did absolutely nothing. (231) When U.S. Congressman Robert H. Steele told a congressional subcommittee in July 1971 that "U.S. military authorities have provided Ambassador Bunker with hard intelligence that one of the chief traffickers is Gen. Ngo Dzu, the commander of 11 Corps, (232) the U.S. mission did its best to discredit the Congressman. Rather than criticizing Gen. Ngo Dzu for pushing heroin, the senior U.S. adviser for 11 Corps declared publicly, "There is no information available to me that in any shape, manner or fashion would substantiate the charges Congressman Steele has made." (233) In light of the CID report quoted earlier, the U.S. mission has apparently decided to use any means possible to protect the Thieu regime from investigation of its involvement in the heroin trade.
While the U.S. Embassy has done its best to shield the Thieu regime from criticism, the Nixon administration and the U.S. military command have tried to defuse public concern over the GI heroin epidemic by minimizing the extent of the problem. The military offers two main arguments to justify its official optimism: (1) the definitive urinalysis test administered to every Vietnam GI just before he returns to the United States has shown that no more than 5.5 percent of all army personnel in Vietnam are heroin users; (2) since only 8.0 percent of the GI addicts in Vietnam inject, or "mainline," the great majority who smoke or snort heroin are not seriously addicted and will have no problem kicking the habit once they return home. (234)
Unfortunately, the army's first supposition is not true. On June 22, 1971, the U.S. military command ordered every GI leaving Vietnam to submit to a sophisticated test that can detect significant amounts of morphine in the body. Any GI who tested positively was confined to a special detoxification center and could not be allowed to return home until he had "dried out" and could pass the test. From the very first, G.I's started devising ingenious ways of belting the system. Supervision of the testing centers has been notoriously lax, and many serious addicts pass by bringing a buddy's "clean" urine to the test and substituting it for their own. (235) Since the urinalysis can only detect morphine in the body if the addict has used heroin within the last four or five days, many addicts dry themselves out voluntarily before taking the test. (236) Army nurses have seen addicts who are in the midst of an agonizing withdrawal pass the test. (237) Contrary to popular myth, addicts can control their intake to some extent, and often alternate "sprees" with brief periods of abstinence lasting up to a week, especially the last few days before payday. (238)
Almost every American soldier in Vietnam knows the exact date of his scheduled return to the "world," and most keep a running countdown, which often includes hours and minutes as the time gets shorter. Every G.I's D.E.R.O'S (Date of Expected Return from Overseas) has an historic, even religious quality about it, and the thought of having to stay an extra week, or even a few days more is absolutely intolerable. Most G.I addicts accept the pain of voluntary withdrawal in order to pass the test and get on their scheduled flight. Those who are too weak to make it on their own volunteer for the base "amnesty" program.
Many army physicians report a disproportionately high percentage of patients with only a few weeks left in their tours. (239) When one GI was asked why he and his buddies had temporarily given up heroin, he replied, "The magic word, the absolute magic word, is D.E.R.O'S." (240) The short, painful detoxification simply flushes the morphine out of the system but in no way ends the deep psychological craving for heroin. When these men return home they are still "addicts" in every sense of the word.
The army's suggestion that addicts who smoke heroin in Vietnam are somehow less addicted than those who "mainline" back in the United States is patently absurd. While it is true that injection is more potent than smoking, Vietnamese heroin is so pure (90 to 98 percent pure compared to 2 to 10 percent pure in the United States) that smoking one vial of Vietnamese heroin is equivalent to five or six injections of the cut heroin available in the United States. (241) (Almost no Hong Kong addicts "mainline," but that city has the most serious heroin addiction problem in the world.) Most GI addicts in Vietnam have habits that would cost them over two hundred dollars a day back in the United States.
The army makes its absurd claim because it is not willing to admit the catastrophic impact of GI addiction in Vietnam on the worsening heroin crisis back in the United States. Despite President Nixon's promise that "all our servicemen must be accorded the right to rehabilitation," the U.S. military command in Vietnam is discharging between one thousand and two thousand GI addicts a month. These are men who are declared of negligible value to the United States Army" after failing the urinalysis test twice. Although every GI in Vietnam has been guaranteed the right to declare himself an addict and volunteer for treatment, the army's generosity does not often extend to two-time losers. Once a commanding officer decides that a two-time loser is a hopeless case, the GI addict is flown back to the United States and discharged almost immediately Y. (242)
Virtually none of these addicts are given any follow-up treatme t. In August 1971 the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Public Health, Rep. Paul Rogers, declared that "Veterans Administration hospitals have handled only three referrals out of 12,000 servicemen on heroin . . . in Vietnam. " (243) Left to fend for themselves, many of these men are returning to their home towns as confirmed addicts and potential pushers. A large percentage of the returning veterans are middle Americans from communities that have always been completely free from heroin addiction and regarded it as a problem unique to the black ghetto. Organized crime had never established a foothold in white middle-class communities, and most law enforcement experts considered them immune to heroin. When GI addicts started coming home to middle America, however, drug experts were frightened that they might be carriers of the heroin plague. In June 1971 one specialist said, "Each addict makes at least four more. He cannot bear his habit alone and is sure to seek recruits even if he is not himself the pusher. This is the emergency we now face. (244)
In Vietnam heroin use is so commonplace among GIs that the traditional middle-class American taboo toward the drug has been broken. A U.S. army survey administered to 1,000 army returnees in March 1971 showed that while only 11 percent had used heroin regularly in Vietnam, 22 percent had tried it at least once. (245) For these men heroin is just another narcotic like marijuana, pep pills, or alcohol. In Vietnam soldiers handle heroin so frequently-buying it for themselves, picking up some for a buddy on duty, or selling it for profit-that the idea of pushing heroin once they get home seems natural. "I heard from a few guys who got off it," said one twenty-two-year-old middle American at the Long Binh treatment center. "They said they were still off 'cause it was too expensive, and anyway, they were scared to use the needle. But they said they wanted me to send 'em some scag [heroin] so they could sell it and make some money. You know a jug [vial] over here only costs two dollars, but you can get a hundred dollars for it back in the world." (246) Traveling through Asia on an investigative tour, U.S. Congressman John M. Murphy found "numerous examples of the slick G.I who gets discharged, goes home, then comes back to set himself up in the drug traffic." (247)
According to U.S. narcotics agents, one of the more important heroin exporters in Thailand was an ex-serviceman, William Henry Jackson, who managed the Five Star Bar in Bangkok, a hangout for black G.I's. Working with other ex-servicemen, Jackson recruited active duty soldiers going home as couriers and used local G.I's "to ship heroin to the United States through the army and air force postal system. (248)One U.S. agent who has arrested several of these ex-GI drug dealers says that, "Most of these guys say to themselves, 'Just as soon as I get $100,000 for a gas station, home, boat, and car in California I'm going to quit.' Most of them are just regular guys." On April 5, 1971, U.S. customs officials in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, seized 7.7 kilos of Double U-0 Globe brand heroin in a package mailed from Bangkok, Thailand, through the U.S. military postal system. (249) It had a retail value estimated at $1.75 million. During March and April 1971 U.S. customs seized 248 pieces of mail containing narcotics in the army and air force postal systems. (250)
As the number of American troops in Vietnam rapidly dwindles, there will be a natural tendency to forget the whole nightmarish experience of the Vietnam heroin epidemic. In time the Nixon administration may even claim the end of the GI heroin problem as one of the more solid accomplishments of its Vietnamization program. Despite these fervent hopes, it will probably be a long time before the memory of the Vietnam heroin epidemic can take its richly deserved place in the garbage can of history. For returning GI addicts have come home as carriers of the disease and are afflicting hundreds of communities with the heroin virus. The Golden Triangle heroin laboratories, which had been supplying American soldiers in Vietnam since late 1969, are not going out of business. When the number of G.I's in Vietnam declined drastically in 1971, Corsican and Chinese syndicates started shipping Laotian heroin directly to the United States. In April 1971 the Laotian Ambassador to France was apprehended in Paris with sixty kilos of Double U-0 Globe brand heroin destined for the United States. (251) On November 11, 1971, a Filipino diplomat and a Bangkok Chinese merchant were arrested at the Lexington Hotel in New York City with 15.5 kilos of Double U-0 Globe brand shortly after they arrived from Vientiane. (252) Heroin is following the G.I's home.
World War I produced a "lost generation" of writers, poets, and artists. World War II gave us a generation of collegians and suburbanites. The Vietnam War seems to be fathering a generation of junkies.
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https://ia601404.us.archive.org/22/items/pdfy-MiSTDFMs_BBF8W9B/52_Alfred_McCoy___The_politics_of_heroin_in_Southeast_Asia.pdf
There is evidence that one of the first new groups which began smuggling opium into South Vietnam was the Vietnamese special forces contingents operating in southern Laos. In August 1971 The New York Times reported that many of the aircraft flying narcotics into South Vietnam "are connected with secret South Vietnamese special forces operating along the Ho Chi Minh Trail network in Laos. (129) Based in Konturn Province, north of Pleiku, the special forces "assault task force" has a small fleet of helicopters, transports, and light aircraft that fly into southern Laos on regular sabotage and long-range reconnaissance forays. Some special forces officers claim that the commander of this unit was transferred to another post in mid 1971 because his extensive involvement in the narcotics traffic risked exposure. (130)
But clandestine forays were a relatively inefficient method of smuggling, and it appears that General Quang's apparatus did not become heavily involved in the narcotics trade until the Cambodian invasion of May 1970. For the first time in years the Vietnamese army operated inside Cambodia; Vietnamese troops guarded key Cambodian communication routes, the army assigned liaison officers to Phnom Penh, and intelligence officers were allowed to work inside the former neutralist kingdom. More importantly, the Vietnamese navy began permanent patrols along the Cambodian stretches of the Mekong and set up bases in Phnom Penh.
The Vietnamese Navy:
Up the Creek
The
Vietnamese
navy utilized
the Cambodian
invasion to
expand its role
in the narcotics
traffic, opening
up a new
pipeline that
had previously
been
inaccessible.
On May 9 an
armada of 110
Vietnamese and
30 American
river craft
headed by the
naval fleet
commander,
Capt. Nguyen
Thanh Chau,
crossed the
border into
Cambodia,
speeding up the
Mekong in a
dramatic V shaped
formation.
(131) The next
day the
commander of
Riverine Task
Force 211,
Capt. Nguyen
Van Thong,
landed several
hundred Vietnamese twenty miles upriver at Neak Luong, a vital ferry crossing on Route
I linking Phnom Penh with Saigon. (132) Leaving their American advisers behind here,
the Vietnamese arrived at Phnom Penh on May 11, and on May 12 reached Kompong
Chain, seventy miles north of the Cambodian capital, thus totally clearing the waterway
for their use. (133) Hailed as a tactical coup and a great "military humanitarian fleet" by
navy publicists, the armada also had, according to sources inside the Vietnamese navy,the dubious distinction of smuggling vast quantities of opium and heroin into South
Vietnam. An associate of General Quang's, former navy commander Rear Admiral Chung Tan Cang, rose to prominence during the Cambodian invasion. Admiral Cang had been a good friend of President Thieu's since their student days together at Saigon's Merchant Marine Academy (class of '47). (134) When Admiral Cang was removed from command of the navy in 1965, after being charged with selling badly needed flood relief supplies on the black market instead of delivering them to the starving refugees, (135) Thieu had intervened to prevent him from being prosecuted and had him appointed to a face-saving sinecure. (136)
Sources inside the Vietnamese navy say that a smuggling network which shipped heroin and opium from Cambodia back to South Vietnam was set up among high-ranking naval officers shortly after the Vietnamese navy docked at Phnom Penh. The shipments were passed from protector to protector until they reached Saigon: the first relay was from Phnom Penh to Neak Luong; the next, from Neak Luong to Tan Chau, just inside South Vietnam; the next, from Tan Chan to Binh Thuy. From there the narcotics were shipped to Saigon on a variety of naval and civilian vessels. (137)
As the Cambodian military operation drew to a close in the middle of 1970, the navy's smuggling organization (which had been bringing limited quantities of gold, opium, and dutiable goods into Vietnam since 1968) expanded.
Commo. Lam Nguon Thanh was appointed vice-chief of naval operations in August of 1970. Also a member of Thieu's class at the Merchant Marine Academy (class of '47) Commodore Thanh had been abruptly removed from his post as navy chief of staff in 1966. (138) Sources inside the navy allege that high ranking naval officials used three of the Mekong Delta naval bases under Commodore Thanh's command-Rach Soi, Long Xuyen, and Tan Chau-as drop points for narcotics smuggled into Vietnam on Thai fishing boats or Cambodian river sampans. From these three bases, the narcotics were smuggled to Saigon on naval vessels or on "swift boats" (officially known as P.C.F's, or Patrol Craft Fast). When, as often happened, the narcotics were shipped to Saigon on ordinary civilian sampans or fishing junks, their movements were protected by these naval units. (139)
Some of these smuggling operations within the Vietnamese navy were exposed in the summer of 1971. Shortly before this happened, the U.S. government had finally begun pressuring the South Vietnamese to crack down on the drug smuggling. According to sources inside the navy, the American demands were a cause of some concern for General Quang and Admiral Cang. General Quang thoughtfully had Admiral Cang appointed as chairman of the National Anti Narcotics Committee and his associate, Commodore Thanh, installed as chairman of the Navy Anti-Narcotics Committee. (140)
Although these precautions should have proved adequate, events and decisions beyond General Quang's control nearly resulted in a humiliating public expose. On July 25, 1971, Vietnamese narcotics police, assisted by Thai and American agents, broke up a major chiu chau Chinese syndicate based in Cholon, arrested 60 drug traffickers, and made one of the largest narcotics seizures in Vietnam's recent history,51 kilos of heroin and 334 kilos of opium. Hailed in the press as a great victory for the Thieu government's war on drugs, these raids were actually something of a major embarrassment, since they partially exposed the navy smuggling ring. (141)
This Cholon chiu chau syndicate was organized in mid 1970 when "Mr. Big" in Bangkok, a chiu chau Chinese reputed to be one of the largest drug financiers in Southeast Asia, decided to start dealing in South Vietnam. He contacted a respectable chiu chau plastics manufacturer in Cholon, Mr. Tran Minh, and the two soon came to an agreement. The Vietnamese navy, of course, was to provide protection (see Map 5, page 155). Sometime in mid 1970 a Thai fishing vessel arrived off the coast of Puolo Dama, a tiny Vietnamese island in the Gulf of Siam, with the first shipment. Waiting for the boat was a Vietnamese fishing boat under the command of a chiu chau captain named Tang Hai. Hired by Mr. Tran Minh, Tang Hai was the link between the Bangkok and Cholon syndicates. After two hundred kilos of opium had been transferred in mid-ocean, the Vietnamese boat chugged off toward its home port, Rach Gia, about fifty-five miles to the northeast. In Rach Gia, the bundles of opium were loaded onto a river sampan for the voyage to Saigon. Concealed under a layer of coconut shells, the opium appeared to be just another commercial cargo as it wound its way through the maze of canals that led to the docks of Cholon. Once the sampan docked at a wharf in Cholon's seventh district, the cargo was transferred to a microbus, driven to Tran Minh's warehouse in Cholon's sixth district, and eventually dispensed to the opium dens of Saigon-Cholon. All the traffic on these waterways was policed and protected by the Vietnamese navy. Tran Minh's business prospered and the smuggling continued.
By the third shipment Mr. Tran Minh had decided to expand into the GI market, and ordered ten kilos of Double U-0 Globe brand heroin as well as the usual two hundred kilos of opium. For the fourth shipment, Tran Minh was afraid the deliveries might start attracting notice and changed the transfer point to Hon Panjang, an island 115 miles southwest of Rach Gia. By mid 1971 business was going so well that the Cholon syndicate boss ordered a double shipment four hundred kilos of opium and sixty kilos of heroin. The heroin alone was worth more than $720,000 retail, and for the fishing captain Tang Hai and his military protectors at the Rach Soi Naval Base it turned out to be an irresistible temptation.
In early July 1971 Tang Hai kept his appointment with the Thai fishing boat and picked up the cargo near Hon Panjang Island. But instead of returning to Rach Gia, he then proceeded to sail sixty miles north to Phu Quoc Island, where he buried the opium and hid the heroin in some underbrush. Then he returned to Rach Gia and told Mr. Tran Minh's contact man that the shipment had been stolen by the Vietnamese navy. Apparently this was a convincing explanation, and the contact man relayed the news to Cholon. When Mr. Tran Minh agreed to buy back half of the shipment from the navy for $25,000, Tang Hai returned to Phu Quoc Island, dug up most of the cache, and delivered half of the original shipment to the contact man in Rach Gia after burying the difference near his home. The contact man hired the usual sampan owner to smuggle the drugs to Cholon, but he was robbed, this time for real, by three A.R.V.N corporals only ten miles up the canal from Rach Gia.
The boatman returned to Rach Gia and reported his bad luck to the beleaguered contact man, who dutifully passed the word along to ChoIon. Now $25,000 poorer, Mr. Tran Minh informed Bangkok that he had been robbed twice and could not pay for the shipment. The Bangkok financier, however, immediately assumed that he was being cheated and decided to wipe out the entire Vietnamese syndicate. The Thai fishing captain was selected as the informer, and he approached Col. Pramual Vangibandhu of the Thai Central Narcotics Bureau with a proposition: in exchange for a guarantee of complete immunity and anonymity for the Bangkok syndicate, he would name the two key men in the Saigon operation (which were, in fact, the only names the Bangkok syndicate knew).
Colonel Pramual accepted the offer and contacted U.S. narcotics agent William Wanzeck, asking him to arrange a meeting with the Vietnamese. The two men flew to Saigon, where they met with the head of the Vietnamese Narcotics Police, Redactor Ly Ky Hoang, and U.S. narcotics agent Fred Dick. It was agreed that there should be two simultaneous raids; the Vietnamese National Police would bust the Saigon syndicate while Redactor Hoang, Colonel Pramual, and Fred Dick flew to Rach Gia to arrest Tang Hai and his cohorts.
The two raids were planned for 9:30 A.M. on July 25, less than three weeks after the drugs first arrived off Hon Panjang Island. The Saigon raid came off perfectly, but at Rach Gia, Redactor Hoang found that Tang Hai was not at home. Hoang, who was not in uniform, explained to Tang Hai's sister that the boss, Mr. Tran Minh, had sent him to negotiate for the missing drugs. After fifty minutes of skillful explanations, the sister finally agreed to take Redactor Hoang to a restaurant where her brother was "at a party drinking with some friends." The two of them clambered aboard a sputtering Lambretta taxi and disembarked about thirty minutes later in front of a restaurant in Rach Soi, a small fishing port four miles south of Rach Gia. Inside, Tang Hai was the guest of honor at a boisterous drinking party hosted by the commander of nearby Rach Soi Naval Base, Captain Hai, and attended by twenty well-armed navy officers and sailors.
Explaining that Mr. Tran Minh himself was waiting at Rach Gia, Redactor Hoang suggested that he and Tang Hai go there to discuss buying back the drugs. When the chiu chau smuggler replied that he would rather stay at the party, Redactor Hoang elaborated on his story, explaining that the boss was willing to pay $25,000 for the remaining half of the shipment. At this the navy commander insisted that Hoang use his personal jeep and driver to bring Mr. Tran Minh to the party for negotiations.
An hour later Redactor Hoang returned in a police car, accompanied by Colonel Pramual and Fred Dick. While the others waited outside, Redactor Hoang entered the restaurant alone. After suggesting that they step outside for a private word with the boss, he arrested Tang Hai, threw him into the waiting police car, and raced off for Rach Gia. Minutes later the navy officers realized their guest had been arrested, grabbed their guns, and sped off in hot pursuit.
Even though they suspected that the navy posse was not far behind, the multinational police squad stopped en-route to Rach Gia at a house belonging to Tang Hai's cousin to search for a suspected drugs cache. While Dick and Colonel Pramual took Tang Hai inside and proceeded to ransack the house, Redactor Hoang remained in the car a hundred yards down the street, radioing desperately for police assistance. Before he finally realized that the radio was out of order navy jeeps screeched to a halt in front of the house and the officers began spreading out along the opposite side of the street with their guns drawn and aimed at the house.
Hoang was pinned down in the police car, cut off from his friends and feeling rather frightened. Suddenly he spotted a Lambretta minibus coming down the road. He cocked his gun and waited. When the minibus was just abreast of his car, Hoang jumped out, raced alongside the minibus until it was parallel with the house, and then dove through the front door. When he told the others what was happening, Fred Dick started to break out a window with his pistol butt for a shoot-out, but Hoang, who had not seen as many cowboy movies, stopped him.
Fortunately for our heroes, a plainclothes policeman just happened to enter the adjoining iron shop. After Hoang explained the situation, the policeman jumped on his Honda motor bike and puttered off for help. When a well-armed squad of local police arrived ten minutes later, the naval officers, realizing they were outgunned, reluctantly climbed back in their jeeps and retreated to Rach Soi.
When search of the house turned up nothing, Hoang and the others drove Tang Hai to the Rach Gia police station for interrogation. At first the smuggler refused to talk, but after Hoang, who has considerable ability in these arcane arts, finished with a few minutes of skillful interrogation, he confessed everything-including the location of the drug cache on Phu Quoc Island. While Colonel Pramual and Fred Dick flew Tang Hai out to the island to dig up the cache ( 112.0 kilos of opium and 3.9 kilos of heroin), Hoang himself arrested the three A.R.V.N corporals who had actually stolen half the shipment and turned them over to the Military Security Service (M.S.S) for questioning. Sensing that M.S.S would learn nothing, Hoang ordered the Rach Gia police commander to send a car around to his hotel when the M.S.S gave up. The military finished six hours of fruitless questioning at 2:00 A.M.; Hoang arrived at police headquarters an hour later and had his answers in only fifteen minutes. The next morning a police squad unearthed 32.7 kilos of heroin and 35.0 kilos of opium near a canal about two hours from Rach Gia. A search of Tang Hai's yard later that day uncovered an additional 7.0 kilos of Double U-0 Globe brand heroin and 88.0 kilos of opium. Meanwhile, back in Bangkok the Thai police held a press conference on July 29, only four days after the first spectacular raids. Nervous over rumors of their involvement in the international traffic, the Thai police were eager to grab credit and add a little luster to their otherwise tawdry reputation. Gen. Nitya Bhanumas, secretary general of the Thai Narcotics Board, reportedly claimed that the information that led to the seizures came from "informants he developed in an investigation he directed last month. (142)
When the Vietnamese police picked up their newspapers the next morning, they were outraged. (143) Not only had the Thais claimed credit for what they felt was their work, but the investigation was still continuing and the Vietnamese police feared that the headlines might drive many of the syndicate's members into hiding. The Thai police had only given their Vietnamese counterparts the two names known to Bangkok's "Mr. Big"- Tang Hai and Mr. Tran Minh. Working from the top of the syndicate down, the Vietnamese were just beginning a roundup that eventually netted over sixty middle- and upper-level distributors and scores of street pushers.
According to sources inside the Vietnamese navy, these raids created a near panic in the navy smuggling ring as its leaders scrambled frantically to salvage the situation. Two of the officers involved in the Cambodia invasion command structure were speedily removed about the time that the smuggling ring was exposed. Capt. Nguyen Van Thong was removed from his command of Riverine Task Force 211 and reassigned to a command training course only a few days before the police raids took place. The commander of the coastal patrol force, Capt. Nguyen Huu Chi, was transferred to a staff college for advanced training a scarce two weeks later. (144) Although M.S.S has arrested the navy officers at Rach Soi directly implicated in the affair, (145) there are reports that high ranking military officers are doing their best to protect them, and have managed to make sure that their arrest received almost no mention in the press. (146)
The Vietnamese Army:
Marketing the Product
While the Vietnamese navy is involved in drug importing, pro-Thieu elements of the
Vietnamese army (A.R.V.N) manage much of the distribution and sale of heroin to G.I's
inside South Vietnam. But rather than risking exposure by having their own officers
handle the more vulnerable aspects of the operation, high ranking A.R.V.N commanders
generally prefer to work with Cholon's Chinese syndicates. Thus, once bulk heroin
shipments are smuggled into the country either by the military itself or by Chinese
protected by the military-they are usually turned over to Cholon syndicates for packaging
and shipment. From Cholon, Chinese and Vietnamese couriers fan out across the country,
delivering multi kilo lots of heroin to military commanders from the Delta to the DMZ. In
three of the four military zones, the local distribution is supervised and protected by highranking
army officers. (147) In the Mekong Delta (IV Corps) local sales are controlled by
colonels loyal to General Quang; in the south central part of the country (II Corps) heroin
distribution has become a subject of controversy between two feuding generals loyal to
President Thieu, the former II Corps commander Gen. Lu Lan and the present
commander Gen. Ngo Dzu; (148) and in northernmost I Corps the traffic is directed by
deputies of the corps commander. (149) In June 1971 the chief U.S. police adviser filed a
memorandum on Gen. Ngo Dzu's involvement in the heroin trade that describes the
relationship between Cholon's Chinese racketeers and Vietnamese generals: (150) "HEADQUARTERS UNITED STATES MILITARY COMMAND, VIETNAM APO SAN FRANCISCO 96222 Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, CORDS MACCORDS-PS 10 June 1971
MEMORANDUM FOR RECORD SUBJECT: Alleged Trafficking in Heroin (U)
1. A confidential source has advised this Directorate that the father of General Dzu, MR2 Commanding General, is trafficking in heroin with Mr. Chanh, an ethnic Chinese from Cholon. (Other identification not available.)
2. General Dzu's father lives in Qui Nhon. Mr. Chanh makes regular trips to Qui Nhon from Saigon usually via Air Vietnam, but sometimes by General Dzu's private aircraft. Mr. Chanh either travels to Qui Nhon alone, or with other ethnic Chinese. Upon his arrival at the Qui Nhon Airport he is met by an escort normally composed of MSS and/or QC's [military police]; Mr. Chanh is then allegedly escorted to General Dzu's father, where he turns over kilogram quantities of heroin for U.S. currency. Mr. Chanh usually spends several days in Qui Nhon, and stays at the Hoa Binh Hotel, Gia Long Street, Qui Nhon. When Chanh returns to Saigon he is allegedly also given an escort from TSN Airport.
3. The National Police in Qui Nhon especially those police assigned to the airport, are reportedly aware of *the activity between General Dzu's father and Mr. Chanh, but are afraid to either report or investigate these alleged violations fearing that they will only be made the scapegoat should they act.
4. Mr. Chanh (AKA: Red Nose) is an ethnic Chinese from Cholon about 40 years of age,
[signed] Michael G. McCann, Director Public Safety Directorate CORDS
After bulk shipments of heroin have been delivered to cities or ARVN bases near U.S. installations it is sold to GIs through a network of civilian pushers (barracks' maids, street vendors, pimps, and street urchins) or by low-ranking ARVN officers. In Saigon and surrounding 11 Corps most of the heroin marketing is managed by ordinary civilian networks, but as GI addicts move away from the capital to the isolated firebases along the Laotian border and the DMZ, the ARVN pushers become more and more predominant. "How do we get the stuff?" said one GI stationed at a desolate fire base near the DMZ, "just go over to the fence and rap with an ARVN. If he's got it you can make a purchase .
Even at Long Binh, the massive U.S. army installation on the outskirts of Saigon, Vietnamese officers work as pushers. As one GI addict based at Long Binh put it, "You can always get some from an ARVN; not a Pfc., but the officers. I've gotten it from as high as Captain." (152)
The Lower House: Heroin Junkets
Another avenue of the narcotics traffic that has proved embarrassing to President Thieu is
the smuggling operations indulged in by pro-Thieu members of the National Assembly's
lower house. The buffoonlike ineptness of many of these politicians has turned out to be
more of a liability than an asset. At one point in Thieu's rivalry with the increasingly
important Prime Minister Khiem, the ease with which these politician smugglers could be
exposed created a good many political problems for the Thieu apparatus. While only the
slightest hint of the pro-Thieu faction's massive smuggling operation has leaked out of
the security conscious military, the opera pouffe antics of bumbling lower house
representatives have rated incredulous headlines around the world. Between September
1970 and March 1971 no less than seven representatives returning from foreign study
tours were caught trying to smuggle everything from gold and heroin to Playboy
calendars and brassieres into South Vietnam. (153) Foreign observers were genuinely
dismayed by the smuggling arrests, but the Vietnamese public simply regarded them as a
new low in the lower house's four-year history of bribery, corruption, and scandal. (154) The outrageous behavior of its representatives on the floor of the house, where insults of every order are freely and openly traded, has cost the lower house any semblance of popular respect among the essentially honest, puritanical South Vietnamese peasants. It is widely regarded as the longest-running comedy show in Saigon. Votes on crucial issues are sold to the highest bidder, and the Saigon press cheerfully keeps a running tally of the going price. In addition to regular monthly stipends and special New Year's bonuses of $350, (155) pro-Thieu representatives have earned up to $1,800 apiece for voting the right way on crucial government measures. (156) In fact, even staunch opposition members vote the right way to pick up a little extra cash when defeat for their side looks inevitable. (157)
In the lower house, President Thieu relies on members of the Independence Bloc to do the bargaining and make the payments, rather than negotiating personally or working through his military advisers. Consisting almost entirely of North Vietnamese Catholic refugees, this bloc has maintained a militantly anti-Communist position since it was formed in 1967. Although the bloc is nominally independent, its leader, Rep. Nguyen Quang Luyen, met with President Thieu soon after it was formed and "verbally agreed" to support the president in exchange for unspecified favors. (158) The bloc has influence far beyond its numerical strength, and all its members occupy key positions as committee chairmen, fund raisers, or whips; with only nineteen members, the Independence Bloc controls six out of the lower house's sixteen committee chairmanships. (159) During the debates over the 1971 election law, for example, it was an Independence Bloc member, Rep. Pliam Huu Giao, who floor managed the passage of article 10. This controversial clause required a minimum of forty Congressional signatures on every nominating petition for the upcoming presidential election and made it possible for President Thieu to eliminate Ky from the running. Early in the debates, Rep. Pham Huu Giao reportedly tied down a few hill tribe votes for as little as $350 apiece and most of the Cambodian minority's ballots for a mere $700 each. (160) However, in the three days of intense bargaining preceding the final balloting, the price jumped from $1,000 to $1,800 for the final handful that completed the proposal's winning tally of seventy-five votes. (161)
Loyalty to Thieu seems to have its benefits. No opposition members have even been implicated in a serious smuggling case. All lower house representatives implicated in the heroin and gold traffic are either present or past members of the Independence Bloc. The reason for this is simple; opposition deputies often lack the necessary capital to finance such trips, and are not guaranteed "courtesy of the port" when they return. However, pro government deputies who are bankrolled by an official travel grant or savings from months of voting the right way are able to take advantage of their four exit visas per year, a privilege guaranteed to deputies for foreign travel during the legislative holidays. The result has been an orgy of foreign junketeering on the part of pro-government deputies. In 1969-1970 junketeering representatives purchased $821,000 worth of foreign currency for their travels. One prominent pro government representative was abroad for 119 days in 1969, 98 days in 1970 , and 75 days during the first three months of 1971. (162)
Although most pro-government deputies had usually returned with some form of contraband or undeclared dutiable item, they passed through customs without being checked. (163) Even if a representative was caught, customs officers merely imposed a "fine" and allowed the illegal items to pass through. For example, in August and December 1970 Vietnamese customs officers at Tan Son Nhut Airport discovered gold and dutiable goods in the luggage of Rep. Pham Huu Giao, one of the Thieu regime's most important lower house whips. The representative paid a rather nominal fine, and the whole matter was hushed up until it was revealed during the height of the smuggling controversy several months later. (164)
The tempo of parliamentary smuggling seems to have been intensified by the eruption of the GI heroin epidemic and the liberalization of the assembly's travel laws. In December 1970 a group of pro-Thieu deputies who control the lower house administrative office decided to allow representatives four foreign trips each year instead of two. (165) When the annual January-March legislative holiday started a few weeks later, one Saigon daily reported that a record 140 out of the National Assembly's 190 members would soon be going abroad. (166)
The smuggling bonanza that followed resulted in three sensational customs seizures within ten days of each other in March as the legislators returned one by one to prepare for the upcoming session of the National Assembly.
The first deputy implicated was Rep. Vo Van Mau, a Catholic refugee from North Vietnam and a member of the pro-Thieu Independence Bloc. During Air Vietnam's regular Vientiane-Saigon flight on March 10, a Chinese smuggler transferred a suitcase to one of the stewardesses, Mrs. Nguyen Ngoc Qui. (167) But instead of being waved through customs at Tan Son Nhut, as Air Vietnam stewardesses usually were, Mrs. Qui was subjected to a thorough search, which turned up 9.6 kilos of Laos's most popular export-Double U-0 Globe brand heroin-and a letter addressed to Rep. Vo Van Mau. Showing unusual insensitivity to Representative Mau's high official status, officers of customs' Fraud Repression Division followed up the lead. A search of Representative Mau's offices turned up the Chinese smuggler's identity card. (168) Although a spokesman for Prime Minister Khiem's office later announced that this seizure was being thoroughly investigated "because it appears to implicate directly" a deputy, (169) Representative Mau was never officially charged and quietly faded from view when he failed to stand for reelection several months later.
On March 17 another pro-Thieu representative, Pham Chi Thien, landed at Tan Son Nhut Airport on the 4:30 P.m. flight from Bangkok. Much to Representative Thien's surprise, a customs officer insisted on giving his luggage a thorough search and opened a gift wrapped box he found in the legislator's suitcase, which turned out to contain four kilos of Double U-0 Globe brand heroin. (170) Announcing his resignation from the lower house a week later, Representative Thien denied that he was "actually" a smuggler and claimed that he had simply agreed to carry a package to Saigon as a favor to "a softspoken lady I met in Vientiane." (171) He admitted to accepting money for carrying the package, but denied any knowledge of its contents. (172)
While the charges against Vo Van Mau and Pham Chi Thien, both rather unimportant legislators, caused a certain amount of dismay, the arrest of a third pro-Thieu legislator, Rep. Nguyen Ouang Luyen, for gold smuggling was a major scandal. Representative Luyen was second deputy chairman of the lower house, chairman of the Asian Parliamentary Union, and had been chairman of the pro-Thieu Independence Bloc from 1967 to 1970 (he, too, was a North Vietnamese refugee). As he was boarding a flight for Saigon at the Bangkok Airport on March 18, Thai customs searched his luggage and discovered fifteen kilos of pure gold, worth about $26,000 on Saigon's black market. (173) However, the Vietnamese Embassy intervened and secured his immediate release after another legislator traveling with Representative Luyen raced into downtown Bangkok to plead for assistance. (174)
Four days later one Saigon newspaper reported that Thai customs had suspected Representative Luyen of being part of an international smuggling ring for several years but had been maintaining a discreet surveillance because of the sensitive nature of Thai-Vietnamese relations. The fifteen kilos seized in Rep. Luyen's luggage were reportedly part of a larger shipment of ninety kilos of gold (worth $158,000 on the Saigon black market) being smuggled piecemeal into Saigon by this ring. (175) Reliable sources inside the lower house report that other members of the Independence Bloc had helped finance this shipment.
By all accounts, lower house representatives had been smuggling narcotics, gold, and dutiable goods into South Vietnam for over three years without such sensational exposes. Arrests were rare, and when they occurred the legislator almost always settled the matter quietly by just paying a "fine." Why had Vietnamese customs officials suddenly become so aggressive, or more pointedly, why was the Thieu faction suddenly subjected to the humiliating indignity of having three of its staunchest legislative supporters implicated in contraband smuggling within ten days of one another? The answer, as usual in South Vietnam, was political. Ironically, President Thieu's gadfly was his own handpicked prime minister, Tran Thien Khiem.
The Khiem
Apparatus:
All in the
Family
While the
Independence
Bloc enjoys
President
Thieu's political
protection,
unfortunately
for these three
smugglers the
customs service
was controlled
by Prime
Minister
Khiem's
apparatus.
After four years
of political
exile in Taiwan
and the United
States, Khiem
had returned to
Vietnam in
May 1968 and
was appointed
minister of the
interior in
President
Thieu's
administration.
Khiem,
probably the
most fickle of
Vietnam's
military
leaders,
proceeded to
build up a
power base of his own, becoming prime minister in 1969. Although Khiem has a history
of betraying his allies when it suits his Purposes, President Thieu had been locked in a
desperate underground war with Vice-President Ky, and probably appointed Khiem
because he needed his unparalleled talents as a political infighter. (176) But first as minister of the interior and later as concurrent prime minister, Khiem appointed his
relatives to lucrative offices in the civil administration and began building an increasingly
independent political organization. In June 1968 he appointed his brother-in-law mayor
of Saigon. He used his growing political influence to have his younger brother, Tran
Thien Khoi, appointed chief of customs' Fraud Repression Division (the enforcement
arm), another brother made director of Saigon Port and his cousin appointed deputy
governor-general of Saigon. Following his promotion to prime minister in 1969, Khiem
was able to appoint one of his wife's relatives to the position of director-general of the
National Police. One of the most important men in Khiem's apparatus was his brother, Tran Thien Khoi, chief of customs' Fraud Repression Division. Soon after U.S. customs advisers began working at Tan Son Nhut Airport in 1968, they filed detailed reports on the abysmal conditions and urged their South Vietnamese counterparts to crack down. However, as one U.S. official put it, "They were just beginning to clean it up when Khiem's brother arrived, and then it all went right out the window. (177) Fraud Repression Chief Tran Thien Khoi relegated much of the dirty work to his deputy chief, and together the two men brought any effective enforcement work to a halt. (178) Chief Khoi's partner was vividly described in a 1971 U.S. provost marshal's report:
He has an opium habit that costs approximately 10,000 piasters a day [$35] and visits a local opium den on a predictable schedule. He was charged with serious irregularities approximately two years ago but by payoffs and political influence, managed to have the charges dropped. When he took up his present position he was known to be nearly destitute, but is now wealthy and supporting two or three wives. (179)
The report described Chief Khoi himself as "a principal in the opium traffic" who had sabotaged efforts to set up a narcotics squad within the Fraud Repression Division. (180) Under Chief Khoi's inspired leadership, gold and opium smuggling at Tan Son Nhut became so blatant that in February 1971 a U.S. customs adviser reported that ". . . after three years of these meetings and countless directives being issued at all levels, the Customs operation at the airport has . . . reached a point to where the Customs personnel of Vietnam are little more than lackeys to the smugglers . . ." (181) The report went on to describe the partnership between customs officials and a group of professional smugglers who seem to run the airport:
Actually, the Customs Officers seem extremely anxious to please these smugglers and not only escort them past the examination counters but even accompany them out to the waiting taxis. This lends an air of legitimacy to the transaction so that there could be no interference on the part of an over zealous Customs Officer or Policeman who might be new on the job and not yet know what is expected of him. (182)
The most important smuggler at Tan Son Nhut Airport was a woman with impressive political connections:
"One of the biggest problems at the airport since the Advisers first arrived there and the subject of one of the first reports is Mrs. Chin, or Ba Chin or Chin Map which in Vietnamese is literally translated as "Fat Nine." This description fits her well as she is stout enough to be easily identified in any group.... This person heads a ring of 10 or 12 women who are present at every arrival of every aircraft from Laos and Singapore and these women are the recipients of most of the cargo that arrives on these flights as unaccompanied baggage. . . . When Mrs. Chin leaves the Customs area, she is like a mother duck with her brood as she leads the procession and is obediently followed by 8 to 10 porters who are carrying her goods to be loaded into the waiting taxis....
I recall an occasion . . . in July 1968 when an aircraft arrived from Laos.... I expressed an interest in the same type of Chinese medicine that this woman had received and already left with. One of the newer Customs officers opened up one of the packages and it was found to contain not medicine but thin strips of gold.... This incident was brought to the attention of the Director General but the Chief of Zone 2. . . . said that I was only guessing and that I could not accuse Mrs. Chin of any wrong doing. I bring this out to show that this woman is protected by every level in the GVN Customs Service." (183)
Although almost every functionary in the customs service receives payoffs from the smugglers, U.S. customs advisers believe that Chief Khoi's job is the most financially rewarding. While most division chiefs only receive payoffs from their immediate underlings, his enforcement powers enable him to receive kickbacks from every division of the customs service. Since even so minor an official as the chief collections officer at Tan Son Nhut cargo warehouse kicked back $22,000 a month to his superiors, Chief Khoi's income must have been enormous. (184)
In early 1971 U.S. customs advisers mounted a "strenuous effort" to have the deputy chief transferred, but Chief Khoi was extremely adept at protecting his associate. In March American officials in Vientiane learned that Rep. Pham Chi Thien would be boarding a flight for Saigon carrying four kilos of heroin and relayed the information to Saigon. When U.S. customs advisers asked the Fraud Repression Division to make the arrest (U.S. customs officials have no right to make arrests), Chief Khoi entrusted the seizure to his opium-smoking assistant. The "hero" was later decorated for this "accomplishment," and U.S. customs advisers, who were still trying to get him fired, or at least transferred, had to grit their teeth and attend a banquet in his honor. (185)
Frustrated by months of inaction by the U.S. mission and outright duplicity from the Vietnamese, members of the U.S. customs advisory team evidently decided to take their case to the American public. Copies of the unflattering customs advisory reports quoted above were leaked to the press and became the basis of an article that appeared on the front page of The New York Times on April 22, 1971, under the headline, "Saigon Airport a Smuggler's Paradise." (186)
The American response was immediate. Washington dispatched more customs advisers for duty at Tan Son Nhut, and the U.S. Embassy finally demanded action from the Thieu regime. Initially, however, the Saigon government was cool to the Embassy's demands for a cleanup of the customs' Fraud Repression Division. It was not until the smuggling issue became a political football between the Khiem and Thieu factions that the Vietnamese showed any interest in dealing with the problem.
Tempest in a Teapot:
The Thieu-Khiem Squabble
When the enormous political dividends of the Fraud Repression Division were added to
Khiem's other sources of power, such as the police and the Saigon port authority, the
result was all the strength necessary to form an independent political faction. Prime
Minister Khiem's reemergence as something of a political power in his own right seems
to have created tensions inside the Thieu organization and produced some heated political
infighting. As relations between the Thieu and Khiem factions soured, the smuggling issue became just another club to use against the competition. As one frank U.S. Embassy official in Saigon put it, "Our role essentially ends up allowing one faction to use U.S. pressure to force the other faction out of business. And," he added rather glumly, "the way these guys jump on each other so gleefully makes it look like they are really eager to cut themselves in on . . . an enormously lucrative traffic." (187)
When the Air Vietnam stewardess was arrested with 9.6 kilos of heroin, it was Prime Minister Khiem's office that issued an official statement confirming rumors that a proThieu representative was involved. (188) Furthermore, reliable lower house sources claim that the aggressiveness shown by Chief Khoi's Fraud Repression Division in investigating the case was politically motivated. President Thieu later retaliated. According to one Saigon press report, members of Prime Minister Khiem's cabinet "protested . . . President Thieu's remark that the smuggling involved many high ranking officials who smuggled through the Tan Son Nhut Airport where one of the Prime Minister's brothers was in control." (189) Despite the cabinet's protest, the director-general of customs was dismissed, and in late June Tran Thien Khoi left for a short vacation in Paris. On his return several weeks later, he was transferred to a less lucrative post in the Cholon Customs House. (190) His opium-smoking assistant was likewise transferred, and wound up in the Customs Library, a traditional dumping ground for those in disgrace. (191)
Three months later, the director-general of the National Police, one of Mrs. Khiem's relatives, resigned under pressure. The Saigon press reported that the director-general had been involved in the heroin traffic and was being dismissed as a part of the anti narcotics campaign. Prophetically, one Saigon daily had earlier reported that President Thieu was "taking advantage of the anti narcotics smuggling drive" to force officials out of office and to replace them with his own supporters. (192)Interestingly enough, the new police director-general is Col. Nguyen Khac Binh, a nephew of Mrs. Thieu. (193)
Despite all this political agitation over the narcotics traffic, heroin smuggling continues unabated. U.S. customs advisers have pointed out that commercial air flights have been only one of several routes used to bring narcotics into South Vietnam. Now that airport security has tightened up, smugglers have simply diverted narcotics shipment to other routes, particularly military air bases and coastal and river shipping. (194) Throughout 1971 unlimited quantities of heroin were readily available near every U.S. installation in Vietnam, and there was no appreciable rise in price.
The Mafia Comes to Asia
The flourishing heroin traffic among Vietnam-based G.I's was undoubtedly the most
important new market for Indochina's drug traffickers, but it was not the only one. As we
have already seen, increasingly insurmountable problems in the Mediterranean Basin had
forced the American Mafia and the Corsican syndicates of Marseilles to look to Southeast
Asia for new sources of heroin and morphine base. Faced with the alternative of finding a
new source of morphine base or going out of business, the Corsican syndicates of Marseilles turned to their associates in Southeast Asia for help. "There are people who
think that once the problem in Turkey is cleaned up, that's the end of the traffic," explains
John Warner, chief intelligence analyst for the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics. "But the Corsican's aren't stupid. They saw the handwriting on the wall and began to shift their
morphine base sources to Southeast Asia." (195) The Corsican narcotics syndicates based in Saigon and Vientiane had been supplying European drug factories with Southeast Asian morphine base for several years, and links with Marseilles were already well established. During the First Indochina War (1946- 1954) Corsican gangsters in Marseilles and Saigon cooperated closely in smuggling gold, currency, and narcotics between the two ports. In 1962 Corsican gangsters in Saigon reported that Paul Louis Levet, a Bangkok based syndicate leader, was supplying European heroin laboratories with morphine base from northern Thailand. (196) Furthermore, at least four Corsican charter airlines had played a key role in Southeast Asia's regional opium traffic from 1955 to 1965. Although they were forced out of business when the Laotian generals decided to cut themselves in for a bigger share of the profits in 1965, most of the Corsican's had remained in Southeast Asia. They had opened up businesses or taken jobs in Vientiane and Saigon to tide themselves over until something new opened up. (197)
When Gen. Edward G. Lansdale of the CIA returned to Saigon as a special assistant to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in 1965, he quickly learned that his old enemies, the Corsican's, were still in town. During the fighting between the French 2eme Bureau and the CIA back in 1955, the Corsican gangsters had been involved in several attempts on his life. "So I wouldn't have to look behind my back every time I walked down the street," Lansdale explained in a June 1971 interview, "I decided to have a meeting with the Corsican leaders. I told them I wasn't interested in doing any criminal investigations; I wasn't in Vietnam for that. And they agreed to leave me alone. We had some kind of a truce." General Lansdale can no longer recall much of what transpired at that meeting. He remembers that a large-busted French-Vietnamese named Helene took an active role in the proceedings, that the affair was amicable enough, but not much else. Lansdale later learned that the Corsican's were still heavily involved in the narcotics traffic, but since this was not his responsibility, he took no action. (198)
Through his friendship with the Corsican's, Conein has gained a healthy respect for them. "The Corsicans are smarter, tougher, and better organized that the Sicilians," says Conein. "They are absolutely ruthless and are the equal of anything we know about the Sicilians, but they hide their internal fighting better." Conein also learned that many Saigon syndicate leaders had relatives in the Marseilles underworld. These family relations play an important role in the international drug traffic, Conein feels, because much of the morphine base used in Marseilles's heroin laboratories comes from Saigon. Corsican smugglers in Saigon purchase morphine base through Corsican contacts in Vientiane and ship it on French merchant vessels to relatives and friends in Marseilles, where it is processed into heroin. (200) "From what I know of them," says Conein, "it will be absolutely impossible to cut off the dope traffic. You can cut it down, but you can never stop it, unless you can get to the growers in the hills." (201)
Police officials also point out that one of Ky's strongest supporters in the Air Force, Transport Division Commander Col. Phan Phung Tien, is close to many Corsican gangsters and has been implicated in the smuggling of drugs between Laos and Vietnam.
From 1965 to 1967 Gen. Lansdale's Senior Liaison Office worked closely with Premier Ky's administration, and the general himself was identified as one of the young premier's stronger supporters among U.S. mission personnel. (203) One can only wonder whether Conein's and Lansdale's willingness to grant the Corsicans a "truce" and overlook their growing involvement in the American heroin traffic might not have been motivated by political considerations, i.e., their fear of embarrassing Premier Ky.
Just as most of the Corsican gangsters now still active in Saigon and Vientiane came to Indochina for the first time as camp followers of the French Expeditionary Corps in the late 1940's and early 1950's, the American Mafia followed the U.S. army to Vietnam in 1965. Like any group of intelligent investors, the Mafia is always looking for new financial "frontiers," and when the Vietnam war began to heat up, many of its more entrepreneurial young members were bankrolled by the organization and left for Saigon. Attracted to Vietnam by lucrative construction and service contracts, the mafiosi concentrated on ordinary graft and kickbacks at first, but later branched out into narcotics smuggling as they built up their contacts in Hong Kong and Indochina.
Probably the most important of these pioneers was Frank Carmen Furci, a young mafioso from Tampa, Florida. Although any ordinary businessman would try to hide this kind of family background from his staid corporate associates, Frank Furci found that it impressed the corrupt sergeants, shady profiteers, and Corsican gangsters who were his friends and associates in Saigon. He told them all proudly, "My father is the Mafia boss of Tampa, Florida." (204) (Actually, Frank's father, Dominick Furci, is only a middle ranking lieutenant in the powerful Florida-based family. Santo Trafficante, Jr., is, of course, the Mafia boss of Tampa. (205) Furci arrived in Vietnam in 1965 with good financial backing and soon became a key figure in the systematic graft and corruption that began to plague U.S. military clubs in Vietnam as hundreds of thousands of G.I's poured into the war zone. (206) A lengthy U.S. Senate investigation later exposed the network of graft, bribes, and kickbacks that Furci and his fellow profiteers employed to cheat military clubs and their G.I customers out of millions of dollars. At the bottom of the system were 500,000 bored and homesick G.I's who found Vietnamese rice too sticky and the strong fish sauce repugnant.
The clubs were managed by senior N.C.O's, usually sergeant majors, who had made the army their career and were considered dedicated, trustworthy men. While the officers were preoccupied with giving orders and running a war, the sergeants were left with responsibility for all of the minor details involved in managing one of the largest restaurant and night club chains in the world-ordering refrigerators, hiring bands, selecting liquor brands, and negotiating purchasing orders for everything from slot machines to peanuts. Accounting systems were shoddy, and the entire system was pathetically vulnerable to well-organized graft. Seven sergeants who had served together in the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division at Augsburg, Germany, during the early 1960's had discovered this weakness and exploited it fully, stealing up to $40,000 a month from N.C.O clubs. (207)
At the top of the system were the civilian entrepreneurs-Frank Furci and his competitor, William J. Crum-who worked as agents for a host of American companies and paid the sergeants lavish kickbacks on huge Army purchase orders for kitchen equipment, snacks, liquor , etc.
Furci was also heavily involved in the currency black market. A U.S. Senate investigation of illegal currency manipulations in Vietnam later showed that he had exchanged $99,200 through a single unauthorized money changer at the black market rate of 300 or 400 piasters to the dollar, considerably more than the official rate of 118 piasters. (210)
Unfortunately for Furci, his competitor, William J. Crum, was also aware of these illegal transactions, and he decided to use this knowledge to force Furci out of business. Frank Furci was simply outclassed by the crippled, half-blind William Crum, an old China hand who has made a profit on almost every war in Asia since 1941. Attracted by the economic potential of the growing Southeast Asia conflict, Crum came out of his million dollar retirement in Hong Kong and moved to Saigon in 1962. (211)
While the massive U.S. military buildup in 1965 had attracted other commercial agents as well, Crum seemed particularly resentful of Furci, whose competing line of liquor brands, slot machines, and kitchen equipment had "stolen" $2.5 million worth of his business. (212) Crum passed on information about Furci's illegal currency transactions to the Fraud Repression Division of the Vietnamese customs service through a U.S. army general whom Crum was paying $1,000 a month for protection. (213) Vietnamese customs raided Furci's offices in July 1967, found evidence to support the accusations, and later fined him $45,000. (214) Unable to pay such a large fine, Furci left Saigon. Crum later bragged that he had "paid for" the raid that had eliminated his competitor. (215)
Furci moved to Hong Kong and in August opened a restaurant named the San Francisco Steak House with nominal capital of $100,000. (216) More importantly, Furci was instrumental in the formation of Maradern Ltd., a company that the Augsburg sergeants who managed N.C.O clubs in Vietnam used to increase illegal profits from the military clubs. Although Furci's name does not appear on any of the incorporation papers, it seems that he was the "silent partner" in the classic Mafia sense of the term. (217)
Maradem Ltd, was not a wholesale supplier or retail outlet, but a broker that used its control over N.C.O clubs and base mess halls to force legitimate wholesalers to pay a fixed percentage of their profits in order to do business. (218) Maradem's competitors were gradually "squeezed out" of business, and in its first year of operation the company did $1,210,000 worth of business with NCO clubs in Vietnam. (219)
By 1968 Frank Furci had gained three years of valuable experience in the shadow world of Hong Kong and Indochina; he was friendly with powerful Corsican syndicate leaders in Saigon and had the opportunity to form similar relationships with chiu chau bosses in Hong Kong. (220) Thus, perhaps it is not too surprising that the boss himself, Santo Trafficante, Jr., did Furci the honor of visiting him in Hong Kong in 1968. Accompanied by Frank's father, Dominick Furci, Trafficante was questioned by Hong Kong authorities regarding the purpose of his visit, and according to a U.S. Senate investigation, he explained that "They were traveling around the world together at the time. They stopped to visit Furci, Frank Furci in Hong Kong and to visit his restaurant" (221)
After a leisurely stopover, Trafficante proceeded to Saigon, (222) where, according to U.S. Embassy sources, he met with some prominent Corsican gangsters. (223) Trafficante was not the first of Lansky's chief lieutenants to visit Hong Kong. In April 1965 John Pullman, Lansky's courier and financial expert, paid an extended visit to Hong Kong, where he reportedly investigated the narcotics and gambling rackets. (224)
Although the few Mafia watchers who are aware of Trafficante's journey to Asia have always been mystified by it, there is good reason to believe that it was a response to the crisis in the Mediterranean drug traffic and an attempt to secure new sources of heroin for Mafia distributors inside the United States. With almost 70 Percent of the world's illicit opium supply in the Golden Triangle, skilled heroin chemists in Hong Kong, and entrenched Corsican syndicates in Indochina, Southeast Asia was a logical choice.
Soon after Trafficante's visit to Hong Kong, a Filipino courier ring started delivering Hong Kong heroin to Mafia distributors in the United States. In 1970 U.S. narcotics agents arrested many of these couriers. Subsequent interrogation revealed that the ring had successfully smuggled one thousand kilos of pure heroin into the United States-the equivalent of 10 to 20 percent of America's annual consumption.
The Consequences of Complicity:
A Generation of Junkies
In the face of the twin horrors of the Vietnam drug problem-the heroin epidemic among
G.I's and the growing exports to the United States what has been the response from
American diplomatic and military officials in Vietnam? On the whole, their reaction has
been a combination of embarrassment and apathy. Embarrassment, because they are all
aware to some degree, even though they will not admit it, that elements of the
Vietnamese government they have been praising and defending all these years are
pushing heroin to American G.I's Apathy because most of them feel that anybody who
uses heroin deserves what he gets. Almost all U.S. officials knit their brows, cluck their
tongues, and try to look very, very concerned whenever the heroin problem is mentioned,
but most simply could not care less. They are in Vietnam to beat the V.C, smash the
Communists, and defend Democracy; the fact that some of Democracy's proteges are
pushing heroin is something they would rather not think about. In the early years of the Diem administration, American pronouncements about its goals in Vietnam had an almost naively innocent quality about them. President Diem was seen as a middle path of virtuous democracy between the Viet Minh's brutal "Communist dictatorship" on the left and the corrupt, dope dealing Binh Xuyen pirates on the right. When Diem refused to fire his corrupt brother, who had revived the endemic corruption so characteristic of the Binh Xuyen, the U.S. mission helped engineer Diem's downfall in the hope that an honest, efficient government would emerge from the confusion. But as Vietnam's politics proceeded to plunge into chaos and Saigon's security reached the critical level, the U.S. mission saw the light and prayed for the return of another "strong man."
The answer to the American prayer was the Thieu-Ky administration. Although Thieu and Ky devoted too much of their time to fighting each other, the Americans have generally been pleased with their ability to govern with a firm, if despotic, hand. Having learned that this type of heavy-handed government is the only kind compatible with American interests, U.S. officials were hardly going to protest when the close associates of both leaders were involved in systematic corruption, including the narcotics traffic. As long as the narcotics traffic was directed exclusively at Chinese and Vietnamese opium smokers, U.S. congressional complaints about corruption were muted. When in 1968 Senator Albert Gruening accused Air Vice-Marshal Ky of smuggling opium, the U.S. Embassy in Saigon issued a firm, if inaccurate, denial, and the matter was forgotten. (228)But when South Vietnam's narcotics syndicates started cultivating the GI heroin market, the problem was not dismissed so cavalierly. After NBC's Saigon correspondent accused President Thieu's chief adviser, General Quang, of being "the biggest pusher" of heroin to G.I's in Vietnam (229) the U.S. Embassy "filed a top level report to Washington saying it can find no evidence to support recent charges that President Nguyen Van Thieu and Vice-President Nguyen Cao Ky were involved in or profiting from the drug trade." Simultaneously, U.S. officials defended Thieu and Ky publicly by leaking the Embassy report to members of the Saigon press corps in an off the-record background briefing. (230)
According to a U.S. Embassy official assigned to the drug problem, the U.S. mission "can find no evidence" because it studiously avoids looking for any. It is an unwritten rule among Embassy officials that nobody can mention the names of high-ranking Vietnamese during discussions of the heroin traffic. The CIA avoids gathering information on high-level involvement, and even in its closed-door sessions with high Embassy officials discusses only minor pushers and addicts.
The U.S. mission's handling of the accusations concerning Gen. Ngo Dzu's involvement in the heroin trade is another case in point. Beginning in January 1971, the U.S. army's Criminal Investigation Division (C.I.D) began gathering detailed information on Gen. Ngo Dzu's involvement in GI heroin traffic. Although these reports were sent to the U.S. Embassy through the proper channels, the U.S. mission did absolutely nothing. (231) When U.S. Congressman Robert H. Steele told a congressional subcommittee in July 1971 that "U.S. military authorities have provided Ambassador Bunker with hard intelligence that one of the chief traffickers is Gen. Ngo Dzu, the commander of 11 Corps, (232) the U.S. mission did its best to discredit the Congressman. Rather than criticizing Gen. Ngo Dzu for pushing heroin, the senior U.S. adviser for 11 Corps declared publicly, "There is no information available to me that in any shape, manner or fashion would substantiate the charges Congressman Steele has made." (233) In light of the CID report quoted earlier, the U.S. mission has apparently decided to use any means possible to protect the Thieu regime from investigation of its involvement in the heroin trade.
While the U.S. Embassy has done its best to shield the Thieu regime from criticism, the Nixon administration and the U.S. military command have tried to defuse public concern over the GI heroin epidemic by minimizing the extent of the problem. The military offers two main arguments to justify its official optimism: (1) the definitive urinalysis test administered to every Vietnam GI just before he returns to the United States has shown that no more than 5.5 percent of all army personnel in Vietnam are heroin users; (2) since only 8.0 percent of the GI addicts in Vietnam inject, or "mainline," the great majority who smoke or snort heroin are not seriously addicted and will have no problem kicking the habit once they return home. (234)
Unfortunately, the army's first supposition is not true. On June 22, 1971, the U.S. military command ordered every GI leaving Vietnam to submit to a sophisticated test that can detect significant amounts of morphine in the body. Any GI who tested positively was confined to a special detoxification center and could not be allowed to return home until he had "dried out" and could pass the test. From the very first, G.I's started devising ingenious ways of belting the system. Supervision of the testing centers has been notoriously lax, and many serious addicts pass by bringing a buddy's "clean" urine to the test and substituting it for their own. (235) Since the urinalysis can only detect morphine in the body if the addict has used heroin within the last four or five days, many addicts dry themselves out voluntarily before taking the test. (236) Army nurses have seen addicts who are in the midst of an agonizing withdrawal pass the test. (237) Contrary to popular myth, addicts can control their intake to some extent, and often alternate "sprees" with brief periods of abstinence lasting up to a week, especially the last few days before payday. (238)
Almost every American soldier in Vietnam knows the exact date of his scheduled return to the "world," and most keep a running countdown, which often includes hours and minutes as the time gets shorter. Every G.I's D.E.R.O'S (Date of Expected Return from Overseas) has an historic, even religious quality about it, and the thought of having to stay an extra week, or even a few days more is absolutely intolerable. Most G.I addicts accept the pain of voluntary withdrawal in order to pass the test and get on their scheduled flight. Those who are too weak to make it on their own volunteer for the base "amnesty" program.
Many army physicians report a disproportionately high percentage of patients with only a few weeks left in their tours. (239) When one GI was asked why he and his buddies had temporarily given up heroin, he replied, "The magic word, the absolute magic word, is D.E.R.O'S." (240) The short, painful detoxification simply flushes the morphine out of the system but in no way ends the deep psychological craving for heroin. When these men return home they are still "addicts" in every sense of the word.
The army's suggestion that addicts who smoke heroin in Vietnam are somehow less addicted than those who "mainline" back in the United States is patently absurd. While it is true that injection is more potent than smoking, Vietnamese heroin is so pure (90 to 98 percent pure compared to 2 to 10 percent pure in the United States) that smoking one vial of Vietnamese heroin is equivalent to five or six injections of the cut heroin available in the United States. (241) (Almost no Hong Kong addicts "mainline," but that city has the most serious heroin addiction problem in the world.) Most GI addicts in Vietnam have habits that would cost them over two hundred dollars a day back in the United States.
The army makes its absurd claim because it is not willing to admit the catastrophic impact of GI addiction in Vietnam on the worsening heroin crisis back in the United States. Despite President Nixon's promise that "all our servicemen must be accorded the right to rehabilitation," the U.S. military command in Vietnam is discharging between one thousand and two thousand GI addicts a month. These are men who are declared of negligible value to the United States Army" after failing the urinalysis test twice. Although every GI in Vietnam has been guaranteed the right to declare himself an addict and volunteer for treatment, the army's generosity does not often extend to two-time losers. Once a commanding officer decides that a two-time loser is a hopeless case, the GI addict is flown back to the United States and discharged almost immediately Y. (242)
Virtually none of these addicts are given any follow-up treatme t. In August 1971 the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Public Health, Rep. Paul Rogers, declared that "Veterans Administration hospitals have handled only three referrals out of 12,000 servicemen on heroin . . . in Vietnam. " (243) Left to fend for themselves, many of these men are returning to their home towns as confirmed addicts and potential pushers. A large percentage of the returning veterans are middle Americans from communities that have always been completely free from heroin addiction and regarded it as a problem unique to the black ghetto. Organized crime had never established a foothold in white middle-class communities, and most law enforcement experts considered them immune to heroin. When GI addicts started coming home to middle America, however, drug experts were frightened that they might be carriers of the heroin plague. In June 1971 one specialist said, "Each addict makes at least four more. He cannot bear his habit alone and is sure to seek recruits even if he is not himself the pusher. This is the emergency we now face. (244)
In Vietnam heroin use is so commonplace among GIs that the traditional middle-class American taboo toward the drug has been broken. A U.S. army survey administered to 1,000 army returnees in March 1971 showed that while only 11 percent had used heroin regularly in Vietnam, 22 percent had tried it at least once. (245) For these men heroin is just another narcotic like marijuana, pep pills, or alcohol. In Vietnam soldiers handle heroin so frequently-buying it for themselves, picking up some for a buddy on duty, or selling it for profit-that the idea of pushing heroin once they get home seems natural. "I heard from a few guys who got off it," said one twenty-two-year-old middle American at the Long Binh treatment center. "They said they were still off 'cause it was too expensive, and anyway, they were scared to use the needle. But they said they wanted me to send 'em some scag [heroin] so they could sell it and make some money. You know a jug [vial] over here only costs two dollars, but you can get a hundred dollars for it back in the world." (246) Traveling through Asia on an investigative tour, U.S. Congressman John M. Murphy found "numerous examples of the slick G.I who gets discharged, goes home, then comes back to set himself up in the drug traffic." (247)
According to U.S. narcotics agents, one of the more important heroin exporters in Thailand was an ex-serviceman, William Henry Jackson, who managed the Five Star Bar in Bangkok, a hangout for black G.I's. Working with other ex-servicemen, Jackson recruited active duty soldiers going home as couriers and used local G.I's "to ship heroin to the United States through the army and air force postal system. (248)One U.S. agent who has arrested several of these ex-GI drug dealers says that, "Most of these guys say to themselves, 'Just as soon as I get $100,000 for a gas station, home, boat, and car in California I'm going to quit.' Most of them are just regular guys." On April 5, 1971, U.S. customs officials in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, seized 7.7 kilos of Double U-0 Globe brand heroin in a package mailed from Bangkok, Thailand, through the U.S. military postal system. (249) It had a retail value estimated at $1.75 million. During March and April 1971 U.S. customs seized 248 pieces of mail containing narcotics in the army and air force postal systems. (250)
As the number of American troops in Vietnam rapidly dwindles, there will be a natural tendency to forget the whole nightmarish experience of the Vietnam heroin epidemic. In time the Nixon administration may even claim the end of the GI heroin problem as one of the more solid accomplishments of its Vietnamization program. Despite these fervent hopes, it will probably be a long time before the memory of the Vietnam heroin epidemic can take its richly deserved place in the garbage can of history. For returning GI addicts have come home as carriers of the disease and are afflicting hundreds of communities with the heroin virus. The Golden Triangle heroin laboratories, which had been supplying American soldiers in Vietnam since late 1969, are not going out of business. When the number of G.I's in Vietnam declined drastically in 1971, Corsican and Chinese syndicates started shipping Laotian heroin directly to the United States. In April 1971 the Laotian Ambassador to France was apprehended in Paris with sixty kilos of Double U-0 Globe brand heroin destined for the United States. (251) On November 11, 1971, a Filipino diplomat and a Bangkok Chinese merchant were arrested at the Lexington Hotel in New York City with 15.5 kilos of Double U-0 Globe brand shortly after they arrived from Vientiane. (252) Heroin is following the G.I's home.
World War I produced a "lost generation" of writers, poets, and artists. World War II gave us a generation of collegians and suburbanites. The Vietnam War seems to be fathering a generation of junkies.
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Hong Kong: Heir to the Heroin Traffic 183s
notes here
p320
https://ia601404.us.archive.org/22/items/pdfy-MiSTDFMs_BBF8W9B/52_Alfred_McCoy___The_politics_of_heroin_in_Southeast_Asia.pdf
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