The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
1. Sicily: Home of the Mafia
AT THE END of World War II, there was an excellent chance that heroin addiction could be eliminated in the United States. The wartime security measures designed to prevent infiltration of foreign spies and sabotage to naval installations made smuggling into the United States virtually impossible. Most American addicts were forced to break their habits during the war, and consumer demand just about disappeared. Moreover, the international narcotics syndicates were weakened by the war and could have been decimated with a minimum of police effort. (1)
During the 1930s most of America's heroin had come from China's refineries centered in Shanghai and Tientsin. This was supplemented by the smaller amounts produced in Marseille by the Corsican syndicates and in the Middle East by the notorious Eliopoulos brothers. Mediterranean shipping routes were disrupted by submarine warfare during the war, and the Japanese invasion of China interrupted the flow of shipments to the United States from the Shanghai and Tientsin heroin laboratories. The last major wartime seizure took place in 1940, when forty-two kilograms of Shanghai heroin were discovered in San Francisco. During the war only tiny quantities of heroin were confiscated, and laboratory analysis by federal officials showed that its quality was constantly declining; by the end of the war most heroin was a crude Mexican product, less than 3 percent pure. And a surprisingly high percentage of the samples were fake.' As has already been mentioned, most addicts were forced to undergo an involuntary withdrawal from heroin, and at the end of the war the Federal Bureau of Narcotics reported that there were only 20,000 addicts in all of America. (2)
After the war, Chinese traffickers had barely reestablished their heroin labs when Mao Tse-tung's peasant armies captured Shanghai and drove them out of China. (3) The Eliopoulos brothers had retired from the trade with the advent of the war, and a postwar narcotics indictment in New York served to discourage any thoughts they may have had of returning to it. (4) The hold of the Corsican syndicates in Marseille was weakened, since their most powerful leaders had made the tactical error of collaborating with the Nazi Gestapo, and so were either dead or in exile. Most significantly, Sicily's Mafia had been smashed almost beyond repair by two decades of Mussolini's police repression. It was barely holding onto its control of local protection money from farmers and shepherds. (5)
With American consumer demand reduced to its lowest point in fifty years and the international syndicates in disarray, the U.S. government had a unique opportunity to eliminate heroin addiction as a major American social problem. However, instead of delivering the death blow to these criminal syndicates, the U.S. government-through the Central Intelligence Agency and its wartime predecessor, the OSS-created a situation that made it possible for the SicilianAmerican Mafia and the Corsican underworld to revive the international narcotics traffic.(6)
In Sicily the OSS initially allied with the Mafia to assist the Allied forces in their 1943 invasion. Later, the alliance was maintained in order to check the growing strength of the Italian Communist party on the island. In Marseille the CIA joined forces with the Corsican underworld to break the hold of the Communist Party over city government and to end two dock strikes--one in 1947 and the other in 1950-that threatened efficient operation of the Marshall Plan and the First Indochina War. (7) Once the United States released the Mafia's corporate genius, Lucky Luciano, as a reward for his wartime services, the international drug trafficking syndicates were back in business within an alarmingly short period of time. And their biggest customer? The United States, the richest nation in the world, the only one of the great powers that had come through the horrors of World War II relatively untouched, and the country that bad the biggest potential for narcotics distribution. For, in spite of their forced withdrawal during the war years, America's addicts could easily be won back to their heroin persuasion. For America itself had long had a drug problem, one that dated back to the nineteentb century.
One of the Dulles Brothers was very involved in the OSS. I cannot remember if it was Allen Foster Dulles or the other one.
CT
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