The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
CIA paramilitary operations in northwestern Laos began in 1959, but they were poorly planned and achieved far less than the ambitious Meo program in the northeast. During the five-month battle for Nam Tha City in early 1962, a team of twelve U.S. Green Berets were active in the area as advisers to the beleaguered rightist army. What little work they did with the local hill tribes was cut short in May 1962 when the frightened garrison abandoned the city and retreated toward the Mekong River in complete disorder.(174)
Afraid that the Communists were about to overrun all of Nam Tha Province, the CIA assigned William Young to the area in mid 1962. Young was instructed to build up a hill tribe commando force for operations in the tri-border area since regular Laotian army troops were ill-suited for military operations in the rugged mountains. Nam Tha's ethnic complexity and the scope of clandestine operations made paramilitary work in this province far more demanding than Meo operations in the northeast. (175)
Nam Tha Province probably has more different ethnic minorities per square mile than any other place on earth, having been a migration crossroads for centuries for tribes from southern China and Tibet. Successive waves of Meo and Yao tribesmen began migrating down the Red River valley into North Vietnam in the late 1700s, reaching Nam Tha in the mid nineteenth century. (176) Nam Tha also marks the extreme southeastern frontier for advancing Tibeto-Burman tribes, mainly Akha and Lahu, who have been moving south, with glacierlike speed, through the China-Burma borderlands for centuries. Laotian officials believe that there may be as many as thirty different ethnic minorities living in the province.
Nam Tha Province itself was tacked onto Laos in the late nineteenth century when Europe's imperial real estate brokers decided that the Mekong River was the most convenient dividing line between British Burma and French Indochina. Jutting awkwardly into Thailand, Burma, and China, it actually looks on maps as if it had been pasted onto Laos. There are very few Lao in Nam Tha, and most of the lowland valleys are inhabited by Lu, a Tai- peaking people who were once part of a feudal kingdom centered in southern Yunnan. With thirty tribal dialects and languages, most of them mutually unintelligible, and virtually no Lao population, Nam Tha Province had been a source of endless frustration for both French and American counterinsurgency specialists.
With his knowledge of local languages and his remarkable rapport with the mountain minorities, William Young was uniquely qualified to overcome these difficulties. Speaking four of the most important languages-Lu, Lao, Meo, and Lahu-Young could deal directly with most of the tribesmen in Nam Tha. And since Young had grown up in Lahu and Shan villages in Burma, he actually enjoyed the long months of solitary work among the hill tribes, which might have strained the nerves of less acculturated agents. Rather than trying to create a tribal warlord on the Vang Pao Young decided to build a pan-tribal army under the command of a joint council composed of one or two leaders from every tribe. Theoretically the council was supposed to have final authority on all matters, but in reality Young controlled all the money and made all the decisions. However, council meetings did give various tribal leaders a sense of participation and greatly increased the efficiency of paramilitary operations. Most importantly, Young managed to develop his pan-tribal council and weaken the would-be Yao warlord, Chao Mai, without alienating him from the program. In fact, Chao Mai remained one of Young's strongest supporters, and his Yao tribesmen comprised the great majority of the CIA mercenary force in Nam Tha. (177)
Although his relationships with hill tribe leaders were quite extraordinary, William Young still used standard CIA procedures for "opening up" an area to paramilitary operations. But to organize the building of runways, select base sites, and perform all the other essential tasks connected with forging a counterguerrilla infrastructure, Young recruited a remarkable team of sixteen Shan and Lahu operatives he called "the Sixteen Musketeers," whose leader was a middle-aged Shan nationalist leader, "General" U Ba Thein. (178)
With the team's assistance, Young began "opening up" the province in mid 1962. By late 1963 he had built up a network of some twenty dirt landing strips and a guerrilla force of six hundred Yao commandos and several hundred additional troops from the other tribes. But the war in northwestern Laos had intensified and large-scale refugee relocations had begun in late 1962 when Chao Mai and several thousand of his Yao followers abandoned their villages in the mountains between Nam Tha City and Muong Sing, both of Which were under Pathet Lao control, and moved south to Ban Na Woua and Nam Thouei, refugee centers established by the Sixteen Musketeers. (179) (See Map 9, page 303, for locations of these towns.) The outbreak of fighting several months later gradually forced tribal mercenaries and their families, particularly the Yao, out of the Pathet Lao zone and into refugee camps. (180)
Instead of directing rice drops and refugee operations personally, Young delegated the responsibility to a pistol-packing community development worker named Joseph Flipse (who, like Edgar Buell, was an IVS volunteer). While Flipse maintained a humanitarian showplace at Nam Thouei complete with a hospital, school, and supply warehouse, William Young and the Sixteen Musketeers opened a secret base at Nam Yu, only three miles away, which served as CIA headquarters for cross-border intelligence forays deep into southern China. (181) The Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde relationship between Nam Thouei and Nam Yu in northwestern Laos was very similar to the arrangement at Sam Thong and Long Tieng in northeastern Laos: for almost a decade reporters and visiting Congressmen were taken to Sam Thong to see all the wonderful things Edgar Buell was doing to save the poor Meo from Communist genocide, but were flatly denied access to CIA headquarters at Long Tieng. (182)
However, just as the operations were getting under way, CIA policy decisions and local opium politics combined to kill this enthusiasm and weaken the overall effectiveness of bill tribe operations. A series of CIA personnel transfers in 1964 and 1965 probably did more damage than anything else. When Young became involved in a heated jurisdictional dispute with Thai intelligence officers in October 1964, the CIA pulled him out of Nam Tha and sent him to Washington, D.C., for a special training course. High-ranking CIA bureaucrats in Washington and Vientiane had long been dissatisfied with the paucity of "Intel-Coms" (intelligence communications) and in-depth reports they were getting from Young, and apparently used his squabble with the Thais as a pretext for placing a more senior agent in charge of operations in Nam Tha. After Young's first replacement, an operative named Objibway, died in a helicopter crash in the summer of 1965, Anthony Poe drew the assignment. (183)
Where William Young had used his skill as a negotiator and his knowledge of minority cultures to win compliance from hill tribe leaders, Anthony Poe preferred to use bribes, intimidation, and threats. The hill tribe leaders, particularly Chao Mai, were alienated by Poe's tactics and became less aggressive. Poe tried to rekindle their enthusiasm for combat by raising salaries and offering cash bonuses for Pathet Lao ears. (184) But as a former USAID official put it, "The pay was constantly going up, and the troops kept moving slower." (185)
Gen. Ouane Rattikone's monopolization of the opium trade in Military Region 1, northwestern Laos, dealt another major blow to Chao Mai's enthusiasm for the war effort. Chao Mai had inherited control over the Yao opium trade from his father, and during the early 1960s he was probably the most important opium merchant in Nam Tha Province. Every year Chao Mai sold the harvest to the Chinese merchants in Muong Sing and Ban Houei Sai who acted as brokers for the Corsican charter airlines. With his share of the profits, Chao Mai financed a wide variety of social welfare projects among the Yao,. from which he derived his power and prestige. However, when General Ouane took over the Laotian opium trade in 1965, he forced all of his competitors, big and little, out of business. One USAID official who worked in the area remembers that all the hotels and shops in Ban Houci Sai were crowded with opium buyers from Vientiane and Luang Prabang following the 1963 and 1964 harvest seasons. But in 1965 the hotels and shops were empty and local merchants explained that, "there was a big move on by Ouane to consolidate the opium business." General Ouane's strategy for forcing his most important competitor out of business was rather simple-, after Chao Mai had finished delivering most of the Yao opium to General Ouane's broker in Ban Houei Sai, who had promised to arrange air transport to Vientiane, the Lao army officer simply refused to pay for the opium. There was absolutely nothing Chao Mai could do, and he was forced to accept the loss. Needless to say, this humiliating incident further weakened his control over the Yao, and by the time he died in April 1967 most of his followers had moved to Nam Keung where his brother Chao La was sitting out the war on the banks of the Mekong. (186)
After Chao Mai's death, Anthony Poe tried in vain to revitalize tribal commando operations by appointing his brother, Chao La, commander of Yao paramilitary forces. Although Chao La accepted the position and participated in the more spectacular raids, such as the recapture of Nam Tha city in October 1967, he has little interest in the tedium of day-to-day operations which are the essence of counterguerrilla warfare. Unlike Chao Mai, who was a politician and a soldier, Chao La is a businessman whose main interests are his lumber mill, gunrunning and the narcotics traffic. In fact, there are some American officials who believe that Chao La only works with the CIA to get guns (which he uses to buy opium from Burmese smugglers) and political protection for his opium refineries. (187)
Although William Young was removed from command of paramilitary operations in 1964, the CIA had ordered him back to Nam Tha in August 1965 to continue supervising the Yao and Lahu intelligence teams, which were being sent deep into Yunnan Province, China. Wedged between China and Burma, Nam Tha Province is an ideal staging ground for cross-border intelligence patrols operating in southern China. The arbitrary boundaries between Burma, China, and Laos have absolutely no meaning for the hill tribes, who have been moving back and forth across the frontiers for centuries in search of new mountains and virgin forests, As a result of these constant migrations, many of the hill tribes that populate the Burma-China borderlands are also found in Nam Tha Province. (188) Some of the elderly Lahu and Yao living in Nam Tha were actually born in Yunnan, and many of the younger generation have relatives there. Most importantly, both of these tribes have a strong sense of ethnic identity, and individual tribesmen view themselves as members of larger Yao and Lahu communities that transcend national boundaries. (189) Because of the ethnic overlap between all three countries, CIA-trained Lahu and Yao agents from Nam Tha could cross the Chinese border and wander around the mountains of Yunnan tapping telephone lines and monitoring road traffic without being detected.
After a year of recruiting and training agents, William Young had begun sending the first Lahu and Yao teams into China in 1963. Since the CIA and the Pentagon were quite concerned about the possibility of Chinese military intervention in Indochina, any intelligence on military activity in southern China was valued and the cross-border operations were steadily expanded. By the time Young quit the CIA in 1967, he had opened three major radio posts within Burma's Shan States, built a special training camp that was graduating thirty-five agents every two months, and sent hundreds of teams deep into Yunnan. While Young's linguistic abilities and his understanding of hill tribe culture had made him a capable paramilitary organizer, it was his family's special relationship with the Lahu that enabled him to organize the cross-border operations. The Sixteen Musketeers who recruited most of the first agents were Lahu, the majority of the tribesmen who volunteered for these dangerous missions were Labu, and all the radio posts inside the Shan States were manned by Lahu tribesmen. (190)
This special relationship with the Lahu tribe dates back to the turn of the century, when the Rev. William M. Young opened an American Baptist Mission in the Shan States at Kengtung City and began preaching the gospel in the marketplace. While the Buddhist townspeople ignored Reverend Young, crowds of curious Lahu tribesmen, who had come down from the surrounding hills to trade in the market, gathered to listen. None of the Lahu were particularly interested in the God named Jesus Christ of which he spoke, but were quite intrigued by the possibility that Reverend Young himself might be God. A popular Lahu prophet had once told his followers:
"We may not see God, no matter how we search for him now. But, when the time is fulfilled, God will search for us and will enter our homes. There is a sign and when it appears, we will know that God is coming. The sign is that white people on white horses will bring us the Scriptures ofGod." (191)
Reverend Young was a white American, wore a white tropical suit, and like many Baptist missionaries, carried his Bible wherever he went. As word of the White God spread through the hills, thousands of Lahu flocked to Kengtung, where Reverend Young baptized them on the spot. When Reverend Young reported 4,419 baptisms for the year 1905-1906 (an all-time conversion record for the Burma Baptist Mission), mission officials became suspicious and a delegation was sent to investigate. Although the investigators concluded that Reverend Young was pandering to pagan myths, Baptist congregations in the United States were impressed by his statistical success and had already started sending large contributions to "gather in the harvest." Bowing to financial imperatives, the Burma Baptist Mission left the White God free to wander the bills. (192)
After twenty years of work in Kengtung, Reverend Young turned the mission over to younger missionaries and carried the gospel on to the Lahu of Yunnan. Lahu tribesmen from Yunnan had been coming to Kengtung for a number of years to 4 see the White God, and Reverend Young was eager to harvest the waiting souls in China. After opening two missions in western Yunnan and converting thousands, he retired and left Burma in 1932. When he died four years later one of his fellow missionaries hailed him as a pioneer who single-handedly "pushed back the frontiers of Baptist Mission work to cover an area of 100,000 square miles." (193)
His sons remained to carry on his work, and in 1935 Harold Young established a mission in the Wa States. He had inherited his father's semidivine charisma and quickly added thousands of Wa to the lists of instant Christians. (194) After World War II, the newly independent Burmese government became suspicious of his relations with minority dissidents and he was forced to leave the country. He moved to Chiangmai, Thailand, where he became curator of the local zoo. (195) Despite the superficiality of many Lahu conversions, two generations of missionary work by the Young family left behind a strong church; in 1950 the American Baptist Mission estimated that out of sixty-six thousand Lahu in northeastern Burma, twenty-eight thousand were Christians. (196)
Harold's move to Chiangmai marked the beginning of the second chapter in the history of the Young family's special relationship with the Lahu tribe. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the CIA rearmed remnants of the Nationalist Chinese army who had fled into the Shan States and launched three abortive invasions into western Yunnan on the theory that the Chinese masses would rally to their banners. The CIA needed detailed information on Chinese troop movements in Yunnan's border areas and hired Harold Young to gather this intelligence. Young contacted a Shan Christian in Kengtung named U Ba Thein, and asked him to organize a team of Lahu Christians for intelligence work inside China. Since U Ba Thein had commanded a Lahu paramilitary unit for British intelligence during World War II, he was more than competent to direct the operation. U Ba Thein recruited a group of Christian Lahu and sent them to Chiangmai where Harold Young's eldest son, Gordon, trained them in radio transmission and repairs. Once the training was completed, they hiked back into the Shan States and began the operation in the Burma-China borderlands, paying particular attention to a Chinese telecommunications base at Meng-Lien that was then under construction. All the intelligence information was radioed back to Chiangmai in Lahu, translated by Gordon Young and handed over to a local CIA operative who was working undercover as the American vice-consul. (197)
The Lahu intelligence operations continued for almost six years until the outbreak of the Shan national revolution forced U Ba Thein to leave Burma in 1958. During the last twenty-five years of their colonial rule, the British had separated the Shan States from the rest of Burma and administered them as an autonomous federation, governing indirectly through the sawbwas, the traditional feudal princes. (198) In order to induce the sawbwas to join the newly independent Union of Burma, the government's 1947 constitution reconfirmed their traditional prerogatives and granted them administrative autonomy with the right to secession after ten years. However, the Burmese began to revoke some of the sawbwas' prerogatives during the early 1950s, and as the constitutionally guaranteed secession date approached (January 4, 1958) many of the sawbwas began to advocate independence. (199)The Burmese response was forceful repression, and by late 1958 there were small Shan rebel guerrilla armies in the hills. When the Burmese government abolished the last of the sawbwas' prerogatives in 1959, the rebellion intensified. The final break came in 1962 when the commander in chief of the Burmese army, Gen. Ne Win, who had just seized power through a military coup, arrested many of the sawbwas who were then negotiating with the civilian government. (200)
As treasurer of Kengtung State, U Ba Thein was intensely loyal to its popular young sawbwa, Sao Sai Long, and played an important role in the early stages of the Shan independence movement. Burmese intelligence officials became suspicious of his activities, and U Ba Thein soon realized that it was only a matter of time until they arrested him. (201) After closing the treasury offices one Friday afternoon in January 1958, he stuffed the state pension funds into a canvas sack and fled into the hills. (202)
When U Ba Thein showed up at Harold Young's home in Chiangmai several weeks later, Gordon found him a hiding place in the nearby mountains and supplied him with food. After he came out of hiding four months later, he decided that there were too many Burmese agents in Chiangmai and moved to Muong Sing, Laos, where he remained for the next three and a half years, buying arms for Shan insurgents with the Kengtung pension funds, and trying, without much success, to organize an effective guerrilla army. (203)
Through his work for the CIA, U Ba Thein's cross-border intelligence missions became inextricably interwoven with the fabric of the Burmese opium trade, and he became involved in a series of arms-for-opium deals between General Ouane and the Shans.
Since the Pathet Lao occupied the entire Laotian-Chinese frontier area, CIA tribal intelligence teams had to pass through the Burmese Shan States before entering Yunnan (instead of crossing the border directly from Nam Tha Province). As a result, the CIA had to depend on Shan rebels to guide its teams up to the Chinese border, protect its forward radio posts inside the Shan States and provide transportation between these radio posts and its forward bases in Nam Tha. Almost every aspect of these intelligence missions was somehow involved with the logistics of the Burmese opium trade.
A brief review of the cross-border missions' operating procedures illustrates the peculiar symbiosis between opium and espionage in the Burmese Shan States. In general, the modus operandi of cross-border patrols changed very little from the time William Young initiated them in 1962 until President Nixon ordered them stopped in August 1971. (204)
Once prospective agents were recruited, they were sent to secret camps not far from Nam Yu for two months of rigorous training. While the CIA planned the curriculum, Thai special forces provided most of the actual instructors.(205) After that the prospective agents were sent to the Thai special forces camp at Phitsanulok for four to five months of instruction in codes, radio transmission, and radio repair. (206)
Finally, the tribal agents were flown back to Nam Yu, the nerve center of cross-border espionage, and divided into five- to fifteen-man teams. From Nam Yu the teams were flown fifty-five miles due north and dropped off on the Laotian bank of the Mekong River. After inflating their rubber rafts, the teams paddled across the Mekong and hiked three miles through the Burmese jungle until they reached the joint Nationalist ChineseCIA base near Mong Hkan. Of the five bases the CIA maintains along the Burma-China border, Mong Hkan is by far the most exotic. It was originally established by a KMT intelligence force, the First Independent Unit, to serve as a base for its own cross-border forays into Yunnan, and as a radio post for transmitting information on the availability of opium to KMT military caravans based at Mae Salong in northern Thailand. When the CIA began sending its reconnaissance patrols into Yunnan, the First Independent Unit agreed to share the base and Young opened a radio post manned by Lahu agents. According to Young, Mong Hkan was something of a "little Switzerland." Soon after the CIA arrived, British, Thai, Laotian, and even a few Indian intelligence agents began showing up to "see what they could skim off the top." (207)
From Mong Hkan, the CIA teams hiked north for several days to one of two forward bases only a few miles fro m the border-a joint CIAKMT radio post at Mong He and a CIA station at Mong Mom. The teams usually spent about three or four months inside China.
Using light-weight, four-pound radios with a broadcast radius of four hundred miles, the teams transmitted their top priority data directly to a powerful receiver at Nam Yu or to specially equipped Air America planes that flew back and forth along the LaotianChinese border. Once these messages were translated at Nam Yu, they were forwarded to Vientiane for analysis and possible transmission to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The radio messages also served to pinpoint every team's position, all carefully recorded on a huge relief map of Yunnan Province mounted in a restricted operations room at Nam YU. (208)
During the period that William Young directed cross-border espionage, the CIA maintained two independent listening posts much deeper inside the Shan States, in addition to the bases it operated jointly with the KMT. Both of these posts-one located ten miles north of Mong Yang and the other five miles east of Ving Ngun-were extremely close to the Chinese border. Each was manned by twenty to thirty Lahu and Wa operatives who mounted lateral patrols along the border, went into China on reconnaissance missions, and maintained radio contact with Nam Yu. (209)
Since Mong Yang is about 80 miles from CIA headquarters at Nam Yu and Ving Ngun is over 180 miles away, the Agency found it had to rely on U Ba Thein's guerrilla armies to protect these bases from Burmese army patrols and government self-defense forces. U Ba Thein feels that his guerrillas provided an invaluable service for the CIA, pointing out that these posts were maintained with only twenty to thirty men, whereas KNIT radio posts in the same areas that were not protected by the rebels needed a minimum of a hundred men.
Rather than sending Air America helicopters so far into unknown, hostile territory to keep these bases supplied, the CIA relied on Shan rebel opium caravans. Since these caravans usually returned from their frequent trips to northern Thailand and Laos with a relatively lighter load of arms and ammunition, they were happy to pick up some extra money by carrying suppliesarms, ammunition, money, and radiosto the CIA's forward listenin post, thus saving the CIA the risk of sending Air America helicopters into far-off, unknown, and hostile territory. (210)