With Hawaii needle exchanges at a record high and persistent concerns about fentanyl on the islands, conversations often turn to people’s curiosity about the intersection of the CIA and illegal narcotics.
Why shouldn’t they be curious? Rumors and intrigue go back to the 1940s, when the agency’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, reportedly collaborated on intelligence operations with the heroin-Sicilian Mafia smuggling in Europe and opium-peddling Chinese nationalists in the Far East, and fresh speculations have risen with proprietaries and partnerships ever since — Air America in Indochina (1960-70s), Contra support and the Mujahideen alliance (1980s), and so on. Then there’s Congress’s 1975 public revelation of its findings on agency LSD experiments a decade prior.
Outside observers are left cobbling together a puka-filled understanding of the modern CIA-drug nexus from scraps of truth mixed with anecdotes and conjecture in film, television and print (all of varying objectivity), and in conspiracy theories. So, let’s take a look from inside Langley’s halls at one aspect of the matter: CIA’s counternarcotics mission, to which I contributed for several years.
“Hold on. Instead of trafficking cocaine, laundering drug money, and propping up kingpins, the spooks are combating the problem?”
In a nutshell, yes.
I cannot speak to allegations of CIA activities before my time, and I was not omniscient or omnipresent in my career days, but over two decades inside, I never even heard rumors matching the product of imaginative minds in Hollywood, talk shows and tabloids. Even the concept of rogue officers was largely the stuff of myth (internal checks and balances are rigorous).
“Go on,” you skeptically quip.
The CIA Crime and Narcotics Center, or CNC, established in 1989, brought to the so-called “drug war” toolboxes from the cloak-and-dagger world. Officers use the full spectrum of classified and open source information to produce rigorous, strategic-level analytic products on global and foreign regional trends and issues regarding international drug smuggling and transnational criminal enterprises.
Their focus is on illicit substances produced abroad and destined for U.S. consumers — from the Golden Triangle’s poppy fields to South American jungle labs processing coca leaves, and every link in the chain between those and U.S. borders. Their consumers include the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, the State Department’s Narcotics Affairs Section, law enforcement (DEA, FBI, ICE), and the Coast Guard.
Most intelligence community organs embed representatives in the CNC, ensuring close interagency cooperation. Officers also employ operational targeting methods and clandestine tradecraft to develop actionable intelligence for global law enforcement partners to disrupt illicit networks.
“So … why hasn’t the drug problem improved after three decades of James Bond efforts?”
Great question. (Any suggestion of complicity is off the mark, though.)
As an intelligence officer working the problem analytically and operationally, in the foreign field and at HQs, I (like many) came to understand that the illegal drug trade is, more than anything, an economic issue beholden to the law of supply and demand. As long as there is demand, the extreme profit margins of the illicit, ever-evolving free market ensure that someone will rise to supply it, irrespective of laws and enforcement efforts. (This applies to the Orchid Isle’s drug problem, and related crime, too.) Until we better address demand, like in some other countries and as U.S. drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey urged in the late 90s, the market and collateral crime will thrive.
Bringing additional assets against the supply side, like the creation of the CNC, has not significantly improved the situation, and there is no indication that it ever will. History, modern medical research into use and addiction, and the well-studied economics of prohibition and black markets more generally support this position.
However, addressing demand is not as easy, or as politically sellable to some voters, as initiatives to kick down doors, make seizures and arrests (short-term, tactical actions of force against a long-term, strategic economic and health problem). A demand-side approach also does not advance careers and budgets in agencies involved in counternarcotics. There’s the rub.
Begad! I’m at my word limit and, sadly, forced to say, “aloha.” As for the CIA and drugs, and the persistence of the trade, as Paul Harvey said, you now know “the rest of the story.”
J.P. Atwell is a former senior CIA operations officer. His two-decade career began as an intelligence analyst and took him to every continent, save Antarctica. He now calls Hawaii Island home. He welcomes your comments at island.intelligencer@gmail.com.
