February 14, 2008: Russia is recycling
the Vietnam era Information War campaign, that convinced a lot of people that
the CIA was using the war as a means to export heroin from Myanmar (when it was
called Burma, and was the major source of that drug). Now the Russians are
telling anyone who will listen, that the CIA is transporting most of the Afghan
heroin out of Afghanistan aboard U.S. Air Force transports.
Back in the 1960s, some of the Burmese
drug lords exported their heroin through Vietnam, and bribed whoever they could
to move the stuff. Since then, China and Burma shut down the heroin gangs along
their mutual border, and production moved to Pakistan, where it was tolerated
for a while, then chased across the border to Afghanistan in the 1990s. The Russians
pushed the story that it was the CIA that set up the heroin trade in Pakistan,
as a way to get the drug to Soviet soldiers fighting in Afghanistan. The target
wasn't the Russian soldiers, but the larger Russian population. Today, there
are millions of Russian heroin addicts, and Russian gangsters move tons of it through
Russia into Western Europe.
Despite the size of the heroin trade
since the end of World War II, no reporters have managed to come up with the
facts proving this enormous CIA conspiracy. That doesn't bother the Russians,
who continue to get a lot of mileage out of the Information War campaign
accusing the CIA of inventing AIDs and unleashing it on Africa, and the world.
Conspiracy theories, especially ones that can never be proven, are always
popular. The mass media loves this stuff, and so does a large segment of the
public. Lack of proof is no impediment. After all, we're talking about the CIA
here, one of the most secretive (despite all the leaks and moles) and powerful
(despite all the failures) organization (also arguable) in the world.
