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.