AMERICAN WAR MACHINE - PETER DALE SCOTT

“In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Agency and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA” - Dennis Dayle

So perhaps I’ll never get off my CIA bullshit. Oh well. I will say that reading this stuff constantly makes reading the news very insane, especially when former CIA officers are allowed to go on TV and uncritically war-monger. This book is quite excellent and is a good companion piece to GHOST WARS which is, basically, the normie version of this book. All the Afghanistan fuckery with none of the stuff about our involvement with the drug trade. Actually, that’s a bit misleading, this book traces drug profits used to back up parastate activities from the end (or, to be technical, slightly before) of WWII up through the Obama administration. Scott paints a compelling picture, the gist is that wars and counter-insurgencies and all that cost money, lots of money, and to finance these activities various groups have attached themselves to drug smuggling, which is, perhaps, the third largest commodity in the world, after arms and oil. The CIA has been central to this nexus of drugs and insurgency since their founding. People probably know about the (completely true) accusation that the CIA helped Nicaraguan Contras smuggle drugs, specifically cocaine and specifically the cocaine that fueled the Crack epidemic, as well as the stories about heroin coming back in servicemen’s coffins during Vietnam but Scott makes a compelling case that these weren’t weird aberrations, they’re the two most visible parts of a large pattern. It starts with helping the KMT sell opium to finance their war against Mao, then migrated into South East Asia where they helped groups in Laos and Thailand finance their anti-communist wars/death squads. This blueprint is repeated in Latin America, with both the aforementioned Contras as well as with Bolivia, Colombian and Cuban gangsters/right-wingers. He goes on to point out how this works in Afghanistan, where the US has been propping up opium growers for literal decades, first as part of Operation Cyclone then as part of the even more direct Operation Mosquito which was a plan to addict Red Army troops to heroin then as part of the plan to “stabilize” the country after the 2001 invasion, with basically all of the major dope movers being protected US intelligence assets. High ranking Russian and Pakistani officers charge that literal US planes fly some of the dope out, though  There’s all sorts of amazing threads about 9/11 and Khashoggi (Adnan, not Jamal), the connection between Mexican Cartels and US intelligence (a subject I’m quite interested in), the concept of “Deep Events” like JFK’s assassination or 9/11, the connection between far-right politics and organzied crime, and all sorts of related matters. Scott sums it up nicely when he reports that the US doesn’t want to eradicate drugs, they just want to alter the market share and make sure that their preferred goons keep the dope$. 1947 US planes full of heroin.