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 he September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were another wake-up call to the West about the elaborate financing behind international terrorist organizations. The United States has paid dearly for its failure to recognize the obvious—that terrorism, international drug trafficking, people-smuggling, and criminal organizations all use the same fund-raising methods to enrich themselves. They also use the same techniques and facilities to launder their money. Until September 11th, no one seemed to connect the dots. And no one seriously tried to crack down on their financing.
“We have tougher laws against organized crime and drug trafficking than terrorism,” U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft told the House Judiciary Committee on September 24. He went on to outline the Bush administration’s proposals for changes in U.S. laws dealing with terrorism, incorporating some of the legislation that has been used against organized crime and drug-trafficking organizations for decades.
Osama bin Laden’s is only one among many hostile international criminal organizations, often state-sponsored, that will do whatever they can to diminish the status of the United States as the world’s only superpower. According to a U.S. State Department report, the Taliban, who are (or were) at bin Laden’s service, controlled the world’s largest heroin production and distribution network. After the Taliban took over Afghanistan, heroin production soared to hundreds of tons each year. In 1999 alone, the world production of heroin was estimated at five hundred metric tons; four hundred were produced by the Taliban and hence available to fund bin Laden and his associates worldwide.
Terrorist organizations trained by the former Soviet Union, such as the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”) in Peru, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), radical Muslim organizations such as the Hamas, the Hizballah, and, of course, bin Laden Inc., have been using the drug trade as a triple-pronged weapon with the following goals: - to finance weapons purchases and corrupt people,
- to undermine the political, economic, and social health of the targeted countries, and
- to use all their successes as propaganda for recruiting new members.
Political corruption has longed played a major role in paving the way for such terrorists, by driving disenfranchised, impoverished people into the terrorists’ camps. Political corruption led to political compromises that made narcoterrorism the deadliest weapon in the arsenal of the enemies of democracy and freedom.
Stealth of Nations
The idea of using drugs as a weapon was well illustrated by Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, the former East German official who defected to the West in December of 1989. He had some particularly interesting information to share with the world. A thick dossier he brought along documented a well-oiled machine that had dealt in cocaine and illegal arms sales for twenty years. Minute details described the activities of the East German security services, on orders from Erich Honecker, the former Communist leader, in trading arms and drugs with terrorists from all over the world. Some of the profits found their way to Mr. Honecker’s South American bank accounts. The rest went to fund terrorist activities against the West.
The use of illegal drugs for political purposes is what narcoterrorism is all about. It was developed in the Soviet Union as a peacetime measure by which to destabilize the West and to promote Soviet foreign-policy objectives. The Soviet Military Encyclopedia (Sovyetskaya Voyennaya Entsiklopedia, vol. 7, Moscow: Voyenizdat, 1979 [& 1989], p. 493) provided a list of such measures, including the use of poisons and narcotics. These are included under the definition of spetsal’naya razvedka; literally “special reconnaissance” but more broadly embracing all functions of intelligence and clandestine operations associated with that term. (For more information on these activities, see my book Narco-terrorism, Basic Books, 1992.) In September 1984, then–Secretary of State George Schultz said, “The complicity of Communist nations in the drug trade is cause for grave concern among the nations of the free world. . . . Money from drug smuggling supports terrorists. . . . Organized crime works hand in hand with these other outlaws for their own profit. And what may be the most disturbing is the mounting evidence that some governments are involved, too, for their own diverse reasons.”
Modern terrorist organizations, such as the Sendero Luminoso, the FARC, the PLO, the Sri Lankan ETTE Tamil terrorists, and various Muslim fundamentalist organizations, were initially sponsored by the Soviet Union and its East and Central European satellites. Their training included unconventional warfare designed to subvert and destabilize the countries in which they operated, including the use of drugs and terrorism. The selling of illegal drugs became a double-pronged weapon, used both to fund terrorist activities and to corrupt the moral fiber of the targeted society and its political system.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, this phenomenon did not decline but in fact expanded exponentially, with terrorist organizations, drug traffickers, and organized crime groups working hand in hand (again) to advance their goals. Because drugs are easy to conceal and are a desired commodity everywhere, they have been adopted as the weapon of choice by most terrorist organizations. (For more information, see Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America, Prima Publishing, 1999, and Rachel Ehrenfeld, Evil Money, Harper Business, 1992).
Even some major world powers are involved in the trade. According to a report (“China’s New War Fighting Skills”) by Al Santoli, national security adviser to Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), released last year, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has for decades been sponsoring a drug-funded rebel army, the Wa, in Burma (a.k.a. Myanmar). The U.S. Department of State described the Wa as the largest, richest, and best-armed private drug army on earth. Burma is a major source of the world’s heroin, second only to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and its profits from this trade reach tens of billions of dollars per year. The report further noted that although Burma’s military junta (the State Law and Order Restoration Council [SLORC]) does not deal directly in the drug trade, “the entire SLORC collects taxes from drug manufacturers and traffickers. Army commanders get no funds from the SLORC, so they rely on drug ‘taxes’ to pay their soldiers. However, commanders must send a percentage of the tax to the junta leadership. Recently, a regional commander was sacked by the SLORC for not sending adequate drug tax revenues to Rangoon.” The problems are not confined to Burma: the PLA-supported, 25,000-soldier, Wa tribal army is “expanding trafficking routes into Laos and Cambodia and down the central and southern Burma-Thai border.” By any reasonable logic, those who reap the financial benefits of the drug trade are directly involved with it and any attempt to negate this fact serves only to increase the appeal of narcoterrorism.
Ignoring Obvious Connections
The amalgamation of drug trafficking and terrorism started back in the early 1980s as a marriage of political convenience. The economic incentive for the Leftist guerrillas was clear: drug money provided them with the resources to carry out revolutions. In exchange, the drug traffickers received protection by (and from) the guerrillas, and access to assassins well trained in carrying out acts of intimidation. Although the motives of these two pariah groups were different, their common goal was to destabilize and undermine the government. Thus, although the Marxist rebels have retained their political rhetoric, after the fall of the Soviet Union most quickly replaced their political agenda with a concentration on the lucrative drug business. In fact, the FARC has been organizing hemispheric and European support against “Plan Colombia,” the $882 million, U.S. drug-eradication program in Colombia. The FARC also supports “green” and anticapitalist groups that have been staging violent demonstrations against the World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Bank the past three years, and is a major sponsor of the upcoming People’s Global Action (PGA) international conference in Bolivia.
Ironically, they have achieved even greater success at gaining power: Colombian narcoterrorist groups now control about half of Colombia’s territory. (Colombian president Andres Pastrana made a huge tactical error in giving up large areas of territory as a “gesture of goodwill” to cajole them into joining peace talks.) Since there is no public “bookkeeping” of illegal activities, it is difficult to know the true profits of a nation’s illegal drug trade, but it is estimated that it provides the Colombian narcoterrorists with at least $750 million and up to $1 billion annually. (These estimates are based on how much overall illegal trade is taking place in Colombia, according to Colombian and American sources.) Not surprisingly, the FARC denies involvement in the drug trade, but it is surprising that President Pastrana supports their claim, stating, “There is no evidence that the FARC are drug traffickers,” in an interview last year with the Argentine newspaper Clarin. To the contrary, said Pastrana, “The FARC have always said they are interested in eradicating illegal crops.” And former U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey, though noting the linkage between the drug traffickers and the guerrillas, claimed in 2000 that only “two-thirds [of the terrorists] benefit financially from this association.”
While the Geneva “peace talks” with Colombia’s second-largest narcoterrorist group, ELN, were faltering in the summer of 2000 (AP, “U.S. Targets Colombian Cocaine Crop,” July 25, 2000), the biggest narcoterrorist force, the FARC, was persisting in its assaults on the nation’s police and military officers. Now, the local media report daily on the dozens of law-enforcement officers killed or kidnapped while trying to stop these gangs from growing and processing opium and cocaine. The gangs earn millions of dollars per week and use their profits to buy arms to fight the government and buy off law enforcement officers and politicians, all under the guise of a Marxist agenda. (This was made clear in a hearing before the House Armed Services Special Oversight Panel on Terrorism in Washington, D.C., June 29, 2000, and in the book Patterns of Global Terrorism, 1999, U.S. Department of State, April 2000.)
Transnational Terror, Inc.
The geopolitical reality is that drug trafficking is increasingly ignoring national boundaries. The Colombian cartels, together with their fellow traffickers in Mexico, Venezuela, Panama, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Brazil, are moving great amounts of their product into the United States. Their business partners hail from international criminal organizations in nations as diverse as Cuba, the Ukraine, and Bulgaria. The Colombian guerrillas regularly threaten to retaliate against neighboring countries willing to help the United States combat drug trafficking. Last fall, then–Secretary of State Madeline Albright visited Colombia’s neighboring countries, hoping to persuade them to support a U.S. initiative to help Colombia fight the narcoterrorists, but not all agreed to play along, and all conveyed fear that escalating drug wars will spill into their territories. Some demanded financial aid from the United States as a condition of cooperation.
The allied drugs-for-arms business provides illegal weapons that end up in the hands of Muslim terrorists in the Philippines, Irian Jaya, the Moluka islands, and the streets of Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza. The money is washed clean not only in the Caribbean, the Channel Islands, Hong Kong, and other offshore banking havens but also in the big money centers such as New York and London. (These aspects of the problem were explored in the previously mentioned June 29, 2000, hearing before the House Armed Services Special Oversight Panel on Terrorism). The Hizballah group captured last year in North Carolina, the powerful Russian mafiya (with its strong ties to the government), and national leaders such as Mexico’s Salinas, the Menem regime in Argentina, the Mugabe and Mobutu governments in Africa, and Yassir Arafat on behalf of the PLO, have all laundered drug and other illicit money to increase their personal wealth and power. In fact, money laundering has become so pervasive that money from laundered drug profits and other ill-gotten gains has been identified by the media as facilitating illegal campaign contributions in Colombia, Mexico, Indonesia, Germany, Russia, Israel, Italy, and the United States, to name just a few.
Students of narcoterrorism, such as professor and former U.S. ambassador to Colombia Lewis A. Tambs and the current U.S. ambassador to Indonesia and former Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs Robert S. Gelbard, argue that for several decades at the very least, governments such as Colombia, Burma, Mexico, and Pakistan have been involved in the drug trade. (Also see the International Narcotics Control Strategy Reports, issued every year by the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, U.S. Department of State.) By and large, the illegal drug trade and its attendant terror and corruption have become a state-sponsored phenomenon. Without government protection, it neither prospers nor increases. Two years ago, drug czar Barry McCaffrey argued that only “a few lower-echelon Mexican military and policemen are tainted with drugs,” then had to admit shortly afterward that his Mexican counterpart, whom he had selected himself, was working for drug traffickers. Similar denials, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, continue to be made about Afghanistan’s Taliban and the Syrian government, both totalitarian regimes that depend on the drug trade for their income (see again Bin Laden, by Yossef Bodansky). The failure to understand and acknowledge narcoterrorism has allowed the development of an infrastructure so successful and independent that today, in Mexico, all levels of government have been implicated in and corrupted by drugs, including even former President Carlos Salinas. And some middle-sized countries such as Colombia have virtually abandoned their national sovereignty over large areas, ceding territory to these narcoterrorist regimes, as noted earlier.
Buying Political Power
Colombia is the most visible and publicized illegal-drug battleground, pitting narcoterrorists against inconsistent and ineffectual U.S. policies. Decades after Colombia’s Leftist guerrillas first adopted narcoterrorism as the main means of achieving their political agenda, they continue to benefit from a strange case of willful blindness among U.S. policymakers, especially evident during the second Clinton administration. Despite a general consensus, articulated often by Clinton drug czar Barry McCaffrey while testifying in Congress last year, that Colombia’s problem has reached “emergency” proportions, the Clinton administration and Capitol Hill failed to do anything about the situation other than to send more money (and not merely enough) to the Pastrana government for helicopters, military expertise, and assistance to local police. Such an approach to the war raging in Colombia would be suitable for a political conflict, but the struggle in Colombia is not about politics or ideology; it is about drug money and the political power it buys. The very government to which the money is being entrusted has itself been corrupted at many levels by drug money. And the conflict is not merely a civil war but the first-ever, large-scale turf war to be launched by an international criminal organization determined to take over a legitimate country.
This war has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Colombians while corrupting the country’s political institutions and ruining its economy. Colombia’s kidnapping rate was the highest in the world in 1999 (see “Colombia’s Child Army,” Alma Guillermoprieto, The New York Review of Books, May 11, 2000). Given these depredations, one might expect both the Colombian government and the United States to embark on an unconditional war to rid Colombia of this powerful opposition force. Instead, the Clinton administration and the Colombian president chose to engage in peace talks with the self-styled opposition groups. Not surprisingly, previous U.S. attempts to help with the negotiations had failed, and there is little likelihood that repeated visits to Bogota by high-ranking U.S. diplomatic delegations will change the situation. Clearly, attaining political power over Colombia is not beyond the narcoterrorists’ reach, considering that the FARC now controls approximately 50 percent of the country and has a distinct presence on the outskirts of Bogota.
At present, there is no relief in sight for this beleaguered nation and its neighbors.
The war against the Latin American drug trade has claimed tens of thousands of lives in the last decade, and the drug cartels have corrupted democratic institutions throughout the region, subverted economic markets, and destabilized financial systems throughout the Americas, and they pose a still-growing threat to the social stability of the region. Short of an outright military war against these groups, there appears to be little either Colombia or the United States can do to stem the tide. The Clinton administration was correct to suggest the formation of a U.S.–led coalition to attack the problem, but the current administration must be careful not to join any effort that would lend respectability to criminal activities by treating governments and narcoterrorist groups as equal partners in negotiations. The worst possible course would be to promise the narcoterrorists foreign investment, as New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) chair Richard Grasso reportedly did in the summer of 1999 while visiting the FARC’s headquarters in San Vicente at the invitation of President Pastrana “to meet with the guerrilla leadership and put in a good word for peace and the free market.” (See “Colombia’s Child Army,” cited earlier.) It remains to be seen how effective the $882 million in U.S. aid will be in stopping narcoterrorism from taking over Colombia, further destabilizing the region, and engendering the Colombianization of neighboring countries.
The most important step in combating this problem worldwide is to recognize the importance of drug money to international terrorism. After the September 11 terror attacks, it was British Prime Minister Tony Blair who saw this most clearly, identifying the Afghani heroin sold on the streets of London as a weapon in the hands of the terrorists. In November, finally recognizing the clear evidence that heroin was a major source of funding to bin Laden Inc., President Bush took a step in the right direction when he told the United Nations, “I make this promise to all the victims of that regime: the Taliban’s days of harboring terrorists and dealing in heroin are drawing to a close.” As President Bush noted, it is time to stop the chemical offensive that for decades has killed and maimed generations of Americans, financed other terrorist activities, and penetrated and corrupted legitimate financial institutions worldwide.
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