This is investigative journalism at its finest. Find a remote corrupt area of the world, larger than Belgium, with an interesting, largely unknown history and an immense impact on the present day world, examine it in great detail, at considerable personal risk, then tell the world about it and you’ve got it made. I asked six well-educated people at our Friday Luncheon Discussion Club what they knew about the Wa nation, and they all confessed that they had never heard of it. If you can expose the CIA complicity in various nefarious deeds and embarrass them, so much the better. This American journalist based in Bangkok does this and a lot more.
In Book One, he manages to get a lengthy interview with Saw Lu, a kingpin of the Wa, an almost totally independent state within Burma, (now called Myanmar), which interview covers most of the history of the feuding highland headhunters and drug lords providing opioids in vast quantities to China, Vietnam, Thailand and beyond up to the early 80s, with the CIA helping out by supplying arms, more concerned with fighting Maoist communism than stemming the tide of narcotics floating around the world. Saw Lu’s efforts to educate the Wa, and to convert them to Christianity (he was a Baptist) were largely unsuccessful, but he was willing to overlook their funding from narcotics and had more success uniting the diverse mountain top tribes against communists. Several maps at the front of the book are very helpful references for those of us unfamiliar with the vast territory.
In Book Two, starting in the early 1980s, a rebellion against the ruling communists in the highlands, led to new loyalties and warlords, aided by radio communication systems supplied by the CIA, that ensured safe passage of the drugs to markets worldwide. Nixon’s War On Drugs is shown to be largely ineffective in part because of feuding between the Drug Enforcement Agency and the CIA. One in six returning Vietnam War veterans was addicted to heroin and new supply routes from largely autonomous Shanland (ever hard of it?) developed to maintain the flow to America. It was eventually almost completely extinguished and dispersed by the powerful UWSA, the United Wa State Army.
By the early 1990s, Saw Lu had become a local legend, the foreign minister of the Wa nation. He tried hard to develop a secret master plan to burn drugs and drug factories with DEAs help and no explicit help from the Burmese ruling military junta. In exchange the U.S. would help ease the extreme poverty and stop villainizing the dictators of Burma. Only one such burning took place before the CIA, traitors within the DEA, and lobbyists for the “War on Drugs” in America sabotaged the plan, and imprisoned and tortured him.
The new drug tzar of South Wa, Wei Xuegang, jettisoned any attempts to christianize the Wa, replaced most of the heroin production with meth-amphetamine, and focused on appeasing China rather than America, smuggling 90 million methamphetamine tablets a year to Thailand a U.S. ally. 90 % of the heroin production shifted to Afghanistan warlords fighting the Taliban and supported by the CI A. In addition, exporting rubber to China became a thriving business.
The Wa remain an independent state with profound poverty but with some aid in the form of roads, schools and hospitals supplied by China. Officially a part of Myanmar, no one is keen to change the status quo, least of all the United States.
Very informative and well researched, my one criticism of this book is that it is often difficult to determine what time period he is discussing. A linear time line chart with major events plotted would have made a useful reference.
4/5
Thanks, The Economist.
The Passionate Reader 