Operational Tolerance: The CIA And The Drug Trade

De: Jonathan Sloane

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

In 1943, American intelligence officers made a deal with Lucky Luciano that would shape the next six decades of covert operations. The imprisoned mobster provided contacts for the invasion of Sicily, and in exchange he received his freedom. It was a wartime expedient, a necessary compromise, a small moral cost for a larger strategic gain.

The pattern established in that prison cell repeated itself across continents and decades. Corsican gangsters who built the French Connection heroin trade received CIA protection for breaking Communist unions in Marseille. Air America pilots flew opium out of the Golden Triangle while the secret war in Laos raged below. Contra supporters moved cocaine through the same networks that delivered American weapons to Central America.

The documented record includes congressional investigations, declassified Agency files, and the testimony of participants from Marseille to Mena to the mountains of Afghanistan. Some allegations remain contested. Others have been confirmed by the CIA's own Inspector General. The full truth remains partially hidden behind classification stamps and destroyed documents, but what has emerged is damning enough.

This book follows the money, the drugs, and the decisions that allowed them to flow. It names the warlords and the case officers, the shell companies and the secret airstrips. The story spans the Cold War and the War on Terror, and the consequences are measured in addiction epidemics, shattered communities, and a government that waged war on drugs while its intelligence arm looked the other way.