Prof. Alfred McCoy during one of many CIA-related media appearances.
I woke up last night with the name ‘McCoy’ rolling around in my head. I tried to dismiss my sleeplessness as redux from the previous post about Leonard McCoy and William Colby, Dirty Jobs, but that nagging feeling just wouldn’t go away. Then I remembered that Colby was associated with another, entirely different McCoy. Alfred W. McCoy.
In 1972, Alfred W. McCoy finished writing a book titled The Politics of Heroin, which was an exposé of CIA complicity with heroin trafficking in the Golden Triangle during the Vietnam War (1959-75). A book on this topic should also have been an exposé of Colby, who had been heading up CIA Saigon operations on and off since 1959*. Instead, McCoy’s book mentions Colby a grand total of nine times, mostly in connection to quotes from Colby’s writing. (And I’m working from 1991 Politics of Heroin extended edition– 600 pages!)
McCoy began researching The Politics of Heroin in 1971, the year Colby returned to Washington D.C. to be Executive Director of the CIA and to begin Angleton’s unwinding. It’s *incredible*, readers, that McCoy should begin writing his magnum opus on CIA heroin connections at the same time the man ultimately responsible for those connections assumed an important Washington position. It’s even more incredible that McCoy’s CIA heroin exposé makes so little mention of the man at the heart of Far Eastern CIA operations.
CIA Director William Colby.
A little too incredible. I suggest, readers, that Alfred McCoy’s work is managed opposition to William Colby, the media-friendly CIA leader. My suspicions (mostly) stem from information McCoy provides in the preface to the 1991 edition of his book, where he names the people who lead him to his heroin research and who helped him publish the book, despite CIA ‘disapproval’.
McCoy, as a lowly graduate student, was given extraordinary access to intelligence personalities; McCoy was given inside information from at least one CIA publishing front; and during his media-friendly ‘squabble’ with the CIA prior to publication (the best type of hype), McCoy was helped by William Colby’s journalist confidante, Seymour Hersh AND Washington literary-agent-cum-fixer, David Obst. Too many friends in high places, Prof. McCoy.
I don’t think McCoy’s book is a noble exposé of the CIA’s crimes; I think the CIA director William Colby knew that some of his heroin-related activities were going to get out and The Politics of Heroin was Colby’s damage control strategy. Sort of like Greenwald, Poitras and Gellman are the NSA’s damage control strategy for the Snowden leaks.
Let me flesh out what McCoy actually says in his preface. His heroin research started when he was a second-year graduate student at Yale. Alfred McCoy had the *deucedly good luck* to score an interview with the former head of French Intelligence for Indochina, General Maurice Belleux, who just happened to let it slip that the CIA was involved in selling Golden Triangle opium. Sacrebleu! Colby had inherited the heroin businesses that funded General Belleux’s operations back in Indochine.
Why would a French general spill the beans on CIA Executive Director Colby? Belleux’s interview with McCoy happened 10 years after a major rift between the French and American intelligence services; a rift which is attributed to fallout from the search for Soviet spies in France, nick-named ‘the Sapphire Network’. In 1962 James Angleton, along with his official contact with French intelligence services Philippe de Vosjoli, and the support of the majority of men in President Kennedy’s cabinet, told French Intellegence that they had a number of high-level Soviet infiltrations based on information from Anatoliy Golitsyn. The French rebuffed the information, turned viciously on de Vosjoli and no significant Soviet spies were outed. The event set many French officials against Angleton; Angleton suspected that any serious investigation into Golitsyn’s claims had been thwarted by Soviet-friendly insiders. De Vosjoli’s career was ruined and he fled to Mexico with American assistance.
De Vosjoli had cut his teeth working for French Intelligence in Indochina prior to 1951, so he would have been either a colleague or a subordinate to General Belleux. It would be great to know what state the General’s career was in after the ‘Sapphire’ blow up, but I do know that in 1956 he headed the “French Security Services of the National Defense and Armed Forces“, and by the time the 62-year old retired general spoke to McCoy, he no longer held a position in intelligence, but was heading up a helicopter company in France. (Not hiding in Mexico.)
I suspect that General Belleux heard from old Indochina friends that Colby was going to be ‘made'; Belleux knew Colby had serious image-laundering to do (CIA drug dealing was hardly a secret in Vietnam– it’s what all head honchos do there); and Belleux knew that Colby had an axe to grind with Angleton, so the general was happy to provide a favor. Somebody put General Belleux in touch with an obscure American grad student called Alfred. Strike one, Prof. McCoy.
But it wasn’t just the upper echelons of French Intelligence that opened up to young Alfred McCoy. Allen Ginsberg, beat poet and media darling, turned up on McCoy’s doorstep with a “carton containing years’ worth of unpublished dispatches from Time Life correspondents that documented the involvement of America’s Asian allies in the opium traffic”. Time-Life is a publishing constellation owned by the husband of Clare Boothe Luce, Roald Dahl’s lover/target and black ops aficionado. Carl Bernstein, of Rolling Stone, is famous for outing the Time-Life organization’s cooperation with the CIA. The cooperation included providing working-cover for CIA agents and even funding operations. (Readers will remember that Rolling Stone is no stranger to the intelligence community either!)
Recap: McCoy started writing The Politics of Heroin when Allen Ginsberg tuned up with pre-written notes supplied by a CIA media front. Strike Two.
When McCoy’s publisher Harper & Row warned the CIA about McCoy’s immanent book, Seymour Hersh (then with The New York Times) suddenly appeared on the scene and was granted interviews with Harper & Row staff, so that he could write this article which preempted The Politics of Heroin’s publication:
C.I.A. AIDES ASSAIL ASIA DRUG CHARGE; Agency Fights Reports That It Ignored Heroin Traffic Among Allies of U.S. C.I.A. Aides Fight Reports That Agency Ignored Southeast Asian Heroin Traffic
WASHINGTON, July 21 -The Central Intelligence Agency has begun a public battle against accusations that it knew of but failed to stem the heroin traffic of United States allies in Southeast Asia.
Note Hersh’s use of ‘failed to stem the heroin traffic’ rather than the more accurate ‘was complicit with’ or ‘participates in the heroin traffic’. (As of publication, I was unable to access the full article from the NYT’s rickety archives– they say it’s lost. Will update if there’s news.) Hersh was covering for his buddy William Colby at the CIA; Hersh had been tipped off to McCoy’s book by David Obst, the shadowy Washington literary agent and fixer– but more on Obst later.
Colby and Seymour Hersh buddies? Could it be true? Readers will remember that last Sunday I quoted Seymour Hersh from Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior:
“After talking to Angleton, I then called Colby up to tell him that I thought this man was totally off the reservation– that, in essence, he was totally crazy.”
This conversation took place in 1974, two years after Seymour Hersh’s ‘breaking story’ about the CIA and heroin. Hersh was such good buddies with Colby that he felt comfortable calling the DCI up to b*tch about another CIA big-wig. In fact, Tom Mangold documents how Colby leaked damaging information about Angleton to Hersh, and how Hersh would clear stories with Colby before their publication!
The next day, December 18 [1974], Seymour Hersh, then the top investigative reporter for the New York Times, phoned Colby and told him, “I have a story bigger than My Lai.” (Hersh had earlier won a Pulizter Prize for uncovering that massacre of unarmed Vietnamese civilians by American GIs.) Colby owed Hersh a favor because the reporter had withheld publication of a sensitive story at his request earlier that year, so the DCI agreed to meet him in his office to discuss this latest scoop.
That’s journalistic impartiality for you! The question isn’t whether Hersh was in bed with Colby, but if that cozy relationship was in place during the twelve months prior, when Hersh was beating the drum for Colby’s CYA expose of what *the CIA as a whole* was doing in the Golden Triangle. I think it’s reasonable to assume the relationship was.
Recap: Colby’s buddy Hersh helped to promote McCoy’s book which obscured Colby’s role in the Indochina-drug-dealing. Strike three!
McCoy had a very public tussle with *the CIA as a whole* about his book in the New York Review of Books. In 1990 Colby would use the NYRB again to defend his own writing about the Vietnam War.
Any good historian will know by now that Alfred McCoy is ‘out’. McCoy’s book is managed opposition to Colby and the CIA’s use of the East Asian drug trade. Colby was known as a media-friendly intelligence director; McCoy’s book is part of Colby’s strategy of managing the media to white-wash his corrupt– grotesque– past.
Readers will remember that the only reason any of this heroin trafficking came to light was because heroin addiction had suddenly become rampant amongst American GIs. Colby’s actions are no better than those of the Russians who sold arms to be used against their own men in Afghanistan. Colby was a twisted puppy.
There’s one more scrap of information from McCoy’s preface that I’d like to explore: David Obst. When the CIA initially threatened to quash The Politics of Heroin’s publication, David Obst appeared to give McCoy an alternative publisher:
A month later, Knowlton [Winthorp Knowlton, Harper & Row president] gave me an ultimatum: If I did not agree to a CIA review of the manuscript, Harper & Row would refuse to publish my book. I spent almost twenty-four hours struggling with the dilemma. My friend David Obst , a freelance literary agent in Washington, put me in touch with Hal Dutton of the publishing house E.P. Dutton, who was, David said, very upset by Harper’s decision to grant the CIA prior review of any manuscript. Dutton was willing to publish the book but warned that editorial work and legal batters with Harper & Row could mean a delay of six months.
Rather than slow the publication of timely material, I worked out a compromise with Harper & Row. We created a procedure fo submitting the manuscript to the CIA for prior review in a way that would preserve some semblance of editorial integrity.
Tipped off to a potential story by our mutual friend David Obst, Seymour Hersh, recently hired as an investigative reporter for the New York Times, interviewed Harper’s staff and published his expose of the CIA’s attempt to suppress the book on page 1 of the New York Times. Over the next week, The Washington Post ran an editorial attacking the CIA’s infringement of freedom of the press and NBC’s Chronolog program televised an hour-long report by Garrick Utley on the agency’s complicity in the Laotian drug trade.
David Obst seems to be all things to all people, and right at the heart of the valuable media frenzy surrounding McCoy’s book. Who is David Obst?
According to Luke Ford’s interview with David’s wife, Lynda:
Lynda attended Pomona College, in Claremont, California. Then she became a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at Columbia University. She met literary agent David Obst who represented Watergate journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They had an affair and later married.
David got Jann Wenner to allow Lynda to put together an anthology called The Sixties for Rolling Stone Press. David next got the New York Times Magazine’s editor Ed Klein to meet her and hire her.
Obst edited a cover story in the summer of 1977 called “The New Tycoons of Hollywood.”
“I had a wonderful run as an editor of the New York Times Magazine,” Obst writes.
According to the Santa Barbara Independent in 2007:
He [David Obst] has written a book, Too Good to Be Forgotten: Changing America in the ‘60s and ‘70s, that brings together his experiences as a literary agent for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during and after Watergate with his role in the publication of the Pentagon Papers and his assistance in bringing the My Lai massacre to light.
[Leaking The Pentagon Papers made Daniel Ellsberg famous; he now parties with Laura Poitras and other CIA assets at The Freedom of the Press Foundation.]
So, David made a habit of working with people whose job was to tell the public about Washington scandals through elite media channels.
David Obst, doing what he’s best at.
David was cozy to Rolling Stone, a magazine which I believe breaks bad news the safest way possible for the US government. Rolling Stone is where Carl Bernstein broke the news of *other journalists’* CIA connections– wouldn’t it be funny if Berstein’s guiding-light, Obst, was working for Colby and the CIA himself? Obst’s work with McCoy was very useful to William Colby.
As an interesting side-note, while David was busy ‘outing’ notorious CIA drug deals in far-off Asia, he made a career out of promoting drug culture in the USA. From The Uncool Exclusive Interview with Cameron Crowe, author of Fast Times at Ridgemont High:
David Obst was a publisher who used to work at Rolling Stone and split off to work on book packaging. He’s the one who called me up and said, ‘Do you want to write a book about high school?’ There was a backstory, I think, between Jann Wenner and David Obst where they had discussed a series of articles for Rolling Stone based on high school. So I was never sure if the project would be a book for Obst, or a series of articles for Jann… or both. I just loved the idea of writing about another kind of rock and roll – the kind that happens in the lives of real people. Real teenagers. And I did see something fascinating almost immediately – kids were becoming adults, burdened with financial and sexual responsibilities, years earlier than their parents ever had. It was the great vanishing adolescence. That was the beginning of Fast Times.
Did William Colby always feel the same way about McCoy’s book? I don’t think so. The Vietnam heroin scandal broke open again in the 1990s, prompting Colby to write a letter to the editors of the New York Review of Books. In reply to Colby, Jonathan Mirsky says:
But the CIA’s involvement in this traffic was widely known in the Sixties and Seventies, and was amply documented in Alfred McCoy’s book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (Harper and Row, 1972), which I cited in my article, referring in particular to the chapter on the drug trade in Laos. In his letter Colby ignores McCoy’s evidence, which led to this conclusion:
American diplomats and secret agents have been involved in the narcotics traffic at three levels: (1) coincidental complicity by allying with groups actively engaged in the drug traffic; (2) abetting the traffic by covering up for known heroin traffickers and condoning their involvement; (3) and active engagement in the transport of opium and heroin. It is ironic, to say the least, that America’s heroin plague is of its own making. [p. 14]
Perhaps after several years of being the head of the CIA Colby felt differently about pushing blame for his heroin dealing off on ‘the CIA in general’. After all, as head of the organization, the public now saw Colby as ‘the CIA’. Perhaps in 1990, Colby wished his 1972 exercise in ass-covering would just go away.
September 30th, 1974 TIME cover featuring Colby.
One year after Colby’s 1990 NYRB letter, McCoy decided to publish an expanded version of his 1972 book, which he describes as “moving beyond exposé to explanation”. McCoy’s updated book has copious information on all the other drug dealers in East Asia, not just Colby the CIA.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave. Perhaps none of this matters, because Colby died of a suspicious heart attack a while ago. Alfred McCoy now holds a very pleasant professorship in the sheltered college town of Madison, WI. What? Were you expecting McCoy to have a job at the Rand Corporation, like Daniel Ellsberg?
*For those of you interested in William Colby’s Far Eastern adventures: Colby was the CIA’s deputy chief, then chief of the Saigon station from 1959-62; after that he moved to Washington D.C. to be the CIA’s Far Eastern Division Chief. In 1968 Colby was about to become chief of the Soviet Division– the division that had Angleton so worried– but President Johnson (protégé of Charles Marsh, the BSC collaborator and friend of Roald Dahl) sent him back to Vietnam, to replace Robert Komer and take over the U.S./South Vietnamese rural pacification effort. Colby stayed in Vietnam until 1971, when he was brought back to be Executive Director of the CIA (and quashed investigations into his dealings with a GRU agent in Saigon!)
