Published at: 19/11/2025 09:00 PM

(Declassified CIA files, April 3, 2001; Time, March 5, 2018 and January 29, 1979)

• In 1990, the film Air América (AA), based on real-life events, was released, known as Air Heroína.
• This satirical plot describes how two pilots discover that the aircraft they were piloting on service missions were used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to traffic packages of heroin from Laos, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and South Vietnam to the United States.
• The CIA, to buy the silence of these aviators, believed that it was enough to pay them extravagant salaries of $51,525 per 100 monthly flight hours, tax-free. Air Heroína came to have 436 contracted pilots under its command.
• The local counterpart, who served as a liaison for the CIA, was a disastrous figure, named Vang Pao, an officer of the Lao Army who served to transport more than 500 tons of heroin per year from the cultivation fields of the rooster between 1950 and 1972.
• When the affair came to light as a major scandal, Vang Pao automatically became a protected witness for the agency, dying peacefully decades later at age 81 as owner of a Holiday Inn hotel in Clovis, California.
• Donald Lemond, Major of the U.S. Army, who at the time directed heroin laboratories and their trafficking from Southeast Asia to the United States, was prosecuted for a similar operation known as Iran Gate (Air Cocaine). After receiving the presidential pardon, he was sent to Panama to provide military advice to Manuel Noriega, also a CIA agent, in the alleged fight against drug trafficking.
• Finally, in March 2004, the AA documents were declassified. From its content, it is clear:
  • Air América (AA) was a CIA front airline for carrying out illegal covert operations.
  • Of the 700 tons of total opium production in Indochina per year, AA sold 500 tons per year within the United States. The rest, 200 tons, was traded to other parts of the world through the British colony of Hong Kong.
  • In addition to the hundreds of pilots, there were several U.S. Army officers on Air América's payroll, whose work package of professional fees for services provided, in addition to the extravagant salary, was granted an apartment to enjoy a comfortable retirement from the Armed Forces.
  • In a degree thesis entitled “Heroin Politics in Southeast Asia”, to apply for a doctorate at Yale University, three students: Alfred W. McCoy, Cathleen Read and Leonard Adams, revealed irrefutable evidence about: “government officials of Thailand, Laos and South Vietnam, selling heroin directly to American troops and senior Army officers, who then the were being transported to be sold on the streets of the United States.”
  • Moreover, “all this with the consent of the Nixon administration, which rather facilitated such operations, by not stopping the entry of heroin into the United States, under the pretext of not undermining the activities of the officers protected by their government.”
  • Although the CIA did its best to torpedo the publication of this controversial doctoral thesis, the thousands of supporting documents, testimonies of veteran soldiers and irrefutable evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt, combined with the declassification of the files, demonstrated the clear participation of the CIA in drug trafficking operations.
  • In addition to the publication of the above-mentioned thesis, on November 25, 1972, India's daily BLITZ, reported the capture of 4 tons of opium and morphine, owned by the CIA, in the Bay Harbor of Hong Kong.
  • The doctoral thesis, in the words of Cord Meyer, a CIA officer, “demonstrates the complicity of the CIA and the State Department in the organization and development of drug trafficking in Southeast Asia since 1950.”
  • To support the content of the said thesis, during 18 months of study, the students conducted more than 250 interviews with war veterans, microtraffickers and counter-narcotic police agents in the United States, Europe and Asia.
  • Drug trafficking has been used by successive US governments, as revealed by the same study, as a chemical weapon of war by the ruling classes to control, invade, criminalize adversaries and obtain fabulous profits for military and banking elites and, even, to destroy emerging generations within their own territory.
  • “The Great Heroin Plague” took hold in 1972, reported the doctoral thesis advisor, Dr. Bruce M. Russett: “Most Americans think that the cost of the Vietnam War is low. Our innocence about the costs ignores the $200 trillion it has cost (5 times the Mashall Plan), the disappearance of the social welfare system, the balance of payments on the floor, the thousands of suicides, and the most appalling of all the results of our addiction to interventionism is the appearance of “The Great Plague of Heroin”.
  • In effect, the CIA used undercover agents to recruit new addicts. In particular, he used very attractive female agents to induce certain leaders or actors of the youth scene to vice and then try to ideologically manipulate them, capture them as agents or turn them into human pirates. Today in 2025, the streets of the most important cities and towns in the United States are filled with this.
  • He continues: “This should not be interpreted as a piece of yellow journalism or to merely expose CIA scandals. Since it does not detail any of the classic archetypes of administrative corruption for personal enrichment. Rather, it is something more subtle: the dirty work, rather disgusting, stems from the fact that these intelligence works were done to 'stop the advance of communism', regardless of using the mafias of Sicily in Italy and of Marseille in the South of France”.
  • From those mud there is an avalanche of mud. Today, millions of sleepwalkers, bent by addiction, roam like real human ruins with a glassy look, dead in life, in every corner of the United States.
  • Cynically, in 2025, as in 1972, on Wall Street hundreds of millions of dollars are laundered every day in the stock market rage. The masked balance sheets of drug trafficking centrifuges have their tax haven in the United States to legitimate capital from the biggest business that thrives there: drug trafficking.
  • However, the existence of these drug trafficking operations dates back to 1945, at the end of World War II, when the Office of Strategic Services-OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, founded the commercial airline CAT (Civil Air Transport), for the same purposes as AA.
  • This civilian airline, CAT, the predecessor of the drug trafficking route in Southeast Asia, stopped operating when AA took action.

Mazo News Team