Book Review: Narcotopia. In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel That Survived the CIA
By Patrick Winn
Icon Books, 2024, US$27
The Myanmar drug trade has gripped the Western imagination for years, the exotic Golden Triangle and tales of poppy fields, drug lords on horseback, swashbuckling counter-narcotics agents and crystal meth labs in the jungle. But this has always been a mixture of reality and fiction. Much of the work on the drug trade has taken two very different approaches: the lurid sensationalists or the serious research perspectives. The first sees a rambunctious tale of excess. The second reveals multigenerational misery that impoverishes farmers, prolongs armed conflict and authoritarianism, enriches predatory elites, and acts as a financial current for illicit economies that undermines development. Sensationalism versus seriousness has unbalanced our understanding of narcotics in Myanmar.
Striding into the sensationalist genre is Patrick Winn’s Narcotopia-In Search of the Asia Drug Cartel That Survived the CIA, a blended reality/fiction style that strains credibility. There are four main characters in the book. Saw Lu, a Wa official who tried, more than 30 years ago, to seek an end to his people’s dependence on opium. The second is the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and a number of former Yangon-posted agents that Winn dutifully tracked down and interviewed.
The third is the powerful United Wa State Army (UWSA). And the fourth is the long-term narcotics entrepreneur Wei Hsueh Kang. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is surprisingly a minor character, despite the supposed premise of the book being how the UWSA survived the CIA to create a Utopian narco-enclave. A spoiler alert before you read the book: Winn never actually visits Wa State, and much of his research was in visits to Lashio in northern Shan State before the COVID-19 pandemic, and along the Thailand-Myanmar border. This necessarily limits the book.
The Odd Couple
At the center of the tale is Saw Lu, a former Myanmar military militia leader, DEA informant and UWSA foreign affairs official. In 1993, Saw Lu drafted a manifesto called “The Bondage of Opium” (with the legendary former CIA agent Bill Young) to seek international assistance through the DEA. Betrayed by the CIA, who alerted Myanmar Military Intelligence (MI), Saw Lu was arrested and horrifically tortured, until then-Wa leader Zhao Nyi Lai threatened to march UWSA troops to Lashio and free him. Saw Lu kept a low profile until he was arrested and tortured again, by the UWSA, allegedly on Wei Hsueh Kang’s order, years later. He has a stroke in prison and comes close to death.
After his eventual release, he lived out his days quietly in northern Shan State until Winn, by chance, meets him on a first trip to Lashio in 2019. Winn strangely keeps calling the Wa a “sect”, is obsessed with headhunting to an Orientalist degree, and has long sections on Wa history that go into mind-numbing detail, yet with a mishmash of National Geographic and Readers Digest insight.
There is no doubting the power of Saw Lu’s story and that he genuinely aspired to good deeds. He and his family, including his loyal son-in-law Jacob, who is a significant and compelling presence in the book, certainly suffered. But the entire book is premised on one relatively marginal figure in a labyrinthine narcotics network, whose impact after 1993 was minimal. A more significant figure such as Lo Hsing Han is mentioned only once, as a “megatrafficker”, which he certainly was. Yet he was also instrumental in securing ceasefire agreements with the UWSA in 1989. Also not mentioned is Kokang leader Pheung Kya Shin, leader of the second-biggest northern Shan State enclave, or Sai Leun, head of the Mong La group and a close UWSA ally. Sadly, Saw Lu passed away from COVID-19 in mid-2021. His story is the book’s strong point, although Winn has obviously taken literary liberties with the telling of it. Many of these sections are narrative fiction, not reportage.
Wei Hsueh Kang as a character is largely one of Winn’s imagination, a combination of what is already known about his career—admittedly very little—and less reportage than literary projection. Winn calls Wei “The Prodigy”, “the most famous Wa person alive.” Winn asks people in Shan State about Wei all the time, and seems put out when they don’t wish to discuss the matter. He finally gets Saw Lu to open up his painful past with Wei, who imprisoned him.
Wei indisputably remains a powerful presence in Wa State. But his longevity is explained by his discretion. And a US Department of Justice $2-million bounty may be a significant sum, but to a multi-millionaire drug financier under UWSA protection and official Chinese insouciance, is simply small change. Narcotopia offers us nothing new about this elusive enigma.
American folly in Dopeland
The DEA don’t come out of Narcotopia looking credible. There are long sections on presenting a literal “he said-she said” dynamic as Winn weaves multiple interviews he conducted with agents and analysts stationed at the US Embassy in Yangon in the early 1990s: “I carpet-bombed their answering machines” he claims. The handful of DEA staff were at each other’s throats, and doing constant battle with the CIA station chief and the State Department. The climax of these tensions is the CIA tapping the DEA communications and shopping Saw Lu to Myanmar MI. This resulted in protracted lawsuits, but also prolonged acrimony amongst all the key actors in this drama.
Winn has, on the surface, reconstructed these events well, although there are numerous question marks over what really transpired, and frequent, understandable, discrepancies in recollections. Was there a “DEA safe-house” in Yangon? Did an agent really “deposit his Glock [pistol] with a metallic thunk?” And how does Winn know that? The “State Department’s fanatical hatred of the junta undermined a drug war breakthrough in Burma.” I thought the CIA’s actions did? DEA agent Angelo Saladino gets far too close to officials of the MI and SLORC (the State Law and Order Restoration Council, the junta’s formal name), which Winn doesn’t seem to think was problematic. And the most discomfiting thing about this account is how little mention is made of the sheer brutality of the military dictatorship—up to its neck in the drug trade—that the DEA was cooperating with. These chapters, with their frat-bro titles like ‘Kick the Cat’ and ‘Whiskey Alpha’, are best approached with the suspension of disbelief. They’re written like the TV show Narcos, but are more like The Office.
Winn discusses a DEA visit to northern Shan State facilitated by the SLORC “in an old Bell—a US made helicopter…a 1970s-era relic [that] suffered for lack of replacement parts, which the United States government would no longer provide.” This might have been an opportune, and pertinent, moment to mention that the helicopter was provided by the US government as part of an $80-million support package between 1974 and 1988 that included 28 helicopters; six fixed-wing aircraft; radios; five Thrush spray aircraft (in 1985); and 2,4-D defoliant. The program was suspended after September 1988 following the brutal suppression of protests against Socialist rule. The General Accounting Office (GAO) concluded in a 1989 report that the State Department assistance was “not effective.” This would have been relevant background to the subsequent DEA shenanigans that Winn spends so much space on.
It’s Winn’s outlandish contention that this DEA drama 30 years ago was a watershed moment. “The CIA’s sabotage against the DEA and the UWSA has never been revealed in full, until now, even though these events—in the summer of 1993—transformed the fate of the Wa people and the entire Golden Triangle narcotics trade.” The story of Saw Lu’s betrayal and the DEA/CIA struggle is not new; it was covered by journalists during the 1990s and beyond. And Saw Lu’s treatment didn’t “transform the Golden Triangle”: the surrender of General Khun Sa and the Mong Tai Army (MTA) three years later arguably had a longer-lasting impact.
The DEA is not the hard-boiled dope-busting elite portrayed in popular culture. The recent cases of Yakuza involvement in a supposed Myanmar-focused “arms for heroin” deal in 2022 stretches credibility. A Japanese man not known to the Japanese mafia travels to Copenhagen to purchase “surface to air missiles” to exchange for Myanmar narcotics? A special airstrip in the jungle to land planes? Earlier this year, the Department of Justice added charges of trafficking in “weapons grade nuclear material.” These are farcical charges, but illustrate that the true history of the DEA would reveal a series of questionable approaches.
The so-called “Operation Hotspot” in 2010 saw DEA and Thai counter-narcotics officials pursue “an aggressive community outreach initiative” of putting Wei Hsueh Kang’s mugshot on beer holders to be distributed to go-go bars around Bangkok. One of the bar patrons interviewed by the Bangkok Post has a potentially more grounded view of the DEA’s efforts than Winn: “‘Yeah, like he’s [Wei] going to walk into Nana and watch a show in the Angel Witch bar.’” Narcotopia’s subtitle should be changed to “The Asia Drug Cartel that Survived the DEA”: not the CIA.
The crippling flaw of the entire book is that the “US government” is somehow to blame for the expansionism of the UWSA because of its approach to drug suppression. Yet most of the “credit” for this state-building must go to the Wa themselves, with assistance from the Myanmar military, which granted de-facto autonomy in 1989, and China, which bestowed military and economic support.
Winn makes some inconsistent claims about the agency. “The CIA never set out to entangle itself in the drug trade.” Well, it did, actually. It was called Operation Paper, and involved sending weapons from Formosa (Taiwan) to the Kuomintang (KMT) in Mong Hsat in eastern Shan State in the 1950s. The U Nu government appealed to the United Nations about it. The CIA were also involved in the establishment of a network of KMT listening stations to monitor traffic in China. “Their CIA-built radio network was an all-seeing eye.” Radios don’t work like that. Does he mean an “all-hearing ear”? The story of the CIA’s involvement in Myanmar’s drug trade was uncovered by Alfred McCoy in 1972 in his landmark book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. Little in these sections is new; the information is just repackaged.
The direct CIA meddling in the drug trade was in the 1950s, while the large counter-narcotics program in the 1970s and 1980s was State, not agency. According to the DEA’s official history of this period (which doesn’t mention the UWSA) “the percentage of Southeast Asian heroin from DEA’s Heroin Signature Program rose from 9 percent in 1977 to 58 percent in 1991” a surge that simply cannot be attributed to the rise of the Wa. The events around Saw Lu and the DEA fumblings were in the early 1990s, and Operation Tiger Trap targeting Khun Sa in 1994.
There was a brief flirtation with “certifying” the then State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) as cooperating in narcotics suppression in 2002, which wasn’t successful, despite the assistance of American public relations firms: including former CIA Yangon station chief Barry Broman. The US military supplied helicopters and Special Forces advisors to assist Thai counter-narcotics efforts in 2001 as the ya-ba epidemic surged with UWSA manufactured amphetamine pills, which Winn mentions but oddly doesn’t call by its well-known codename: Task Force 399. This effort waned as Bangkok grew closer to the SPDC as a way to address the drug trade (something which, by now, any observer would conclude never works).
America’s last meaningful action on the Wa was the Treasury Department designating 26 individuals and 16 companies under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act (Kingpin Act) in 2005. American influence on the Wa has been negligible for three decades. The CIA has also been preoccupied since 2001 with global terrorism and fighting two losing wars in the Middle East, containing the rise of China, and a host of other pressing issues. I doubt the UWSA intrudes on the President’s Daily Intelligence Briefing that much, or there is a “How DID the UWSA Cartel Outwit the CIA?” Task Force at Langley.
Winn stretches credulity in the conclusion. “An honest telling of the Wa story threatens the US government. It damages our national myths.” I think the CIA have done a bang-up job of damaging American self-mythology themselves.
Truthiness in the Triangle
Winn’s shtick is to alter the names of key parties or places in all this history, to inject some mystery and allure. Jazz it up. Photoshop reality. But this only generates confusion. The KMT become “The Exiles”. A collection of (then) Burma Army allied militias who were also opium dealers becomes the “League of Warlords”. In an endnote, Winn writes that Saw Lu himself called it “Saw Lu’s Ka Kwe Ye [village home guard] group.” A little less dramatic than “League of Warlords”. The Thai-Myanmar borderlands controlled by Khun Sa’s Shan United Army (SUA) becomes “Shanland” (a phrase coined by the scholar Jane Ferguson in her brilliant work Repossessing Shanland). The town of Ban Hin Taek (Cracked Rock Village, in Northern Chiang Rai, now called Ban Thoerd Thai) formerly the base of Shan strongman Khun Sa, becomes “Broken Rock”. Saw Lu becomes his supposed DEA codename, “Superstar”.
Shan State heroin is marked by a “signature crest: two red lions mounting the planet earth—a brand like the Coca-Cola swirl, assuring traffickers down the supply chain the dope was pristine.” The “Double UO Globe” brand is well known (it’s on McCoy’s book cover), although it in no ways resembles a Coca-Cola logo, and could not possibly be mistaken as such. This approach is not exactly dishonest. It is rewriting reality, though. Winn frequently omits many clarifying points of time and place that would have told a clearer story throughout the book.
There is also the maddening habit of American writers to “America-relate” terrain. The Communist Party of Burma “controlled an area roughly the size of the US state of New Jersey.” “Shanland”: “A micronation, roughly one hundred square miles, the size of Washington DC.” Wa Southern Command is described as “less than Brooklyn.” But then Wa South expands from “Brooklyn sized” to “become as large as Connecticut.” The Wa Alternative Development Project established in 1998 was “about five hundred square miles, the size of Los Angeles.” Senior UWSA officials live in “the Hamptons of Pangshang.”
Winn does venture further afield with his description of the “Wa nation” “as the motherland…nearly as large as Israel.” But later on, the combined Wa area “now encompassed twelve thousand square miles, as much soil as the Netherlands.” All of this territorial talk leads Winn to posit another preposterous contention: “No narcotics cartel had ever ruled so much land outright—an achievement owed in part to the US government, perpetually unable to predict the consequences of its interventions.” Cringingly, Winn claims at the end of Narcotopia that the Wa have achieved “a dream that has eluded the Basques, Cherokees, Tibetans and other minorities.”
And then there are examples of pure fantasy and truth stretching. Khun Sa’s headquarters in “Shanland” did not have a “posh villa with tennis courts and a jumbo-sized swimming pool.” Winn’s source for this and other salacious details is a “CIA report” he cites in the endnotes. But that document is an open source news compendium from the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). The specific source is the “Bin Dieo Column” written by Chaiya Bansuwan in the Tawan Siam newspaper (29 January 1982, page 5) who mentions the pool and a porn collection (but no tennis court). The columnist caveats at one point that he received the information from unnamed sources on a visit to Chiang Mai, and “I cannot swear to the truth of this. They told me this and I am simply repeating it.” Not a “CIA report”, but a gossip column. Khun Sa’s old camp in Ban Thoerd Thai has been a museum for 20 years, which Winn doesn’t mention visiting. There is no pool.
Narcotopia is infested with absurd descriptions. The Mekong River, “its warm waters brown as Ovaltine”, is not notorious for “river pirates.” By that Winn probably means the Shan drug lord Naw Kham, who was accused of killing 13 Chinese sailors on the river in 2011, captured in Laos and deported to China in 2012, and executed in Kunming the following year. If this counts as “piracy” then it is a rare event, so unclear where the “notoriety” comes from. Narcotopia has an unpleasant “VICE News” cadence. Winn possibly believes he writes like James Ellroy. But he’s more Dan Brown.
I frequently wondered why Winn couldn’t simply explain the difference between a ya-ba methamphetamine pill and crystal methamphetamine. For a book on the narcotics trade its understanding of that business, or at least its description in the book, is rudimentary. He squanders words on fetishizing drugs instead of explaining them. WY ya-ba pills are supposedly “infused…with a chemical fragrance that smells like Oreo vanilla crème filling.” The description of the heroin epidemic in the US in the early 1990s is lurid. At one point Winn appears to suggest indirect UWSA culpability in the death of Kurt Cobain.
The most absurd line in Narcotopia is “(t)oday, per annual unit sold, ya-ba pills outperform Big Macs and Starbucks coffee orders worldwide.” (In the endnotes, Winn cites 2016 sales data for both items, but admits “Starbucks seldom release specific sales data.”) This is a meaningless and misleading comparison, a dopey punchline.
Winn makes the erroneous argument that the UWSA are the major drug player in the region. This is simply not borne out by more serious research. It is obvious that the UWSA are still involved, but likely as major investors in multi-investor super labs to produce a gargantuan volume of crystal methamphetamine by Chinese syndicates, smuggled out of Myanmar in tea-brand packaging. But the UWSA has over the past two decades entered multiple other fund-raising ventures, establishing a diversified portfolio of jade, tin mining, and casinos. And Mexican crystal methamphetamines are increasingly undercutting Myanmar-manufactured products in a regional price war.
The Netflix generation
At numerous points in Narcotopia I suspected the enterprise was designed as a treatment for a Netflix series: the Golden Triangle addition to the popular Narcos series. A dedicated drama on Myanmar’s drug trade would be highly anticipated. But there is a potential showdown between the sensationalists and the serious. Having studied the Myanmar drug trade and conflict for 25 years, I’m convinced that it requires no embellishment. An accurate rendering of the history would be more powerfully compelling: You really can’t make the reality up.
That would require consulting the serious writers Alfred McCoy, Bertil Lintner, Ko-Lin Chin and Andrew Ong as technical advisors, all of whom have written the best research on the drug trade and the Wa, and their work should be the basis of any dramatic rendering. The brilliant work of the film maker Adrian Cowell, who documented the Shan State anarchy from the 1960s to the 1990s, would be invaluable, as would the work of the Transnational Institute (TNI). There is an abundant canon of serious and compassionate work that renders sensationalist work like Narcotopia irrelevant to the complex history of Myanmar’s narcotics misery.
David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, humanitarian and human rights issues on Myanmar.
