In 1970,
more than five centuries after the Christian knights
had abandoned their ill-fated crusade against the Turks,
the Nixon administration moved to renew the ancient
hostilities. Unable to uproot the marijuana plant from
Mexico, the Ad Hoc Committee on Narcotics next turned
its attention to the Turkish connection. To be sure,
Turkey was by no means the sole, or even the largest,
producer of opium. The opium poppy (Papaver somniferum)
had been cultivated for centuries in virtually every
country between Yugoslavia and Japan. And according
to CIA estimates compiled for the ad hoc committee,
India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Thailand, Laos, and Burma
all produced substantially more illicit opium than did
Turkey. Moreover, after a thirteen-year prohibition,
the Shah of Iran had decided in 1969 to plant 20,000
hectares with poppies, which was a 50percent-greater
area than Turkey had in cultivation. In all, the CIA
estimated, Turkey produced only from 3 to 8 percent
of the illicit opium available throughout the world.
Nevertheless, Turkey was chosen as the most feasible
target by the committee for several reasons. For one,
Turkey was assumed to be the most convenient and proximate
source for the European heroin wholesalers in the various
scenarios, or "systems," worked out by the
Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The putative
distribution routes-from Afyon to Beirut to Marseilles
to Montreal to New York, etc.-were neatly marked out
on the bureau's maps, as if they were readily available
tourist itineraries. (For the most part these maps reflected
locations where the BNDD already had agents, and did
not necessarily include all the smuggling routes.) According
to these scenarios, all opium routes led to the Turkish
province of Afyon, and alternative routes in Southeast
Asia, which were not on the bureau's maps, were deemed
of less importance. Second, and more important, Turkey
was a NATO ally, dependent on United States military
aid, and it could therefore be expected to be more vulnerable
to American pressure than "neutral" countries
such as Burma and India. Although India was still the
world's largest producer of opium-both licit and illicit-the
ad hoc committee considered it unlikely that it would
bow to American diplomatic or military pressure. Indeed,
Elliot Richardson warned that it might respond by denouncing
United States "Imperialism." (It was therefore
necessary to promote in the press the myth that India's
opium was tightly controlled by the government, even
though the committee's analysis showed enormous leakage
of Indian opium into illicit markets.) In the case of
Burma (as well as of Afghanistan and Laos), it was recognized
that the central government had virtually no control
over the tribes growing and smuggling poppies, and that
any American pressure-or incentives given to the central
government would be at best unproductive. Iran presented
another problem: given the realities of oil politics,
it was considered impolitic (and futile) to attempt
to restrain the Shah from replanting the poppy in his
country. This left Turkey. As one member of the committee
put it, "Turkey was the only country where we could
expect dramatic results, and that was what the president
wanted."
The opium poppy had grown on
the rich, shaly plains of Afyon for a millennium or
so before the Ad Hoc Committee on Narcotics considered
the problem, and it had become an integral part of peasant
life in that province of Turkey. The poppy seed provided
the oil for cooking, the protein-rich husks of the poppy
plant provided nourishment for livestock, the leaves
were used in salads, the stalks were burned as heating
fuel in the cold Anatolian winters, and the gummy juice
of the unripened capsule served as a remedy for most
ailments and as a pain-deadener. This substance, which
became known as '.afyon" in Turkey and as "opium"
in the rest of the world, could also be bartered or
sold to passing caravans. Although in the twentieth
century Turkish farmers were required by law to sell
their entire opium harvest to the government at a fixed
price for resale to pharmaceutical manufacturers all
over the world (Who used it to manufacture morphine
and codeine), many farmers clandestinely siphoned off
part of their harvest and sold it at higher prices to
black marketeers. William Handley, the American ambassador
to Turkey, warned the ad hoc committee that since the
suppression of opium in Turkey could deprive tens of
thousands of Anatolian farmers of their livelihood,
it would prove difficult to persuade the Turkish government
that opium should be banned in Turkey while India and
other countries expanded their production.
Five thousand miles away, in
Washington, however, the Nixon administration decided
to escalate the pressures on Turkey to conform to American
domestic policy. Initially, in early 1970, it was proposed
only that the United States make "Preemptive buys"
of opium in Turkey and use it to build up the United
States government stockpiles of codeine and morphine.
State Department representatives on the committee argued
that if the licit price for opium were raised, Turkish
peasants would be better able to resist the temptation
of selling part of their harvest to illicit traffickers.
However, Eugene Rossides, who had taken an active part
in Operation Intercept, was a Greek-Cypriot American
with little sympathy for the Turks, and he vehemently
objected to any plan which would subsidize the Turkish
opium farmers. He reasoned that higher prices for licit
opium would simply encourage more farmers to plant poppies,
and therefore more opium would be produced for both
licit and illicit markets. "We are at war,"
Rossides said metaphorically. "If the Turks refuse
to go along with us in this crusade against heroin,
we have to consider them enemies rather than allies."
At this and subsequent meetings of the ad hoc committee,
the rhetoric became more and more that of the first
crusade against the infidel Turks. Myles Ambrose subsequently
recalled that "they seemed to be totally divorced
from the reality of the situation, and I felt like Alice
at the Mad Hatter's tea party." What was the "reality"?
Ambrose continued perceptively, "The basic fact
that eluded these great geniuses was that it takes only
ten square miles of poppy to feed the entire American
heroin market, and they grow everywhere." At one
point it was even suggested that Turkey be purged from
NATO. Whatever suggestions were made at the committee,
however, Krogh insisted that President Nixon realized
the strategic importance of Turkey, and would not have
allowed NATO to disintegrate over the opium question.
Krogh explained, "Nixon was a poker player, and
didn't expect the Turks to call our bluff."
Thus, in the spring of 1970,
the Ad Hoc Committee on Narcotics decided to make an
all-out effort to discourage Turkish production of opium.
Through congressional testimony and news releases, Turkey
was accused of supplying "up to 80 percent of the
heroin smuggled into the United States." Even though
the 80-percent estimate quickly became established as
a journalistic "fact," it was predicated on
a set of very open-ended assumptions. It was assumed,
first of all, that about one quarter of Turkish opium
was diverted to the illicit market (an estimate largely
based on the difference between the expected and the
actual yield per acre in 1968), and, second, it was
assumed that almost all of this diverted opium was converted
into heroin for the United States market. This in turn
was based on the third assumption that there was no
domestic consumption of opium in Turkey nor any demand
for it in countries other than the United States. These
assumptions were all extremely problematic. Despite
the elaborately articulated systems and colorful maps
that the Bureau of Narcotics used in its relations with
Congress and the press, it had at the time no reliable
means of identifying the source of American heroin.
George Belk, the program manager of the bureau's international
division, acknowledged in 1972 that scientifically "there
is no way known of chemically tracing heroin seized
in the United States back to the country, no less area,
of its origin." It is all done, the bureau's director
explained, "by deductive reasoning." In reality,
John Ingersoll explained candidly, "We know that
substantial opium goes from Turkey to the wholesalers
in Europe, but we don't know what percentage of this
ever reaches America."
When in late 1970 Ambassador
William Handley attempted to convince Turkish officials
that they were responsible for most, if not four fifths,
of American heroin, they sharply disputed the underlying
assumptions. Turkey had formed, with American financing,
a special narcotics field unit of its police force in
1968, modeled after the American agency, and it claimed
that only a small fraction of the opium grown seeped
into the illicit market, and that this was mainly diverted
east, to Iran. Though sympathetic to their ally's heroin
problem, Turkish officials insisted that it was politically
impossible for them to curtail production at the cost
of jeopardizing the livelihood of a large number of
Anatolian peasants. The Turkish populace would hardly
perceive a heroin problem in America as germane to them.
"The problem was further
complicated by the fact that Turkey was a somewhat shaky
parliamentary democracy," Osman Olcay, the foreign
minister at the time, explained to me. "Even those
in the government and military most sympathetic to the
American position realized that no government that threatened
a half million Turkish farmers with starvation could
remain in power for a day." Not only was the American
plan to eradicate the Turkish poppy unpopular with the
conservative elements in Parliament, who drew their
support from the peasants, but the left-wing parties
openly attacked it as American imperialism and interference.
Even many moderate Turks argued that the United States
was employing a double standard by demanding that Turkey
alone suppress its poppy crop while India, Iran, and
other countries continued to grow poppy. In light of
this political situation in 1970, the best the Turks
were willing to offer was to intensify the policing
of their fields and borders, and gradually to substitute
other crops for poppies.
The White House, however, was
not satisfied with Ambassador Handley's efforts to persuade
the Turks, and the ad hoc committee ordered more pressures
to be selectively applied against their new adversary.
The president's emissaries to NATO maneuvered the alliance
into converting its new adjunct, the Committee for Challenges
to Modern Societies, into another American antiheroin
agency. Since none of our Western European allies had
much of a heroin problem, this new arm of NATO was used
mainly to harangue the lone Turkish delegate on the
committee.
Congress was also recruited
into the new crusade against the Turks. Eugene Rossides,
believing that Kissinger "was dragging his feet"
because he was unwilling to jeopardize the alliance,
pressed black congressmen concerned about heroin addiction
in their districts to cut off military aid to Turkey.
This "hyping-up" of congressmen greatly concerned
some members of the National Security Council, since
the military aid was being extended to Turkey in return
for the use of air bases and radar installations that
monitored and tracked Soviet missiles. Rossides's assistant,
G. Gordon Liddy, who had moved from Operation Intercept
to the working committee to curtail Turkish opium supplies,
suggested to Ambassador Handley that the cadavers of
heroin addicts who had died of overdoses be sent in
body bags to Turkish diplomats. At the time, Handley
did not take the suggestion seriously.
As the election drew nearer,
the White House strategists made Handley and other American
diplomats uncomfortably aware of the administration's
determination to achieve quickly some dramatic breakthrough
on the opium front. Indeed, Handley was rudely summoned
back to Washington from Ankara. Minutes after his arrival
at the White House, a presidential assistant told him,
in front of Arthur Downey, a staff member of the National
Security Council, "To show you how seriously I
view the matter ... I intend to recommend to the president
that unless we have an agreement, he should order the
Sixth Fleet through the Dardanelles and shell Istanbul.
They are committing naked aggression, why shouldn't
we respond?" Handley, still not recovered from
the seventeen-hour flight, left the room somewhat dazed.
Downey, who was present at this meeting in the White
House, later explained to me that the president's aide
was merely trying to "build a fire under Handley"
and the military threat was meant only metaphorically.
At another point during this brief visit, Handley was
called aside by Liddy, who said in his deadly quiet
voice, "Mr. Ambassador, how many bodies have you
picked off the streets of New York?" Again Handley
fell speechless, while Liddy continued, "I have
personally loaded overdosed victims into ambulances,
and the Turks are responsible. Tell them that!"
Still later, as Handley prepared to return to Ankara,
President Nixon personally handed him a press clipping
reporting growing concern over "heroin-related
deaths" (a broad and somewhat deceptive category
which included virtually all deaths of narcotic users,
even if they died of old age or were hit by an automobile).
The president told him to present the clipping to the
Turkish prime minister immediately upon his arrival.
When he returned to Ankara, Handley heard from his chief
of mission that members of the ad hoc committee were
demanding that the State Department fire any "ambassadors
who failed to achieve the president's objectives in
the drug program."
Fortunately, for Handley at
least, the Turkish military forces overthrew the elected
government of Turkey in 1971, and installed a government
which was less willing to jeopardize American military
aid and goodwill over the poppy issue. The new premier,
Nihat Erim, told Handley that he was willing to suspend
poppy cultivation temporarily before the American election
if the United States would agree to compensate the farmers
for the lost income and assist them in finding alternative
crops and livelihoods. Handley continued negotiating
with the Turkish military government through the spring
of 1971 and, in June, finally achieved a tentative agreement.
With the first victory in sight in his new crusade,
President Nixon approved the idea of providing $100
million in aid over three years to Turkish farmers.
When Rossides heard of the impending deal, he bitterly
opposed "paying a dime" to Turkish peasants,
but the president, not willing to allow this major coup
to slip from his grasp, immediately authorized Handley
to accept the Turkish terms, and invited Premier Erim
to America for a joint announcement by the end of the
month. (In a lastditch battle Rossides managed to reduce
the amount of aid to $35 million, which was finally
approved by the Treasury Department.) Although in fact
this victory would cut off only a small fraction of
the opium growth in the world-less than 8 percent-and
even this amount would quickly be replaced by opium
from Southeast Asia, India, and other sources, White
House strategists realized that if the announcement
were properly managed in the press, it would be heralded
as a decisive victory against the forces of crime and
addiction.
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