The Hunt for Khun Sa: Drug Lord of the Golden Triangle

By Ron Felber

For two decades, the Burmese warlord Khun Sa controlled nearly 70 percent of the world’s heroin supply, yet there has been little written about the legend the U.S. State Department branded the “most evil man in the world”—until now. Through exhaustive investigative journalism, this examination of one of the world’s major drug lords from the 1970s to the 1990s goes behind the scenes into the lives of the DEA specialists assigned the seemingly impossible task of capturing or killing him. Known as Group 41, these men would fight for years in order to stop a man who, in fact, had the CIA to thank for his rise to power. Featuring interviews with DEA, CIA, Mafia, and Asian gang members, this meticulously researched and well-documented investigation reaches far beyond the expected and delves into the thrilling and shocking world of the CIA-backed heroin trade.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trine Day
• Release date: May 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781936296163

Book preview

The Hunt

For

Khun Sa

Drug Lord of the Golden Triangle

Ron Felber

Table of Contents

Title Page

copyright page

Publisher's quote

Publisher's Foreword

Dedication

Author's quote

Author’s Note

Contents

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Epilogue

Documents

SOURCES

Index

The Hunt for Kuhn Sa: Drug Lord of the Golden Triangle.

Copyright © 2011 Ron Felber. aLL righTS reServeD. preSenTaTion CopyrighT © 2011 Trine Day, LLC

Published by: Trine Day LLC PO Box 577 Walterville, OR 97489 1-800-556-2012 www.TrineDay.com [e-mail]

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011926599

Felber, Ron The Hunt for Kuhn Sa: Drug Lord of the Golden Triangle—1st ed.

p. cm. Includes bibliography, references and index.

Epub (ISBN-13) 978-1-936296-16-3 (ISBN-10) 1-936296-17-9

Kindle (ISBN-13) 978-1-936296-17-0 (ISBN-10) 1-936296-16-0

Print (ISBN-13) 978-1-936296-15-6 (ISBN-10) 1-936296-15-2

1. Drug traffic--History--20th century. 2. Khun Sa,--1934-2007. 3. Drug traffic--Golden Triangle (Southeastern Asia)--History. 4. Opium trade-­Golden Triangle (Southeastern Asia). I. Title

First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the USA Distribution to the Trade by: Independent Publishers Group (IPG) 814 North Franklin Street Chicago, Illinois 60610 312.337.0747 www.ipgbook.com

Don’t behave like drums and gongs: they make sounds only when beaten. Act like clocks: they sound off every time the need arises.

– Khun Sa

Publisher’s foreword

I’ve seen the needle and the damage done A little part of it in everyone …

–Neil Young

… the point is, once you cross that line, from the straight society

to the drug society – marijuana, then speed, then it’s LSD, then

it’s heroin, etc. Then you’re done.

–Richard Nixon

If you have your own country but not your own government,

nothing you own is secure.

–Khun Sa

On June 17, 1971, Richard Nixon first used the term War on Drugs, declaring, Public enemy number one is drug abuse. This was four days after the New York Times had published the Pen­tagon Papers, and exactly one year before the infamous Watergate third-rate burglary. Our country would never be the same.

Both Watergate and the War on Drugs have changed the course of our republic, and neither for the good. Watergate weakened the Office of the President, helped destroy Americans’ faith in their governmental institutions, and almost empowered a completely unelected federal office-holder to serve as President of the US.

The War on Drugs compromises our Constitution, leaving our valiantly secured rights degraded. This War has created a milita­rized police force, a huge prison population and massive corrup­tion. Drug money is laundered by our banks and used as off-the­books funding by our intelligence/military apparatus, allowing forces in the shadows to menace the integrity of our system.

The Drug War has been unsuccessful by any social measure. But then maybe it’s not about protecting our children or our commu­nity: maybe it’s about keeping a black market in place. Without pro­hibition, there are no gargantuan profits. We are given reasons of geopolitics and intelligence gathering, but at the end the day it all appears to be simply about money and power.

Ron Felber’s The Hunt For Khun Sa brings reality to the discourse, and accuracy to the historical record. And is an exciting read to boot. Life is hard enough these days without having to delve through a morass of propaganda and gobbledygook to try to understand the truth of matters, so it is refreshing to come across a book that delivers both punch and honesty.

The Hunt for Khun Sa takes the reader into the excitement, drama and frustration that confront federal agents as they attempt to use the power of the government to curtail the steady flow of heroin to the streets. You learn how their actions get thwarted not only by the crimi­nals, but by other federal prerogatives. After spending years to build cases against certain major narcotics traffickers, the agents are told to stand down, drop the investigation, walk away and simply act as though the smuggling ring didn’t exist.

These rigged games have to be very demoralizing and disconcerting for the rank-and-file, and must make them question their stated mission. Leaving behind a general malaise and inefficiency, a hesitancy to pursue cases, and a pathway for corruption – making a difficult job even harder.

With The Hunt For Khun Sa, we get to experience a successful in­ternational federal investigation and operation that wasn’t shut down. Its outcome may have been different from one hoped for by some, but then there always seems to be more to life than what meets the eye.

Well, let me get off my soapbox and invite you to read a dynamic tale, tinged with the foibles of our times, and ask you to make up your own mind about what it all means.

Onwards to the utmost of futures,

Peace,

Kris Millegan

Publisher

TrineDay

April 20, 2011

For Bill Bonanno, a friend

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire, My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill, which I is I? —Theodore Roethke, In A Dark Time

Author’s Note

For this book, I conducted one-on-one interviews with intel­ligence operatives in New York City; Hong Kong; Bangkok, Thailand; Chiang Mai, Thailand; Chiang Rai, Thailand; and Shan State, Burma. Many excerpts from the taped interviews appear word-for-word throughout the book.

R.F

Contents

Glossary of Terms........................................................xii Prologue........................................................................1

1. Lord of the Golden Triangle ......................................5

2. Group 41 ................................................................11

3. The Mafia Connection ............................................17

4. Monster...................................................................29

5. Heroin ....................................................................41

6. Chinatown ..............................................................57

7. The Cuban Kid .......................................................67

8. Chains, Guns, and Machettes..................................77

9. Living Large ............................................................87

10. The Residue of Other People’s Adventures.............97

11. Mr. Lin ...............................................................111

12. A Roaming Nightmare ........................................121

13. Informant SWH-4-0002.....................................133

14. Burdens of Command.........................................143

15. Operation Tiger Trap...........................................159

16. Apocalypse Now..................................................169

17. Fubria .................................................................179

18. Death of a Drug Lord .........................................187 Epilogue....................................................................191 Documents................................................................197 Sources......................................................................211 Index.........................................................................221

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

au king—a boss, a godfather of Chinese gangs, higher than dai lo.

capo di tutti capo—Sicilian Mafia title: boss of all bosses.

C4 Division—FBI Asian heroin unit.

China White—Southeast Asian heroin, 92-percent pure, aka number four.

dai lo—a leader; name given to gang bosses in Chinatowns.

Delta Force—US Army unit created by Colonel Charles Beckwith in 1977 to create mechanism for direct response to terrorist incidents worldwide.

Executive Order 12333—executive order signed by President Ford forbidding the use of military/intelligence agencies to participate in the assassination of foreign leaders.

Golden Triangle—region where Thailand, Laos, and Burma meet; famous for its opium production.

Group 41—Asian heroin unit in the New York office of the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Ka Kwe Ye—private armies converted to fighting for Burmese military as homeland protection.

Kuomintang (KMT)—US-backed Chinese Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek, whose government fled to Taiwan after Mao’s Communists conquered mainland China.

leng jais—"little horses," children used as couriers, drug mules and assassins.

Mong Tai Army (MTA)—led by drug warlord Khun Sa after unification of his Shan United Army with another Shan rebel force.

Myanmar—Burma; renamed Myanmar in 1997. National League for Democracy (NLD)—party headed by Nobel Laureate Aung Sun Suu Kyi, which swept election in Burma in 1988, precipitating SLORC takeover.

number four—China White

Operation X—SDECE plan to use heroin as means to finance French Indochina war in 1950s. Red Pole—enforcement/assassination arm of Chinese triads. SDECE—French intelligence agency akin to America’s CIA. Shan—a people of northeast Burma ruled for centuries by their

own princely sawbwas; joined Union of Burma after World War II.

SLORC—the State Law and Order Restoration Council; military junta in control of Burma. spirit house—san phra phum in Burmese; a shrine to the protective

spirit of a place, usually in the form of a house on a pedestal.

tong—Chinatown business association, often associated with gang activities. triad—Chinese criminal society; term first used by British colonials

in Hong Kong in recognition of the widespread use of the triangle

in society emblems. Wa—fierce tribe indigenous to Shan State; traditional enemies of the Shan.

Prologue

When US Drug Enforcement Agency Special Agent Nick Caruso first told me about the renegade nation of Burma and Operation Tiger Trap, the DEA’s attempt to take-down Khun Sa and his worldwide heroin network, I was intrigued but not particularly moved.

As a child growing up on the periphery of the city and attending a college preparatory school in the heart of Newark, New Jersey’s inner-city, I vividly recalled grammar school chums gathered outside the local pool hall swapping stories about romancing girls, the victories or defeats of New York City sports teams and—drugs.

Little did I know then that the heroin they’d become addicted to was sold out of the local pizza parlor directly across from where they gathered and was part of an international syndicate with tenacles that stretched from Southeast Asia into our neighborhood. The drug’s global trek began with Khun Sa in the Shan State of Burma, traveled through Laos, Thailand and Hong Kong into the hands of Asian street gangs in New York’s Chinatown and Mafia-run storefront enterprises throughout the United States, and ended up in the veins of my classmates.

The results were not pretty, from my bigger, older childhood protector Danny Dooney Brennen, to class president and straight-A student Gary Ghaswin to dozens of other promising boys, who were both foolish and naïve. By the time I was nineteen years old and safely situated as a student at Georgetown University, five of the nine starting players on my grammar school baseball team were dead from heroin overdoses.

Then, while engaged in an interview for this book with former Mafia chieftan Salvatore Bill Bonanno, I began to understand the vastness and intricacies of what had gone on so many years ago. Each of these revelations were connected, I realized, like the pieces of a puzzle or the pixels in a photograph that few men knew about and almost no one ever saw.

It was then that Caruso’s idea for a book about the hunt for Khun Sa, the drug lord of the Golden Triangle, suddenly took on a life of its own. Now I was hungry for information about the Khun Sa-Mafia connection, Chinatown with its street gangs, the DEA, Khun Sa, himself, and what has aptly been called the cruelest nation on earth, Burma. Why were my friends, just boys really, dead? How did this happen? Who was responsible? What would an unfettered investigation into Khun Sa and his heroin empire ultimately tell me about drugs and geopolitics, the soul of the United States and, perhaps, even me?

As alluring, there was the backdrop of Burma itself, and the conundrum of Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. During her more than twenty years of on-and-off house arrest beginning in July 1989 she had witnessed many spectacles, some beautiful and some harrowing to the bone.

On March 18, 1988, Burma’s dormant outrage, brought on by abject poverty, government tyranny, and military suppression, was ignited by the murder of a university student beaten to death by soldiers. Thousands of citizens marched into central Rangoon. The police responded fiercely, herding demonstrators into vans or clubbing them to death where they stood. Arrested students were packed into police vans, where forty-two died of suffocation. Soldiers fired weapons directly into crowds, killing hundreds. The wounded were brought to hospitals where they died unattended, chained to the metal frames of their beds.

Four months later, students called for national strikes against the military junta. The strike began on August 8 and spread like brushfire from Rangoon to Mandalay, all the way to the Kachin capital of Myitkyina. By August, thirteen million people refused to work, choosing instead to march on government buildings to vent their pent-up anger. Buddhist monks, businessmen, civil servants, and other fledgling pro-democracy leaders arose from the masses to become prominent figures in the struggle. It was at their insistence that Suu Kyi, whose father had been assassinated during the 1947 Resistence Movement, intervened with an open letter to the government proposing that a committee be formed to lay the groundwork for national elections.

Like a lightning bolt, her letter struck the spine of Burma’s body politic, shooting life into a movement that had lain dormant for nearly fifty years. On August 26, a crowd of five hundred thousand gathered to hear Suu Kyi proclaim her support for a democratic government. The current crisis is the concern of the entire nation, she declared, and I cannot, as my father’s daughter, remain indifferent to all that is going on!

The population was ecstatic at her words. Suu Kyi was seen as a female reincarnation, not just of her martyred father, but also of Burma’s spirit of independence. In the days that followed, she became recognized as the unofficial leader of the pro-democratic uprising, putting together the framework for a nationalist democratic party that would garner 85 percent of the vote in the general elections that followed.

All the progress Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy was making came to a violent crescendo on September 18, 1988 when trucks full of troops and vehicles armed with machine guns rolled back into the city. Calling itself the State Law and Order Restoration Council—SLORC—and led by General Sau Maung, the junta announced that the military would that day retake control of Burma.

Marching into public squares where protests continued, soldiers lined up, knelt on the ground to assume firing positions and shot indiscriminately into the crowds of men, women, and children. Thousands were murdered within the first two hours. The wounded were carted away in trucks to Kyandaw crematorium, where they were incinerated with the corpses while still alive. By day’s end, SLORC had assumed power under the pretense of reestablishing state order, marshal law had been declared, and Aung San Suu Kyi had been placed under house arrest, where she spent fifteen of the next twenty-one years before her latest release in November 2010. Her future remains problematic.

So this is Burma, and this is the background of my book. Of course, there is more to The Hunt for Khun Sa: Drug Lord of the Golden Triangle, much more than even my personal sojourn and the travesty of Aung San Suu Kyi. To US Ambassador to Thailand William Brown, Khun Sa was nothing more than a drug lord and mass murderer, but to millions of Shans, he was considered the patriotic leader of an armed movement battling to win their independence from the Burmese government—a military regime considered by many to be the most repressive in the world. Yet not even a man as cunning as Khun Sa could have developed an underground empire so widespread and sophisticated as the one that evolved in the Golden Triangle without the help of powerful allies ranging from the American Mafia to China’s ancient triad criminal organizations to the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States.

Who was Khun Sa really? How did the orphaned son of a Shan mother and Chinese father born in the primitive mountain village of Loi Maw rise to become the unquestioned ruler of a $400-million drug empire? More, how did his destiny and that of Southeast Asia and the United States interlink so profoundly that he managed to hold on to that power and his empire for nearly a full generation. The answer, I discovered, was a simple as it was complex. Call it a history, a dark secret about cynical governments and powerful men, the pieces of a puzzle, the pixels of a photograph. Whatever you call it, the secret is no small matter.

And this is the story I am about to tell you. It has to do with a DEA counterinsurgency operation called Tiger Trap, the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America, and the hunt for a narco-terrorist named Khun Sa, drug lord of the Golden Triangle.

RF

1

Lord of the Golden Triangle

Southeast Asia

Khun Sa is a monster … the worst enemy the world has.

Viraj Jutimitta paged through a two-inch-thick opera­tional plan. Developed in the mid-1990s, it had been dubbed Tiger Trap, based on Khun Sa’s penchant for dried tiger penises, trumpeted by him to be an aphrodisiac. Vi­raj could hear Don Ferrarone, the DEA’s bespectacled, slightly balding country attaché, briefing Director Thomas Constantine in the American embassy’s high-security wing on details of the agency’s most ambitious mission ever.

It was a strategy intended to take down Khun Sa, aka Chang Shee-fu, and his Mong Tai Army—the source of nearly 60 percent of the world’s heroin supply—by dismantling its smuggling mechanisms, its primary distribution and redistribution networks, and freezing its financial assets.

Major General Viraj of the Royal Thai Police had been dogged in his determination, working for nearly twenty years with multiagency US operatives worldwide to reach this stage of Tiger Trap’s evolution. But it hadn’t been easy. After all, how did one trap a tiger?

Tigers were intelligent. They were perceptive, dangerous, and rarely drifted from the safety of familiar environs. Still, there was a way that he and the other members of the operations team believed they had found: study the tiger much as the tiger studies its prey.

What were its strengths? What were its vulnerabilities? Analyze the information and interpret what it tells you about how to proceed. Was it territorial? Did it hunt alone? Stripping out every iota of emotion, pessimism or optimism, translate what you have learned into an action plan to trap or kill the tiger. What resources were necessary? What time frame would be most effective? Was lethal force necessary, or desirable?

Well, now they had it. It was a strategy that teamed the DEA, Thai police, FBI, CIA, and US Joint Special Operations Command to coordinate a plan of attack that promised to neutralize the sixty-nine­year-old drug lord in a way that had never before been attempted.

Observation, analysis, and plan of attack: that was what Tiger Trap was all about. Staged in three distinct phases and to be executed in major cities, back-road towns, and mountainous supply routes throughout Southeast Asia, Operation Tiger Trap set traps with snares that were about to be pulled on sixteen of Khun Sa’s most valuable operatives, who had been lured from the protective cover of Burma’s Shan State either to Hong Kong or to Bangkok, Chiang Mai or Chiang Rai in Thailand.

But less than an hour before, they had discovered that even their most calculated efforts had been dashed somewhat by a leak. Tipped-off through a radio intercept that Khun Sa was aware of the operation, US Army radio dispatchers had been jamming, for the past eight hours nonstop, Mong Tai Army headquarters transmissions out of Homong, Burma. Viraj prayed that they could block communications that would forewarn their targets.

His eyes, once compared to those of boxing champion Roberto Duran, darted across the DEA conference room now transformed into a tactical command center. Aerial maps lined the walls. Electronic equipment cluttered the main table’s rectangular top, with images of arrest sites dancing across sixteen-inch monitors and the anxious voices of on-the-ground teams reconciling GPS surveillance data with US Army recon units circling thirty thousand feet above.

Lock on target, a voice called through the static. Have you established visual contact?

Roger that, shot back the clipped answer of Bangkok’s team leader, Chris Kabel. Target headed for rendezvous location.

The exchange piqued Viraj’s curiosity