Dope Inc

The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence, and International Fascism

a book by Henrik Kruger


Boston: South End Press, 1980. 240 pages. (Originally published in Denmark as "Smukke Serge og Heroinen" in 1976.)

Henrik Kruger spent five years as a correspondent in Bangkok, Santiago, and Washington for the Copenhagen daily "Politiken," and has written or co-authored eight books. His work on what is today called "narcoterrorism" began more than ten years before the term was used in the U.S., and without the anti-Soviet baggage that became obligatory under the sponsorship of Reagan-era think tanks. Unfortunately this book is one of a kind and is invariably ignored by today's mainstream writers.

The Great Heroin Coup raises awkward questions. The first half of the book concerns French intelligence, the OAS, the Corsican Mafia and the CIA, the Ben Barka affair, and the story of Christian David; the second half examines the CIA and Mafia in the Golden Triangle, Cuban exiles in Florida, the Nixon-Vesco connection, and the CIA's infiltration of the DEA in Latin America. The conclusion is not essential to the rich detail and dense footnoting throughout the book, but here it is: Nixon's war against the Turkey-Marseilles heroin allowed Trafficante's marketing "coup" using heroin from Southeast Asia, and for Kruger it appears that there may have been passive collusion in high places.
ISBN 0-89608-031-5