Alfred W. McCoy

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Alfred W. McCoy is a historian and current Professor of History in the "Center for Southeast Asian Studies", at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received an undergraduate degree from Columbia University and his PhD in Southeastern Asian history from Yale University.

McCoy primarily researches and writes about Philippines history and on the Golden Triangle drug trades of opium and heroin; his The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia was a landmark work documenting the interactions between the CIA and drug cartels in Southeast Asia.

McCoy's principal thesis is that, following the effective suppression of the heroin trade in America during World War II and the subsequent decision to stamp out opium growing by Turkey -- which had been one of the main sources of raw opium -- organized crime organizations in America and Europe collaborated in a wide-ranging conspiracy to establish new centers of opium production, heroin refining and distribution in Southeast Asia, and that their efforts were greatly facilitated by the Central Intelligence Agency and the unstable political situation created by the ongoing Vietnam War.

McCoy asserts that the conspiracy arose from an alliance between the Corsican Mafia, who had an historical presence in South Vietnam dating back to the French occupation, and leading members of the American and Sicilian Mafia, under the leadership of infamous Italian-American mob boss Lucky Luciano.

Luciano had been imprisoned in the United States during World War II for racketeering, but McCoy claims that in the later stages of the war he was asked to provide assistance to American military intelligence about Axis infiltration of the waterfront in American ports (which was effectively controlled by the Mafia), as well as assisting Allied forces in their invasion of Sicily and Italy. He reportedly used his contacts in the Sicilian Mafia to assist US forces by gathering intelligence and identifying both fascist collaborators and Socialist/Communist elements in the Italian resistance movement, who were then systematically eliminated.

In return for his assistance, Luciano was covertly permitted to run his crime operations from prison, and at the end of the war he was deported back to Sicily, where he immediately began a major expansion of his drug operations, forging alliances with Corsican Mafia members in South Vietnam and organised crime figures in other countries, including Australia.

McCoy wrote in the book, "However, American involvement had gone far beyond coincidental complicity; embassies had covered up involvement by client governments, CIA contract airlines had carried opium, and individual CIA agents had winked at the opium traffic. As an indirect consequence of American involvement in the Golden Triangle until 1972, opium production steadily increased....Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle grew 70 percent of the world's illicit opium, supplied an estimated 30 percent of America's heroin, and was capable of supplying the United States with unlimited quantities of heroin for generations to come."^[1] The CIA's actions were more specifically described by him thus: "In most cases, the CIA's role involved various forms of complicity, tolerance or studied ignorance about the trade, not any direct culpability in the actual trafficking....The CIA did not handle heroin, but it did provide its drug-lord allies with transport, arms, and political protection. In sum, the CIA's role in the Southeast Asian heroin trade involved indirect complicity rather than direct culpability." ^[2]

In 2001, the Association for Asian Studies awarded him the Grant Goodman Prize for his career contributions to the study of the Philippines.

[edit] References

[edit] Partial bibliography

• Laos: War and Revolution, co-editor, 1970
• The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. CIA complicity in the global drug trade, by Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P. Adams II, 1972, ISBN 0-06-012901-8
• An Anarchy Of Families (state and family in the Philippines), 1998, ISBN 971-550-128-1
• Closer Than Brothers: Manhood at the Philippine Military Academy, 1999, ISBN 0-300-07765-3
• A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror, 2006, ISBN 0-8050-8041-4

[edit] External links

• Page on McCoy at the "Center for Southeast Asian Studies"
• Interview of McCoy on The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
• "A Correspondence with the CIA" -(part of an article for the The New York Review of Books on the CIA's interest in his Politics of Heroin
• "Cruel Science: The Long Shadow of CIA Torture Research" -(article for Counterpunch on the Abu Ghraib tortures)
• "The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America's Road to Abu Ghraib" -(similar editorial for Truthout)

Persondata
NAME	McCoy, Alfred W.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	McCoy, Alfred
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American historian of Southeast Asia and of the drug trades
DATE OF BIRTH
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH