from the trade has been going into the pockets of some of our best friends in Southeast Asia. The charge concludes with the statement that the traffic is being carried on with the indifference if not the closed-eye compliance of some American officials and there is no likelihood of its being shut down in the foreseeable future." This is not inconsistent with Leary's description (with respect to Laos and in Southeast Asia), although there seem to be differences in the degree of knowledge and consent by CIA management. Beginning of transnational drug trade in colonial Indochina McCoy asserts that the French administration of Indochina had financed its covert operations with the drug trade, and the CIA had simply replaced the French, to finance similar operations. He said he had gone to Paris and interviewed retired general Maurice Belleux, the former head of the French equivalent of the CIA, an organization called Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE, predecessor of the current French service, the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure). In an amazing interview he told me that French military intelligence had financed all their covert operations from the control of the Indochina drug trade ... The French paratroopers fighting with hill tribes collected the opium and French aircraft would fly the opium down to Saigon and the Sino-Vietnamese mafia that was the instrument of French intelligence would then distribute the opium. The central bank accounts, the sharing of the profits, was all controlled by French military intelligence. He concluded the interview by telling me that it was his information that the CIA had taken over the French assets and were pursuing something of the same policy. So I went to Southeast Asia to follow up on that lead and that's what took me into doing this whole book. It was basically pulling a thread and keep tucking at it and a veil masking the reality began to unravel. Since the 1920s the League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations, and the United States have prohibited opium and cocaine products from legal sale. These products had already emerged as vast global commodities with very substantial production zones and large markets, large demand for those commodities both in the third world and the first. The historic Asia opium zone stretches across 5,000 miles of Asian mainland from Turkey to Laos along the southern borders of the Soviet