Union and the southern border of communist China. It just so happened that one of the key war zones in the cold war happened to lay astride the Asian opium zone. Perspective on CIA role During the 40 years of the cold war, from the late 1940s to this year, the CIA pursued a policy that I call radical pragmatism. Their mission was to stop communism and in pursuit of that mission they would ally with anyone and do anything to fight communism. McCoy does not so much accuse the CIA of direct participation in the drug trade, than protecting the drug trade of people the CIA believed essential allies in its primary mission. During the long years of the cold war the CIA mounted major covert guerilla operations along the Soviet-Chinese border. The CIA recruited as allies people we now call drug lords for their operation against communist China in northeastern Burma in 1950, then from 1965 to 1975 [during the Vietnam war] their operation in northern Laos and throughout the decade of the 1980s, the Afghan operation against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Powerful, upland political figures control the societies and economies in these regions and part of that panoply of power is the opium trade. The CIA extended the mantle of their alliance to these drug lords and in every case the drug lords used it to expand a small local trade in opium into a major source of supply for the world markets and the United States. While they were allied with the United States these drug lords were absolutely immune to any kind of investigation. If you're involved in any kind of illicit commodity trade, organized crime activity like drug trafficking, there is only one requisite for success, immunity, and the CIA gave them that. As long as they were allied with the CIA, the local police and then the DEA stayed away from the drug lords. UNODOC observes Southeast Asia is closing a tragic chapter that has blighted the Golden Triangle for decades—the region is now almost opium free. Yet it is not free of poverty and therefore farmers remain vulnerable to the temptations of illicit incomes. Much more assistance—for alternative crops and also for viable income substitution—is needed to ensure that drug-free development is sustained in the greater Mekong basin. It may well be that US aid, perhaps not from the CIA but from