'THE NEW DRUG ROUTES' BY ROGER DEVREKER AND PAUL EMMANUEL. BRUSSELS SPECIAL, 27 MAY 1975.

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP79-01194A000100370001-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: C
• Document Page Count: 8
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 6, 1998
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: June 24, 1975
• Content Type: REPORT

Approved For Release 1999/09/02 : CIA-
"The New Drug Routes" by Roger Devreker and Paul Emmanuel.
Brussels Special, 27 May 1975.
The attached article, for your background information, is
intended to supplement case officer knowledge regarding new drug
routes through Amsterdam and the precautionary changes in smug-
gling techniques regularly worked out by international narcotics
traffickers.
Interviews with narcotics enforcement agents have emphasized
the need for stiffer drug laws and for realistic means of enforce-
ment in Europe. Belgian police, for example, are handicapped by
inadequate medical facilities for addicts and by weak narcotics
laws which have not been revised since 1921. Convicted traffickerl
generally go free at the end of a. year, resume smuggling activ-
ities, and become "much more polished and consequently harder to
catch."
The'article points out the flexibility of drug traffickers,
their ability to adapt to changing police tactics and to expend
seemingly limitless manpower and funds. The authors have traced
in detail known drug routes, which cut through four continents
and attest to the continuing need for international police
cooperation.
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CPYRGHT
Brussels SPECIAL
[Article by Roger Devreker and Paul Emmanuel: "The New Drug Routes"]
The new drug offensive has been started from. Amsterdam, where all
the reestablished "connections" come together.
Fired point blank, the four shots hardly made any more noise than the back-
firing of a motorcycle. The man, a fiftyish Oriental, coiled down in a
haunting slow motion, a little like a genie of smoke returning to his Alad-
din's lamp.....
The silence, hardly interrupted by the lapping of the nearby canal, falls
once again in this quarter of Amsterdam. Neither the shadows appearing
from out of nowhere to take the body and lower it into the sea-green water
which has recently licked the pilings of the Prins Henrikkade, nor the
Chinese people bustling like frantic ants around a smoke-filled anthill,
would disturb it again.
It is only the next day that the men from the Thoorenar main police station,
alerted by a phone call, fish out the bodyof Chung Mon, age 54, better
known in the Chinese quarter of Amsterdam by the name of "Uncle Mon." A
prosperous merchant, but one the police called "de Peetvader" [translation
unknown], a sort of Godfather in the Chinese community. Besides his res-
taurant, he also ran a gambling salon and big-hearted, never hesitated to
rush to the aid of his less fortunate compatriots. _
They are all restauranteurs, officially, these Orientals who haunt the
Central Station area, especially Binnen Bantammerstraat, between the old
Jewish quarter and the famous flea market. Leprous facades somewhat
camouflaged by electric signs. Broken pavement, mildewy mortar and not
the tiniest patch of light between the walls which lean precariously to-
ward each other, narrow alleys here and there. Foreigners everywhere.
Leathery faces, downcast eyes, an incredible mixture of races.
One speaks of the "Chinese Quarter" just as one would speak of the "Casbah"
or the "ghetto," though for the Americans, "Tulip Town" has been nothing
but "Poppy City" for several years. A fabulous poppy city where out of
800,000 inhabitants, some 5,000 are habitual drug users!
A town nicknamed "Europe's hypodermic" by the SUNDAY TIMES, where the opium
dens are well known, where hashish is sold in the open street, where the
police know but most of the time can do nothing, where one runs into faces
as closed up as a wall with no windows, every few feet. In fact, an in-
credible tolerance, which would be hard to understand for anyone who is
not very familiar with the Dutch, who would not be surprised to hear
Minister of Health Irene Vorrink's son on the radio quoting prices on the
drug market something like an economic reporter commenting on stock market
prices.
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Under these circumstances, the shooting in Prins Hendrikkade was attributed
to a brawl and the affair, without ever being classified, will forever be
considered by the investigators to be one of those mysteries fated never
to be solved. "Uncle Mon" was another victim of something which now ap-
pears to be, although the Amsterdam police do not want to admit it yet,
a war between drug "syndicates." In fact, a few days before, a certain
C. S. Tan lost his life in a Rembrandtsplein night club. That murder it-
self followed that of the "heroin king," Yong Fatt-tang, last August. In
the course of their investigations, the police also discovered a channel of
distribution to Scandinavia and Toronto (Canada).
"The opium comes here in very small amounts though," explained Colonel El-
bersen, age 59, head of the "Drug.Team" (only 9 men) in the port town.
"And that is mainly destined for 'inside' consumption in the Oriental com-
munity."
Secretive about his counteractive methods, the officer minimized the im-
portance of all the pieces of the puzzle which he is putting together day
by day.
"We have checked a good thousand Chinese legally established here, the
majority of them with British passports, and three times more illegal ones.
During the summer, 5,000 to 6,000 young tourists come here from all over
the world. You think that is not a lot? Amsterdam is not a big city, you
know. We watch that entire 'marginal' population carefully. Don't ask me
how. I do not like to talk about my work methods, but I can assure you
that the evolution of the situation does not escape us. The progress of
our confiscations proves it, only 2.5 kg of heroin in 1972, but 23 kg in
1973 and 26 kg in 19741
And_if one protests that the town is in the process of turning into the
hub of the European drug market, he answers with the utmost energy: "Just
one of the drug markets. The same as Paris, Brussels, Stuttgart or
Frankfurt. A large part of what is sold here comes from Germany or Belgium.
Don't forget that France has always been the supplier for the northern
countries. 'Calling Amsterdam the hub would be an exaggeration!"
Indeed. Last year an ABC Network news report caused a sensation in the
United States and angered the Dutch. It charged, with the brutality char-
acteristic of the press across the Atlantic, that Amsterdam was the new
drug Mecca, and devoted a long sequence to Vondelpark where, with shocking
carelessness and under the blank stares of police passing like sleepwalkers,
a group of young people, the majority of them American, no longer even con-
cealed their "smoking." With a quavering voice, the reporter recounted his
trip to the "Paradiso" and "Melkweg," two deconsecrated churches where "pop"
music provides a good background for those who "get bombed" in an atmos-
phtre as serene as a library. And to conclude; "The Dutch are undoubtedly
the most curious people in all of Europe. But there is a certain number of
things that the tourist does not realize. In the space of 2 years, Amster-
dam has supplanted Marseilles in the field of narcotics traffic and now
people are talking about a 'Dutch Connection."
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That opinion is shared by the Drug Enforcement Administration (formerly
the Narcotics Bureau) detectives, those incorruptible men with vast tech-
nical and financial means, who took care of, among others, the famous
"French Connection" and whose relations with their Amsterdam counterparts
have been smoothed out again after having been strained, to say the least.
"Amsterdam is, in fact, a hub,"-said a "special agent" who lives between
Paris and Brussels just as any young multinational official would. If the
Belgian capital or Luxembourg are sometimes chosen as a "jumping off point"
for certain couriers , it is simply because from there, there is really no
border with Holland any more.
"But also," one of his Belgian colleagues said, without trying to hide his
.bitterness, "because our country is the weakest link in the European con-
trol ch"in! In case of arrest, and our Customs Administration and police
have many to their credit, all the smuggler faces, whether he is carrying
500 grams or 2,000 kg of drugs,. is a sentence of 18 months to 2 years."
"The 2L. February 1921 law is still in effect," complained Major Francois,
age 37, who is in charge of coordinating the activities of the police with-
in a National Narcotics Brigade. "And if the Vranckx Bill still seems to be
blocked since 1971, it is not just because the successive governments have
been absorbed with other problems, especially by the language problem.-..
or that the composition of the parliamentary committees responsible for.
studying it has to be changed constantly. What the bill in question is
aimed at is clearly establishing the difference on the penal level be-
tween the trafficker and the consumer, which is not clear today. However,
adopting a bill is not enough to hope to change the situation, tightening
the control on the 'supplier' level and liberalizing the attitude toward
the addict. When a law is signed, the system for its enforcement should
already be set up. Now, in Belgium, it is the medical infrastructure that
is lacking. Of course, several clinics have had to take care of certain
cases and the work that has been accomplished there is absolutely extra-
ordinary. But those doctors, psychologists and social workers did the work
in addition to other things. A whole legal system cannot be established
on a network of volunteers.
"Minister Vranckx' bill is a combination of things, and since one part of
that combination is unachievable, the whole thing remains blocked. Bel-
gium continues to be a 'Never Never Land' for traffickers who get caught by
the law.
"What is really dangerous," Major Francois added, "is that the smugglers
whom we arrest go free generally at the end of a year, as long as they
adopt a respectful attitude toward the warden and attend Mass even if they
are Muslims. With a favorable report and a remission of sentence, they
go back on the road to Southeast Asia. We find them again, scarcely a few
months later, maybe not any smarter but much more 'polished,' and conse-
quently harder to catch!"
So there they are, hooked up again with one of the "connections" which are
made and unmade according t& circumstances and to the demands of the im-
mutable law of supply and demand.
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to.
"Their techniques of transporting and consumption change as they go along,
said Major Francois. Of course, we keep constantly adapting to those tech-
niques to fight them as effectively as possible. Sometimes we even adopt
the same structures as their rings to better understand their workings.
That is how we have been able to keep up with the evolution of the smug-'
filers' techniques so well.
"Storm" and "Shotgun" -
Those smuggling techniques deserve some explanation. It would be childish
to believe that if the crime-fighting machinery literally dissected the
workings of the rings any time it was possible, the reverse could not
also happen. The press, everytime an important "bust" is made public,
or through certain indiscretions, provides the traffickers with informa-
tion. They are mainly becoming aware of the fact that the arrests are
never due to luck anymore and that basically, there is almost always im-
portant "intelligence" work being done by the national services or infor-
.mation being transmitted either by local Drug Enforcement Administration
[DEA] agents or by Interpol.
This being the situation, two solutions are possible for the "brains" who
almost never leave the famous "Golden Triangle," the access routes to
which are still Hong Kong, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur: give up the
shipment and suffer the financial setback Which that implies, or sacrifice
a few "couriers " along with a part of the precious merchandise.
If they opt for the second solution, they organize the trip with the pre-
vision and care of a travel agent. They usually arrange it so that one
man carrying a relatively large amount of the drug is arrested in a western
airport. Since the news of the arrest is immediately transmitted to all
the narcotics-fighting organizations, it is like an end to the alert, and
the surveillance automatically relaxes. That is the time -- that is, on
the flights immediately following the one on which the "sacrificed @our-
ier " was placed -- when the others arrive.
If, for example, a trafficker is arrested in Zaventem on a Monday morning
at around 0800 hours, it is on the same Monday between 1000 and 1600 hours
that the other smugglers, their luggage stuffed with drugs, land in Bourget,
Schipol, Luxembourg, Frankfurt....
This is the "shotgun" technique. Or, au. the carriers take seats on the
same plane with the sacrificed one, who is usually sacrificed with his own
knowledge. Sometimes his exact description is even discreetly communi-
cated to the police at the airport of his destination. In such cases, the
arrest of the first smuggler causes the relaxation of vigilance on which
all the others rely to slip through the mesh of the net. That is. the
"storm" technique which worked up until last 11 January.
That day, the men of the National Narcotics Brigade made eight arrests,
eight passengers on Flight No. SN286 from Bangkok, and seized a mere tri
fle of 25 kg of heroin at Brussels-Nationals It was one of the biggest
hauls over in the annals of the war on drugs.
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CPYRGHT
Complex Products
But it is mainly the consumption techniques which really worry those in
charge of stopping the most frightening plague in years.
There is an evolution of the product from, the simplest to the. most complex.
It is an economic fact, and all transporters will tell you that the more
concentrated and expensive the product carried is, the more profitable the
operation promises to be. Following that principle, at first the authori-
ties, whether in Paris, Amsterdam, Rome or London, saw the development of
the "grass" trade. It began with the cannibis leaves and flowers,_the_
Delta-9-Tetrahydroeannabinol content of which ranged between 5 and 8 per-
cent. It has been several years now since the police quit seizing the
drug in that form.
Rather than transporting a bulky but "poor" product, one with a low resale
value, the producers then began to export the same drug in the form of a
resin, much more concentrated, with a content sometimes exceeding 15 percent
but a kilogram of it scarcely weighing more than a pocket-size book. The
"bricks" of hashish are widely variable in color, red if they come from
Lebanon and almost black if they come from Afghanistan.
At present, that form of the drug is progressively disappearing in favor of
the "oil," an extract obtained by distillation of the resin with methanol
steam. The oily solution which results from that process has a 50 to 80 per-
cent concentration of tetrahydrocannabinol!
Plow,it is the "oil" which the authorities seize more and more frequently,
which tends to prove that the producers and their chemists -- who are always
called "Panier graduates" in memory of the Panier quarter in Marseilles,
a veritable drug exchange after the war -- have definitely opted for a
more complex form of the product.
"Brown Sugar"
Similarly, and the dangers of this new tendency are obvious, the "death
dealers" have modified their sales techniques, doing away with the psycho-
logical barrier the "pot smoker" must necessarily cross to become a "junky"
or heroin addict...
"To get the young European drug users to cross this threshold, the pushers
are looking for formulas for mixtures which will make it possible to
smoke heroin!
"You know," Major Francois explained, "that heroin comes from the poppy.
Crushed and reduced to a paste, the capsules which contain its flowers
give opium. It is from the opium obtained in the laboratory, basic mor-
phine, that heroin is refined. To simplify, we will call the basic morphine
'No. 1'; basic heroin 'No. 2'; processed, inhalable heroin 'No. 3' or
'brown sugar' and refined, injectable heroin 'No. 4' or'white.' It is the
'brown sugar,' heroin mixed with quinine, caffeine, sometimes a little
strychnine and barbital,that is now smoked in Europe in a special pipe
with a flared bowl. A few of them have already been seized in Belgium and
it is extremely disquieting! And what is also worrying its is the demand
for that processed heroin. If the demand were to increase, we could actual-
ly find ourselves one day with an underground laboratory. on our hands."
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Turkish Opium
If the drugs are a plague, the laboratories are its sores. It was an ab-
cess rather, located around Marseilles,.which an energetic action effected
jointly by the French and American services in charge of the war on drugs
was able to lance.
However, those laboratories were tactically important because all the net-
works necessarily converged on them. All the "connections" and all the
" couriers" to the United States and to Latin America started there.
"In those days," the head of the Belgian National Narcotics Brigade re-
c,-qled, "the two or three big European 'families,' the Italians, the Corsi-
cans and the Spanish, had divided up the western 'market' among themselves
with the Mafia's arbitration. Partners, sometimes rivals, they managed to
supply the American market more or less regularly with raw materials coming
from Turkey.
"But suddenly, at the same time that the underground laboratories were dis-
covered one after another, the Anatolian source began to run dry. In fact,
anxious to stop the growing of opium, most of the derivatives of which
ended up in the United States, the American administration then decided to
compensate the Turkish growers who would agree to pull up their poppy fields.
Thus, millions of dollars were injected into the country's various economic
circuits, the people it was really intended for not receiving one cent.of
the benefits. Several politicians took advantage of the peasants' growing
discontent, promising them, after having fattened their bank accounts with
the dollars that were meant precisely for them, to abolish all the laws
prohibiting poppy growing.
"And since, looking forward to the legislative elections which took place
last year, the same promise was made by the majority candidates as well as
the opposition, the Anatolian peasants went back to their lucrative crops
which are now reaching their harvest season."
Thus, the activity promises to be heated toward the end of the year when
the first opium shipments coming from the poppy harvests begin to reach us,
probably after having bcou halfway around the globe from refinery to lab-
oratory,, on their way to the, "diotribution center" which is undoubtedly.
Amsterdam. (According to the DEA, it has been said that the French deal-
ers In particular have placed large orders for the summer. It is a re-
creation of the "French Connection.") _
The Dutch capital has been the center since 1971. That was also when the
narcotics brigade was created. In Marseilles, the regional "heads" of the
traffic fell one after another, the suppliers no longer had anything to
send their colleagues across the Atlantic and the Turkish sources had dried
up...
From the time of their arrival in the Netherlands, those nuclei of suppliers
and consumers quickly reconnected their networks, at first to satisfy their
own needs and then, tempted by the lure of profits, thus supplying the
"pushers" who were out of stock.
As long as Turkish opium is not found on the market to change the basic
problem, the route starting in the Far East and ending in the ghettos of
the sprawling American cities, passing through two or three large European
"sorting centers" on the way, will still be the typical path. Of course,
others are being added on which evolv n ,o~ r
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 CPYRGHT
Annrov d For RPIPagp 1999/n9/n9 ? r1A_RfP79_n119dAnnnl nn %7nnn1 _5
Last 16 March, a circuit exclusively for supplying the American residents of
West Germany was dismantled. Bought in Amsterdam, the drug was sent to the
base in Bitburg in the Eifel, organized, it seems, in a distributing center
for the whole country. The traffickers, an American military man and the
wife of one of his colleagues, were intercepted while driving on the Liege-
Maastricht highway in a rented car. Before that, the smugglers deposited
the drug in the woods covering the Holland-Germany border. It was then
transported on foot to the no man's land. The system had been operating
for several months.
More united than rivals because of the common danger of being caught, hash-
ish smugglers sometimes use opium or "white" carriers. But one phenomenon,
confirmed by a whole series of arrests on various borders, seems to be
well established: the nucleus of the network is in Amsterdam, just as if
the traffic were going two directions only, into that city and out of it.
From North Africa, hashish crosses Spain thanks to some Iberian "connec-
tions," then France after having crossed the Pyrenees, to arrive finally
in Benelux. It is a long trip, filled with danger and risks to which the
traffickers gladly prefer sea transport. The recent "bust" off Nieuport
harbor in conclusive proof of that.
Following a breakdown, an impressive motor yacht called the "September
Tide" had to make a short stopover in the small pleasure port. Suspicious,
the maritime police examined their papers carefully and the constabulary
their cargo. It contained a ton of hashish, valued at 40 million Belgian
francs! The Dutch captain admitted that he had bought the boat from a
British subject on the Anglo-Norman island of Jersey. From there, he
sailed near Morocco, off Ceuta, to pick up a delivery. The "September
Tide" then went back up north along the coast. Destination: Amsterdam.
A faulty clutch kept it from reaching a safe harbor.
What a coincidence) At the same time as that seizure, 10 Zealanders were
appearing before the Middelburg court for narcotics trafficking. Their
circuit passed through Brussels-National and came from Zaire. Drop point
already too well known: the woody surroundings of the border village of
Roosdaal, precisely where the guards had been removed after the lowering
of the customs barriers was decreed by the Common Market.
The Southeast Asian "syndicate" entrusts its precious merchandise to the
airlines. According to the BNS [National Narcotics Brigade] detectives,
they prefer flights with many stopovers during which they can change
either their flight or their itinerary. The "outlying" airports on that
circuit are Bourget, Frankfurt, Zavemtem and Luxembourg.
In short, all the "secondary" highway border posts are used by the cour-
iers specializing in highway transport, past masters in the techniques of
"stashes," the hiding places rigged up in all sorts of vehicles, from
the semi-truck to the little sports car.
One after another, these techniques are found out, the smugglers are ar-
rested, the pushers unmasked. Then new circuits appear and other producers
rush to assault a market which is far from saturated..
, .
COPYRIGHT:. Accords speciaux avec LE POINT en France
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