Pursuit of the Poppy

EARLY one morning at the Nicosia airport on Cyprus, an American pilot filed a routine flight plan that would take his privately owned, unmarked Martin 202 directly to either Naples or Athens. Alerted by Interpol, the Nicosia air controllers were suspicious. Trailing the plane on radar, they watched it head toward Lebanon. The plane flew so low that it eluded Beirut radar, but Lebanese police started an immediate countrywide search. Within minutes, a police patrol found the Martin 202 parked alongside a large truck on a remote airstrip in the hashish-growing area of Baalbek, near the Syrian border. As police and truck guards fought a gun battle, the plane took off amid a hail of bullets.

Lebanese jet fighters scrambled after the slow propeller-driven Martin, but it managed to escape them. Finally, after flying an erratic course over the Mediterranean, the plane was forced to make a landing to refuel at Heraklion airport in Crete. There, police at once arrested the five men aboard, including the pilot, former U.S. Air Force Lieut. Colonel John Moore, 50, and Copilot Philip Amos, 30. Crete police also seized 13 bags of hashish worth about $4,000,000 on the American market.

Record Arrests. According to John T. Cusack, chief U.S. narcotics agent in Europe, it was the largest single haul ever made of U.S.-bound hashish. American agents had been closely on the trail of this particular drug ring for several months. In a second coup, U.S. agents two weeks ago helped to break up the largest smuggling operation on record. Acting on American-supplied information, French and Swiss agents arrested two of the ring's three members in Nice and Geneva. Since 1965 the smugglers had slipped an estimated $500 million a year in heroin into the U.S. by secreting the white powder in washrooms of U.S.-bound jets, in banana crates, in imported autos, and sometimes in sealed cans labeled as fish. Meanwhile, in Lyon, French police arrested two American smugglers and seized the small plane in which they intended to fly drugs to the U.S. In Mexico, police gave President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz some good news to take to President Nixon. When the two men sat down to talk at Coronado, Calif., last week, Diaz Ordaz could tell the President that in recent days his agents had arrested 43 smugglers, confiscated 7.2 tons of marijuana and burned four large poppy fields.

These recent successes are the result of the Nixon Administration's diligent effort to enlist other countries in the American battle against drugs. Although tightened search procedures at U.S. airports and border crossings have managed to discourage some of the would-be smugglers, Washington hopes to choke off the flow at the source. Other governments, especially those in Europe, have become more cooperative since the use of hard drugs has begun spreading among their own young people.

So far, the U.S. effort has centered mainly on Mexico and Turkey, where the poppies that are converted into morphine base grow in abundance, and on France, where gangsters in "laboratories" around Marseille refine crude morphine into heroin, which is then smuggled into the U.S. The U.S., for example, has given Mexico $1,000,000 for the purchase of five helicopters, three light aircraft and other equipment to be used specifically to detect and catch violators. Dogs have been trained to sniff out marijuana. Since last October, the Mexican army has sought out and destroyed a total of 1,450 acres of poppy fields, and Mexican police have arrested 539 persons on drug-trafficking charges.

Toe-to-Toe Dialogue. When France's President Pompidou visited Washington last February, Nixon expressed his deep concern about the smuggling. U.S. Ambassador to France Arthur Watson continued to bring up the subject to French officials in what diplomats have called a "toe-to-toe dialogue." This diplomatic initiative in drugs was climaxed by Attorney General John Mitchell when he invited French Interior Minister Raymond Marcellin to pay him a visit in Washington in July. Marcellin was reportedly informed that unless more aggressive action were taken against dope smuggling, some French police reports now in the possession of the U.S. government would be leaked to the press. The reports detail the laxity of Pompidou's government in cracking down on the drug traffic in France. Marcellin has ordered a doubling of the narcotics police force to 300. So far, the increased efforts and efficiency of the French agents has led to the smashing of four major rings that smuggled drugs from France to the U.S., but it is believed that the Marseille traffic has not yet been seriously disrupted.

Turkey has received a $3,000,000 loan from the U.S. to finance the war on narcotics. Under U.S. prodding, Prime Minister Sueleyman Demirel issued a decree in June reducing the number of legal poppy-growing provinces from nine to seven by next year. He also submitted to Parliament a bill that would increase the jail term for illegal poppy growing from an insignificant six months to two years. Much of the pressure on Demirel was brought by a U.S. threat to cancel a much-needed $40 million loan to Turkey for economic development.

In Turkey and elsewhere, however, U.S. efforts run squarely into the private-profit motive. For example, a Turkish farmer can receive as much as $94 if he sells the harvest of an acre of poppies to smugglers. By contrast, he stands to earn only $4.83 an acre if he grows wheat.

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