Thailand's Daily Crime Pill #11: The Cat's Eye & Extraordinary Rendition
The best stories die with those that hold them.
Dear expats and readers,
First, an apology.
A friendly True Crime Thailand reader opened a line of correspondence to gracefully inform me of an error I’ve made.
In yesterday’s Crime Pill I wrote that Viktor Bout was locked up at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois alongside the Teflon Don John Gotti.
Massive flub on my part, so bad that I can’t even claim a mulligan. Gotti passed on to the Great Cannoli in the Sky back in 2002. My memory did serve me right on one count, though — as I double-checked that Gotti did serve his time at Marion — albeit 10 years before Bout arrived.
Thanks to the reader from Ayutthaya for the correction, albeit embarrassing on my end.
Another reader, whose identity I’ve sworn to secrecy, but if named would ring a bell for most Asia old hands and readers, shared some of his own insights into the DEA and CIA involvement in the region.
He confirmed that the CIA was well-aware of poppy growing in northern Thailand in the early ‘70s. More than aware, perhaps — they seemed to show a certain kind of stewardship for the harvest and those wizened hill-people who tended the “rows of brightly colored poppies” that “rolled off seemingly to the horizon.”
How friendly the CIA was with the poppy growers, and who profited from the bounty, will never truly be known.
One thing I do know that I can take to the bank: the best stories die with the men that hold them. I’d reckon whoever harvested that mountain crop then is long gone, and whatever truths they knew went along with them.
As for the DEA and its partnership with Thai law enforcement?
Well, it’s on good authority that ol’ Uncle Sam did support the Boys in Brown — not so much in training and operational support — but through kickbacks that yoked them to the U.S. Embassy, and by extension, the DEA’s mission within Thailand.
Of course, you didn’t hear any of this from me, and I didn’t hear it from my guy.
All this talk of alphabet agencies got me in a tizzy, and I couldn’t resist bringing up another case in the same vein.
Old news, but worthy for reminder.
In 2002, the CIA used a black site — supposedly at an old Voice of America station outside of Udon Thani, but denied by all parties Thai and American — as the staging ground for torture.
The place is referred to in leaked spy cables alternatively as the “Cat’s Eye” and “Detention Site Green”.
The victims? Well, I don’t know if victim is quite the right word. The guys that the spooks got their hands on were villains themselves — Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, known as Abu Zubaydah, as one infamous example.
Abu Zubaydah’s name has been associated with instructing would-be terrorists at an Al-Qaeda linked training camp and plots to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport in 1999.
Zubaydah’s attorney, of course, wants a word in edgewise on the matter — and has penned plenty in defense.
No matter how you look at this guy and no matter how he looks at you — with one eye or two — some facts stand.
CIA operatives waterboarded him 83 times; “walled” him, or slammed him into the wall by slinging him against it by a towel wrapped around his neck; confined him for days in a coffin-shaped box termed the “dog box”; and forced sleep deprivation for as long as 180 hours at a time, prodding him to stand or in stress positions.
Over 100 hours of the torture existed on tape at one point, but were destroyed by order of one Jose Rodriguez. He confessed that “the heat” that CIA officials would take over destroying the tapes is “nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into the public domain.”
The suggestion being that somebody would want revenge — especially on the agents whose faces were caught candid on camera.
Another fact stands, too. One CIA gal who oversaw Cat’s Eye in Thailand, Gina Haspel, later became the Director of the CIA under Trump — with much fanfare from the rank-and-file operatives on the ground.
Gina retired from service on January 19th, 2021 — after 36 years of CIA service — and the day before Biden’s inauguration.
The truth of the exact location of Cat’s Eye in Thailand, and what really happened there, will swirl down the drain as time passes and those that know are swept up from this world and are no more.
Of course, seems like every pub on lower Sukhumvit’s got some bar-stool warrior who claims CIA affiliation. Maybe ask them and they’ll give you an earful.
As a Yank myself, CIA rumors will naturally perk my ears, but what grabs me by the balls these days is China’s extraordinary rendition — “government-sponsored abduction and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another, with the purpose of circumventing the former country’s laws on interrogation, detention, extradition, or torture”.
Take the case of Gui Minhai, a high-profile Hong Kongese bookseller — and Swedish citizen, oddly — who disappeared from Thailand in 2015. The Swedes sent detectives to the Land of Smiles to search for his whereabouts, but no dice.
Not until Mr. Gui reappeared in China shortly after and found himself on trial for a fatal car crash from 2003.
He served a two year bid for his involvement.
On tomorrow’s crime pill, I’ll take a closer look at clandestine Chinese operations within Thailand, which whether we like it or not, is the likely future.
Other things I’m reading…
UK police nabbed one drug peddler right as he planned to jet to Thailand. An interesting feature to the story is that the suspect used EncroChat, which was a messaging service preferred by drug networks and extortion artists for several years, but was compromised by authorities. Also, why is it that these chumps always pick Thailand as their get-away spot?
Authorities in Aceh, Indonesia, seized 80 kilos of meth that was sourced from Thailand. At some point I’m going to do a whole write-up of not only where the meth comes from — largely Laos and Shan State — but also where it ends up, and who carts it there. Expect that sometime in the future after I’ve finished my other writing obligations, but it is on the list.
That’s all for today…
Until tomorrow’s Crime Pill, stay safe out there everybody.
- True Crime Thailand
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