The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has bolstered heroine trade in Afghanistan, the American media said, adding that the number of heroin addicts in the US increased by 50 percent during the United States’ presence in that country from 1982 to 1992. The CIA had created a Golden Triangle of heroin warlords in the region for trading and trafficking narcotics to the US from Afghanistan and Pakistan, Veterans Today news website reported. Vang Pao, Phoumi Nosavan and Khun Sa were the CIA’s heroin warlords of the Golden Triangle, it said. From 1982 to 92, the CIA Station in Islamabad became the largest spook den in the world. It was no coincidence that Golden Crescent heroin output soon surpassed that of the Golden Triangle, just as the CIA was launching its biggest operation since Vietnam, the media added.. Golden Crescent heroin captured 60 percent of the US market and bricks of hashish appeared in US cities stamped with a logo of two crossed AK-47 assault rifles circled by the words, “Smoke Out the Soviets”. From 1982 to 1992, roughly the period of US involvement in Afghanistan, heroin addiction in the US rose by 50 percent, it said. From 1982 to 1983, opium harvests along the borders of Afghanistan with Pakistan doubled in size. By 1984, Pakistan was exporting 70 percent of the world’s heroin. During the era of former President Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan became the third largest recipient of US military aid in the world, behind only Israel and Egypt. Much of that aid was going to arm the Afghan Mujahideen who launched raids into Afghanistan, seizing large chunks of real estate and immediately planting it to poppies.
In September 1985, the Pakistan Herald reported that military trucks belonging to the National Logistics Cell of the Pakistan army were being used to transport arms from Karachi port to Peshawar on behalf of the CIA, and that those same trucks were returning to Karachi sealed by the Pakistani military and loaded with heroin.