Hello I’ve been on a 1970s history kick lately and wanna read more about things like the CIA’s heroin and cocaine trading. Preferrably in book length formats with a left point of view, but I mean I’ll read liberal historians too like I also enjoy reading Robert Paxton and George Mosse stuff.
Roger Stone’s seminal Marxist work “The Bush Crime Family”
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Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (quite dry and academic)
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Devil’s Chessboard (haven’t read this one, i think it gets into this stuff and is a bit more of a page turner)
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- Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection
- The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War (air america, french connection, golden triangle are in this book I recall?)
To my understanding PDS takes a sort of post-liberal institutionalist view on the US, but that commentary is kept in the call to actions and the history remains grounded. As a fun thought experiment, consider how the popularity and production of certain drugs rose and fell with US military interventions. Secret war in Laos, dope, 60s, contras, crack, 80s, Afghanistan, 2000s, heroin. In the last case, 90% of the market was in Afghanistan. Rather than being fought, these markets work synergistically with enforcement.
The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade by Alfred W. McCoy is a classic
Operation Gladio : The Unholy Alliance Between The Vatican , The CIA And The Mafia, Paul L. Williams (2015)
I haven’t read this yet so I can’t comment on it, but I’m constantly on the lookout for like The Jakarta Method equivalent on Operation GLADIO and have yet to find one.
